Building a business is hard. Giving advice on building a business – also hard. Every company has different needs, different customer bases, and different products or services. However, there are some common themes that can help move them in the right direction.
Building the Right Team
Most new entrepreneurs think that the product is the most important thing, and the thing that you should focus on first. While it may be the most visible part of the business, it is rarely the most important. After all, a business will often pivot their product offering a few times before they find something that works. Instead, focus on building the right team. There are a few helpful things to focus on when building a team:
Shared Values
Everybody on the team needs to have similar values. If one person is building purely for money and another because of passion, or one person prioritizes long term relationships and the other prioritizes results over the relationship, problems will arise. While not everybody has to align on every single value perfectly, team members need to be on roughly the same page when building a business together.
Shared Vision
What are you making? While the specifics of implementation and design might change, the team needs to all understand the general direction and vision of the project. The CEO is often in charge of company vision, but that does not mean they are the only one that directs it. The core team needs to all understand and agree on what you are trying to accomplish in the end.
Aligned Expectations
Expectations are very commonly an issue with new founders, and can tear apart the team. Understanding when decisions need to be made, by whom, and under what circumstances need to be discussed before beginning.
- How many hours is each person expected to put in? Are those numbers the same for everybody?
- How do you decide when to pivot, if necessary?
- When do the founders get to start receiving money from the company vs reinvesting it back into the company?
- Who is expected to fund the necessary expenses, how do they get paid back, and does that affect the equity amounts?
Complimentary Skills
Each person has a unique skill set that they bring to the table. Having several people that all do the same thing really well can be helpful for specific projects, but for long term growth you usually need complimentary skills. Some examples of opposing qualities that you might want to have both sides of in your team include:
- Ambition vs realism
- Detail oriented vs big picture thinking
- Brainstormer vs analyzer
Good Communication
Good communication is the most important quality in a team member. It is the most important quality.
If things are going well, being able to understand and communicate what is working helps you continue success.
As things go poorly (and they will go poorly at some point), communication becomes exponentially more important. Members need to be able to
- Explain what happened in a particular spot in a way that others can understand
- Resolve interpersonal conflict without making other members feel undervalued
- Express possible solutions clearly
Communication is the backbone of every team. Every problem, every process, every interaction all involves communication.
Building Trust
If potential customers and users don’t trust your company, you won’t have customers or users. You see this all the time in crypto, but it is true across the board. Companies that don’t give users a reason to trust them do not last very long. Sometimes they are able to provide incentives that outweigh the possible damage the company could do to the user, but these tend to be unsustainable in the long run. Some simple ways to build trust could include:
- Providing value for free – linkedin posts, product demos, and solutions that worked for other customers are all great ways to increase trust in your company and its ability to do what you say it can do
- Transparency – being transparent about how you make decisions and who you are goes a long ways towards people understanding and trusting you
- Admitting mistakes – nobody is perfect. Admitting when a mistake is made and addressing how you will fix it increase trustworthiness and confidence.
Building the Right Product
With the right team and confidence in your company, you need a product worth building. This involves market research, testing product market fit, user acceptance testing, implementing updates and features, and more. This deserves a post of its own, and will be the topic of next month’s newsletter!
Building Something You're Proud Of
Sellout. Selling your soul. Faking.
All different ways to describe compromising who you are to make money. One of the amazing parts of being an entrepreneur is having the freedom to build what you want and to be the change that you want to see. At any point in the process, you should be able to look back at what you’ve made and be proud of the effort you put in and what you’ve created so far.
At Altrucoin, we spent a month putting together the business, creating the token, and building the marketing plan. Even if we had failed to raise a single dollar at launch, we were still proud of what we had created and the way we worked together on it. This pride in what we were doing helped drive the business forward and keep true to our values.
Conclusion
The common qualities between successful businesses are building the right team, building trust, building the right product, and building something you’re proud of. If you follow those fundamental qualities, you’re on the right track towards a successful business.
Thank you all for reading! Looking forward to seeing you next month for the next edition!
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