How to present your or your company’s expertise?
Tell your statistics.
Top 10 issues
1. Assuming that raising a successful seed round means that you’ve reached product-market fit
Extremely common. Founders think that investors are smart (on their topic) and if they provided money then they found their PMF. It’s wrong. It almost has nothing to do with PMF. and solving the customer’s problem The founded lots of companies that died. As you are the CEO, you are the biggest expert of the topic, don’t let investors think that they know your market.
2. Hiring too quickly (and early)
People start hiring after seed money pre-PMF, when it too early to do so. The primary job of the CEO is to find PMF first, and then manage the job. Stay lean before PMF to have as less financial liabilities in the company. Success is not getting with seed money, focus on PMF.
2.1 Trying to take too many problems or products at the same time
Companies are trying to start product 2 when product 1 hasn’t even started yet. Employees would not be focused on finding PMF in the first startup, but they will think that it’s a rocket ship that had a false start. You really set yourself up and employees will leave.
3. Not understanding the business model
Tons of B2B companies do not understand if they can afford the process they need to do to acquire customers. There are founders who want to be SaaS founders but they’re running enterprise company or vice versa. A really big disconnect is not following the model of your company. You have to pursue the strategy is to follow the model that actually is working with the charge the customers are paying, which is mostly is decided for you.
4. Not knowing when it’s the right time to sell to tech company
Selling startups early has pros and cons, but I don’t really care about this issue.
5. Assuming investors will be a large differentiator
A+ investor gives you money, signs paperwork when needed and shuts the fuck up. However, founders think that investors will help with their business. Investors are interested on closing the deals, not working on the businesses that they invested. So don’t have high expectations on the investors’ influence on your business.
When you get a certain level of success, people may be happy to give you advise for free. So success creates more success.
6. Not establishing best practices around hiring
Set up intelligent interview process that:
- good candidates would enjoy to going through,
- Having a good, open communication about equity
- Not setting clear expectation on roles and responsibilities
- Not talking about the mission and culture of the company
- Over-believing on hiring great people (most common)
If you have non-essential employees (those who are not really important), you should not have them at least on pre-PMF stage. You should not believe that you’re good on hiring. And you will do many firings. So be prepared.
7. Not establishing best practices around management
Early stage management is not that complicated but if you don’t do it your team performs poorly.
You need:
- Consistent one-on-one meetings between managers and employees
- Some type of All Hands meeting
- Getting employee buy-in on strategy and tactics (вовлекать сотрудника и прислушиваться к нему). It should not be one-sided, because you hired them on the first place to listen to their expertise.
- Not creating an environment or transparency around money in the bank and the KPIs By being not transparent, they will expect the word and find another job that’s better. Also, they will work better if they understand that something is going wrong or bad.
8. Not clearly defining roles and responsibilities between founders
After you get seed money and hire some people, suddenly there will be some hard decisions to make. It’s often the case that team would not make decisions and it will require more and more all-founders committee to get resolved. Define responsibilities so that you will be autonomous on most of the tasks and only most important decisions end up being debated. So do it early.
And be OK with decisions that would not work first because