Why we created a startup for startups
I love startups. I’ve always found talking to people who pour all their passion and creativity as well as countless hours of hard work into building their vision inspirational. I guess that was the main reason I started attending startup networking events. I thought it would be great to listen to other people’s stories and learn from their successes and mistakes before I decided to take the plunge myself.
What surprised me was that many of the comments on the meetup groups were from entrepreneurs looking for team members or co-founders. Surely there was a better way of finding the right people to work with than commenting on an event?
I did some research and found companies offering recruitment solutions to startups, but I figured that wouldn’t really help early stage startups lacking the funding to pay for recruitment let alone the salary of their new hire. Co-founder dating was another option, but it seemed awfully focused on just bringing two people together (after all, that’s what dating usually means).
What about startups requiring a team consisting of more than two people?
The question kept nagging at me and a couple of months later I participated in a Hack Day with my (now-)co-founders. A week before the event took place we’d been asked to complete a form asking us what our ideal role would be. This information was used to put us into well-balanced teams with people complementing our own skills. It suddenly clicked. What if you could do that in real life? We used the Hack Day to explore this idea and managed to win first prize with a very hacky but working prototype of a startup team builder. We realised we might be onto something…
“Exactly what I’ve been looking for!”
As strong believers in the Lean principles, we spent a fair amount of time validating our idea. Was this just something that sounded nice or was there a genuine need we could fulfil here? Almost everyone we spoke to seemed to love the idea. We regularly heard people had been searching for a solution to help them build their startup team. Our landing page where future users could register for early access was generating quite a bit of interest. Some disillusioned entrepreneurs said their startup might not have failed if they’d been able to find the right co-founders. But, of course, there were also more critical notes…
What should a successful startup team look like?
That’s one of the great questions people asked us. If you want to build a solution to help startups build their teams, surely you should offer some guidance on what a startup team is. We took up the challenge and started researching. Our starting point was Rei Inamoto’s suggestion that successful teams needed Hipsters, Hackers and Hustlers. Intrigued by this notion we analysed the skills required to guide a (tech) startup to success.
We identified four main areas: Development, Design, Sales & Marketing and Strategy, and created four “archetypes” to go with these: the Techie, the Creative, the Hustler, and the Visionary. Of course, that doesn’t mean we think every startup should have four team members, but these four areas should be covered between everyone who’s on the team.
Thus, Startup Startup was born!
And so we launched Startup Startup, the free platform connecting talent to build successful startup teams. The community is growing quite quickly and I personally can’t wait to see the first startups created through our platform succeed!
