How to Build Your Dream Startup Team: Steps and Expert Tips

Building the right startup team is one of the most impactful things you will do as a founder. It means more than:

• having the perfect idea because nobody comes up with perfect ideas,
• bring a ton of funding, as money and resources mean nothing if you cannot utilize them,
• being the best leader as it takes a team to win.

At the same time, there are so many open questions:

• When should you start hiring developers rather than building a sales team?
• Do you need full-time employees, or can you outsource specific tasks?
• How is the hiring process different when you start building your company vs later stages of the company?

In this article, we will discuss the process of gathering the right team for your startup and the common pitfalls to avoid along the way. Before jumping into the details, let's give you a TL;DR from Vesko Kolev, Founder and CEO of Icanpreneur:

​​Why Is It Important to Form a Startup Team as Early as Possible?

A solid and well-rounded team is the cornerstone of a successful startup. Many statistics show that having a founding team of two or more people significantly increases the chance of success compared to solopreneurs. But why is that?

Skill Diversity

Running a startup is a highly complex task and requires a diverse set of skills and experience. Usually, a founder needs a blend of technical, business, and domain-specific knowledge that is unusual to be focused on a single person.

Agility and Adaptability

A more diverse team has a better capacity to adapt to unexpected changes:

1. More people means fewer potential blind spots;
2. More people means more options on the table for handling the new environment.

Investor Confidence

Many VCs and Accelerators will prioritize teams over individual entrepreneurs due to the higher success rates of the former. A well-formed team demonstrates commitment and capability to execute the mission.

Mental Resilience

The entrepreneurial journey is long and has many ups and downs. Having team members to rely on and provide support helps overcome moments of doubt and recharge with positive thinking.

Do you need a team from the first day?

With that said, is it possible to start alone? There are things that you can do before or while gathering a team. You can express your business idea using Lean Canvas or a different tool so others can understand and relate to it. This will help inspire and bring other people on board.

Another thing you can do is to start validating the customer problem fit. This means to get real-world validation from conversations with your potential customers about:

• The target audience
• The customer problem - what is it, how important is it, how is it solved today?
• The unique value proposition: What promise can you make to the customer segment that will resonate with them?

Having a validated problem will give others more confidence in joining your team and provide more clarity on the company’s roadmap and future potential. If you are not sure where to start from, we listed the 8 best ways to validate your startup idea.

5 Key Steps to Build Your Startup Team

1. Start with CEO Skills

Self-awareness is one of the key traits for a successful CEO. What are the skills you need to be successful as a CEO vs the things you are good at? How can you mitigate the gaps? Are there things that you can learn? Or something else that you can delegate to someone else?

2. Identify a Co-founder Role

Knowing your strengths and weaknesses, describe the characteristics of a person that can complement you. If you have the domain knowledge, you may need a technical person. If you are a visionary, you might want a more grounded and practical person to fill-in for you. Your ideal co-founder will be a combination of such characteristics.

However, the most important thing for your cofounder is to share your passion for your startup's mission. You are not looking for somebody who needs a job. You need a partner who will pull and persist as much as you will.

3. Decide on Key Roles in the Startup

Once you have identified your role and other cofounders' roles - what other team members do you need on onboard? Consider what additional gaps you need to fill. Some of them might be outsourced to service companies. The early stages of a startup often don’t need in-house accountants and legal advisors.

If you map out the full process of getting from an idea to market success, what does it need to happen and what are the needed skills and activities:

• how the product will be design, build, and delivered?
• how the customers will learn about the product and hire it?
• how customers will be supported after becoming your customers?
• what additional services are needed to have a running business?

Consider the skills you need in your team that are critical to your success. Only then move to hiring employees for the missing roles you have identified.

4. Determine the Best Employees for Key Roles

The startup environment is very different from the corporate job. Both will appeal to different types of people in terms of personality, skills, and mindset. So, how do you know who will thrive in your startup? You are looking for people who:

• Have a growth mindset: No matter their previous experience, they must learn a lot to succeed. Not everybody likes to be outside their comfort zone, but this is the norm in a startup. Some people frown, others thrive, and you want to find the former.
• Have broad interests and want to develop in different areas: startups are spread thin, and each has to participate in activities that are not usually part of their job description.
• Are self-driven and embrace a more chaotic environment: not everything is clear for months ahead in a startup, and at many times, the team may need to find what is their next best move. Each team member is expected to be an active part of that as opposed to waiting for objectives and commands to be driven.
• Are intrinsically motivated: A startup is a high-risk, high-reward game. People joining solely for material compensation will soon leave for more reliable gigs. Others are driven by the problem the company is solving and have more reasons to stay than the paycheck at the end of the month. Similar to the cofounder, your early team members need to be well-aligned with your values, mission, and vision of the company.

5. How to Motivate and Involve Your Team for Significant Results

• Cheer the wins, even the small ones. It’s easy to get sucked into tasks and problems all the time. Taking a breath to celebrate a small achievement will help your team recharge their batteries.
• Reiterate the mission and its importance when you have a good opportunity. It’s not enough to tell it once and assume everybody gets it. One of the best traditions we had at Coursera, dating back to its early days, was sharing learners’ stories—short videos of people telling how Coursera changed their lives. It was motivating and inspiring.
• Build a creative and fun environment that boosts morale. Here is a glimpse from our team’s office.

6. Great teams are built, not gathered

Bringing the right people on board is just the beginning. To turn that group of people into a successful team, you need to build that team.

Best Practices for Building Your Startup Team Structure

Clear Roles and Responsibilities

The startup environment is often chaotic and uncertain. To counter that, startup teams compensate by assigning clear roles and responsibilities. This clarity helps prevent overlaps and gaps in responsibilities and enables team members to develop ownership in their areas of responsibility.

One specific thing about roles in startups is that they can be defined very broadly. If you are a product manager in a four-team startup - you may need to do sales, marketing, and customer service work. Unlike bigger organizations where putting boundaries around roles is appreciated, in startups, team members often need to step up and perform a task that is not part of their usual agenda.

Appropriate Organizational Structure

Even in small teams, there are multiple ways to organize a group of people depending on the needs of the organization:

• A flat organizational structure will foster more initiative, stronger ownership, and diversity in opinions. Decisions will be made without surprises, with discussions and consensus, which might be the perfect decision but will require time to arrive at.
• A hierarchical structure will benefit from quick decision-making and faster execution.

Open Communication

Setting up regular communication channels among team members helps with transparency, building trust, and resolving issues as soon as possible. This is important for onsite teams but especially important for remote teams.

Bonus item from the Icanpreneur community

During the last community event, we had a round of lightning talks and our community member Deyvid Dimitrov prepare a talk on The Search for a Successful Team. You won't be able to catch up with his funny delivery but at least you can check out the slides from the talk.

Key Things to Avoid While Building Your Startup Team

Ignoring Diversity

A lack of diversity in your team limits creativity and innovation. Diverse teams offer broader perspectives that can provide more options in the problem-solving and decision-making process.

Keeping Bad Hires

A bad hire happens, and it’s only a matter of time before you make one. When it happens, it’s crucial to acknowledge it and resolve the situation as quickly as possible. The impact of one bad hire goes much further than a lack of results in this person's area of responsibility.

It can demoralize others and limit the impact on the whole organization. While one or two bad hires in a big company may go unnoticed and take months or years to resolve, you don’t have that time in a startup context.

To be clear - a bad hire doesn’t mean hiring a bad person. It means hiring somebody who is not fit for the position in your company. In many cases, that person might be a brilliant professional and highly valuable to a different company.

Not Evolving the Team Structure

What got you here won't get you there.

Finding an organizational structure that works for you right now doesn’t mean it won’t need to change in the future. As the organization's needs change, so will its structure.

What started as a flat structure where every decision was made by consensus may need to be converted to a more hierarchical structure with a chain of command that favors quick decision-making and execution.

Premature Hirings

As entrepreneurs, we tend to go ahead of ourselves and go big after the first positive signals. However, hiring people before being able to utilize their talent can cost you a lot:

• Wasting company resources
• Demoralizing other team members
• Losing the new hire due to demotivation

Ensure your capacity to utilize their time, skillset, and expertise from the get-go.

FAQ