The Muse Effect

Building anything from scratch, including a startup, requires a huge amount of creativity. Who you have with you on your founding team matters. If you only focus on finding someone with the right skill set and experience you may miss the opportunity to find someone that could really help take your startup to another level. It’s there in the best startup teams, and you should try to add it to yours — the Muse Effect.

Just as an author writes the first lines of an epic story, an entrepreneur takes the first steps to realising a vision. For both it will be a multi-year journey, but the actions that will get them there are not prescribed, they need to be imagined. Only then can the work be done.

As with artists, entrepreneurs need to surround themselves with sources of inspiration. And we do. We read great books, listen to podcasts, share insights with other founders, attend community events, build mentor networks, join accelerator programs and follow the stories of successful startups that have come before us. All of this provides us with huge amounts of inspiration and helps us to imagine our path forward.

There is another way to bring life-giving creativity into your startup. Co-found it with your muse.

The co-founder discussion usually centres around functional aspects. Do they have the right skill set? Do they have the right experience? Can they deal with ambiguity?

But there are other questions we could be asking.

When you work together do you produce work that is next level? When you work together do you produce work that seemed beyond each of you individually? Whether it’s designing a new product feature, creating a social media post, adding a new pitch deck storyline, or landing a new customer deal, are the things you do together somehow magically better?

That’s the Muse Effect.