I’ve always been asked a lot about team-building. Not in the white-water rafting/tank-driving away-day sense, but about literally constructing a founder team from scratch.
In a recent discovery session with a tech entrepreneur, he made a list of the 5 key people he felt he needed to turn his idea into a business.
I asked him to consider that a builder doesn’t show up with a house on his truck, or even a wall. He shows up with bricks, and lays them one at a time, starting with the most important. That’s how you build a house.
My client’s the builder of his venture, and if it’s ever to get off the ground, he needs to order the bricks, one at a time.
Turns out the first “brick” he needs is a marketing whizz. Someone who can not only get the word out when the platform’s ready (and before), but who can actually help him design and build it in a way that makes it easy to market in the first place.
Techy folks are usually not marketers. The two skills require such diametrically opposite learning that few people have trained themselves in both successfully.
If you’re just getting started, you’ll do way worse than first linking up with someone who doesn’t do anything that you do, and does it really well.