How To Build A Minimum Viable Team
And not to fight with your business partners
Starting a business alone is very difficult. You should have more people helping you. Having someone to share the pains of the entrepreneurial life, especially in the beginning, is very important.
For a while, I ended up being the only partner in my company. Because of that, I had no one to talk to about the pressure I had. We can share some of the stuff with people close to us, but nothing like another entrepreneur to understand the entrepreneurial life’s pains and challenges.
How many people should you have at the beginning? What kind of skills should you have in your company? And besides all that, how can you avoid fighting with your business partners?
A common and grave mistake is when two people who work together (two programmers, for example) or two colleagues from school or college decide to start a business together. They believe they can build a company just because they are good at a specific technical function. However, building a company involves multidisciplinary processes.
It was only after I had fights with my partners that I learned about the minimum viable team profile, which consists of:
- Hacker (technology)
- Hipster (design)
- Hustler (business)
Entrepreneurship is a long-term emotional game, and fighting with your partners should be the last thing you want.
My first company started with three programmers and one artist. We had no complementary skills, which made our job very difficult.
At first, I tried to do a little of the three things, but I couldn’t do anything right in the end. Eventually, I focused on being the Hustler (after all, I was the CEO). However, I continued acting as a programmer. My programming time was gradually decreasing until I completely stopped this function in early 2018 (six years after founding the company).
It is necessary to learn many new things to make a company work. For this, it is crucial to understand how each person can help. It is not productive when a company has more than one person fixing the same problem. It is also better to be a very good person in one role than average in many.
At my first company, we didn’t have the roles defined. We had already chosen to use beautiful job names like CEO, CTO, and CCO, but we didn’t know precisely what each of these things meant. We didn’t know what each one of us should be doing. This lack of alignment generated many fights. As we were not clear on each other’s responsibility, we got into each other’s work and disagreed on how to do it.
It is important to emphasize one thing: a company must not be a democracy.
It is essential to have defined the roles between the partners. That is something that if you don’t do properly, it will generate fights in the future.
Each area within the company must have one and only one person responsible for it. That way, it is possible to make decisions much faster. You shouldn’t avoid communicating to others what you’ve been doing, but you don’t need to seek approval for everything to be able to move on.
Not everyone will always agree on a decision, but the company still needs to follow through. You should disagree and commit. If you always expect everyone to agree with you all the time, your business will move at a very slow speed.
We also hear a lot about working on our weaknesses, but this is not right.
Self-knowledge is essential. We need to know what we’re good at and put ourselves in situations where we can generate more results. We must work to acquire skills and knowledge to get better and better at what we are already good at. Otherwise, it is like wanting to teach a fish how to climb trees.
A mistake in education is when a person isn’t good, for example, in mathematics, but good in English. Usually, the person is encouraged to study more mathematics. However, the chance of this person becoming successful in mathematics with this profile is very low. Now, if she already has an aptitude for English, she should study more about it and work to become a successful professional in this area.
The same is true for a company.
Peter Drucker, in his book Managing Oneself, wrote:
“One should waste as little effort as possible on improving areas of low competence. It takes far more energy and work to improve from incompetence to mediocrity than it takes to improve from first-rate performance to excellence. Do not try to change yourself — you are unlikely to succeed. But work hard to improve the way you perform. And try not to take on work you cannot perform or will only perform poorly.”
I tried to work 100 hours per week
Do you need that for your startup to succeed?
joaovsouza.medium.com
In 2014, due to the fights I had with my partners, all of them gave up on the company.
I ended up becoming the sole partner of my company. I had learned my lesson about having complementary members to me. This lack of complementary skills meant that we were unable to solve the problems in a way that was good for the company.
Having gone through it all made all the difference when I started to think about who my next partners should be.
As my gaming company grew, I invited people complementary to me with the necessary skills to help solve the main problem that the company was currently experiencing:
- In early 2015, a CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) joined to help our games reach more people and sell more;
- In early 2017, a COO (Chief Operations Officer) joined to help organize our processes;
- At the end of 2017, a CCO (Chief Creative Officer) joined to help improve our creative side so we could develop better games.
Because of this, I was able to share a lot of the pressure I had. I was also able to work on things that I could bring more value to the company.
I am currently starting a new business where my business partner is the Hacker of the company. Because of my experience, I’m playing the Hustler again. We are just two people. I decided I would take the hat for Hipster too. The Hipster profile is not something so vital for our business, so it is ok for us to work that way for now.
Try not to start a business by yourself or with someone good at the same things as you. Understand how your industry works and how you fit on the minimum viable team profile. After that, try to find at least one person who can compliment you.
Good luck!
