Greg’s Update

  • I have been debating who to hire first. Project/account manager or sales?
  • If sales, plan is to do commission only to start
    • Justin counters that this is not a good route based on his experience
  • If account manager, need to make sure they aren’t going to quit to do their own startup. This can be overcome by proper interview questions and background checks.

Takeaway:

Going to look for an account/project manager that is experienced in mobile marketing as the first hire. Then transition to building a repeatable sales process.

Justin’s Update

My Co-founder CTO might not be able to continue as he is needing to take on more consulting work now that his wife stays at home and they are homeschooling. Our marketing and our sales efforts are ready to scale, however our product is not yet there. He has felt the weight of being a bottleneck I think up to this point and has offered to step down if I can find someone. Now this could have been really bad if we didn’t have the proper agreements in place. So it is important to spend time getting to know any potential partners, but just as important that you still have all the paperwork and agreements in place. Otherwise, I could have been royally screwed. Now, he just so happens to be a cool guy and so I don’t think there would have been any issues, but for listeners, if you aren’t protected you could end up losing a ton of equity switching between partners.

At my agency, my first hire was a sales person. Then an operations person. However, I learned that I’m going to be the best salesman since I’m the founder. I can think quicker on my feet and make decisions that other can’t necessarily make. So this time around after I brought on a CTO partner, I decided to hire marketing/operations help. This took the marketing and fulfillment off my plate to allow me to fully focus on sales.

Takeaway:

Looking to find a CTO in a similar situation as me where they don’t need a job, but are looking for an opportunity with a fast growth startup.

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