These past couple of weeks have been interesting. Thanks to an introduction by a friend and former co-worker, I met a potential co-founding team. It’s early but exciting! In this post, I’ll share a bit about what those first experiences were like and what we plan on doing next.
Getting introduced
Telling people what I want to accomplish has been a powerful way to actually accomplish those goals. A few years ago, when I was looking to transition from engineering into product management, it was a slow process until I started telling more people that this was a goal of mine. Once I did, people gave me advice, advocated for me, and helped to make the transition happen.
Similarly, talking to you folks directly or through this newsletter has introduced me to several new connections that may have always been there but just hadn’t been made yet. I met this co-founding duo through one of these connections.
The point is: talk to your friends and coworkers about your goals! You can even start by replying to this email or commenting below and I’ll see how I can help.
The first couple of dates
The first couple of meetings were structured and sequenced like this:
Just sayin’ hi — This was a 30-minute video chat with one of the co-founders where we just shared our stories and tried to see if there was any way we could help each other.
Tell me more — This was a 1-hour video chat with both of the co-founders to talk more about who we were and why we wanted to build our own businesses.
Mini-collaboration session — This was supposed to be an hour-long, in-person working session with both of the co-founders. It turned into 2.5 hours of knowledge-sharing and brainstorming that ended with a feeling of progress and productivity.
Scheduling each subsequent meeting needed one of us to reach out and express the interest to take the next step. Given that all of us were pursuing startups full-time, the steps happened quickly. Each of these chats took place about 2-3 days apart.
The exact length and format are not as important as what I learned during these chats. In retrospect, I was looking for the following signals:
Kindness
Values alignment, which includes why are we doing this and what kind of company do we want to build
Team-first, problem/solution-second
Commitment
Complementary skill sets
Overlapping interest in potential customers that we want to serve
These are roughly in order of importance for me and I don’t think all of it is necessary to keep the conversation moving forward.
A trial period
After the mini-collaboration session, we wanted to put our team chemistry to the test by working on a real, time-bound project together. This would allow us to better understand how we would make decisions, how we would distribute work, and how we might handle challenges.
We decided on a 3-week trial period. The team had very recently pivoted to solving a different problem for their customer and was starting from scratch on the solution. So, we would get to brainstorm solutions, put together an MVP, and attempt to sell to customers together. Why three weeks? There’s a Y-Combinator application deadline coming up and we may throw our hat into the ring in order to access their network of mentors and advisors.
In addition to team chemistry, I’m particularly evaluating if I’m passionate about serving the customers that this co-founding team is currently pursuing — small, e-commerce business owners. There are plenty of reasons to serve this customer, especially after the devastating year that small businesses have had. But it is a different customer than the ones I have been considering, so I want to give some thought to spending the next 5-10 years on serving them.
We’re already almost a week into it and it has been intense. We have cobbled together an MVP with existing technology and have onboarded 3 customers!
I plan to share more about what we’re working on if I continue with this team. All I’ll say for now is that I’m incredibly impressed by the team so far.
Here’s a related resource from First Round that has been helpful: Founder Dating Playbook – Here’s the Process I Used to Find My Co-Founder