How to find teammates for the new thing you want to build
Avoid the usual interview-and-stare-into-their-eyes process
Founders often face the challenge of needing to build something, and missing all the skills to build it themselves. The more experienced they are, the more they tend to default to a big-company interview process: ask people they know who the best suchandsuch is for their startup, reach out, interview and stare into their eyes, try to convince them to join, and cross your fingers and hope it works out.
The problem with the traditional strategy: odds are, nobody great who you meet that way wants to actually work for your doesn’t-yet-exist-and-isn’t-funded-yet thing. Most people who know how to operate in a day-zero startup aren’t interviewing for jobs the usual way. This process also takes plenty of time, and makes you reluctant to separate from the person if it turns out to be a mismatch.
If you spend too much effort selling a person on joining you, then that candidate might turn out to be precious, spending time on endless “are we aligned” conversations before getting work done. These insta-matches for co-founders hardly ever work.
So what should you do instead?
First, try to learn the skill yourself. Even if it’s something where you might struggle at first (“but I can’t code!” yes, you can), you hold an enormous advantage as the founder — who has the entire vision in your heart and brain, and the commitment to see it through. Try to get out of doing less valuable things, if you can, by skipping doing them, or hiring some easier-to-find help, by the cell division method.
Then, if you do need to bring someone aboard to help you, the best source (duh) is talented people who already know you — so you really taking the time to mine your past relationships (“hey there was that one person in 2017 I thought was so smart, whatever happened to her”…) is usually a surprisingly valuable use of time. Active memory is terrible. I scour my inbox, LinkedIn, social media connections, etc.
The most practical solution: find people who want to crack in to startups, and are not yet known to be talented. That means you might need to be ready to let them go, because you’ll have to get lucky for them to be talented. You can find contractors on Upwork, people who answer Replit Bounties, etc. Where you direct the engineering work, scope the first useful thing as narrowly as humanly possible, try out lots of people to build little bits of it for you, and through some natural selection process end up collaborating more with the people who are great. This also forces you to avoid think-work and focus on do-work even if you need to throw away 95% of what you create. The hard part about this strategy is it does require (small amounts of) cash.
If you need volunteers, first think whether you have something valuable (other than money) with which to compensate them, because uncompensated work is unfair. Look for students — and trying to figure any university connection you have to someone who is just looking for “real work,” where what you’re doing could be inspiring to them!
Most of the best startups ever created had a ragtag group at the outset. So, just keep building.
