You have a great startup idea and you decided to start a tech company. Suddenly, you realize that you need a team because having only an idea isn’t enough to start a company. You need a team, a reliable team to start and run your tech company. But, you don’t have a team.
Yet, you start your company thinking that once you start your company, you will hire people or people will come to you or you know someone who will be working with you.
Can you run your company alone or along with one or two other people? What about projects? Who will handle your projects? Do you have enough people with experience and skills? Do you have people who specialize in different fields?
You need to think deeply about your development team because you need people with experience and skills to work with you. You need people who specialize in different fields because you absolutely need such team members. Otherwise, who will manage your projects, who will design, who will code, who will do the marketing, etc. Can you handle all those roles alone?
As a founder, you need a team that you trust and vice versa, take responsibilities, and carry your burdens. Before that, you need to understand about the development team structure and their roles and processes. It makes it easier for you to hire the right team.
As a Founder, What Sorts of Development Teams Do You Need?
You need the right team to survive the difficult phase at starting and make your company successful. The starting phase is the most difficult phase of a business because you need to deliver quality software products within the deadline. At this phase, you should focus on customer satisfaction and build an image, reputation in the market. Once you have customers who trust you, your presence will increase and more and more people will come forward to work with you.
So, you need to find and build the right team to handle all the customers’ requests and their projects. As a founder, you need a team with
Experience
You need a team with the experience to understand the project requirements clearly, handle a situation, tackle problems, provide suggestions and solutions, and many more.
Skills
A team must have the skill to think critically, communicate and collaborate effectively, deliver timely, and many more.
Teamwork
You need team members who love working in a team and who help other fellow team members. You need team members who, in a team, bring out the full potential of others as well as of themselves.
Knowledge of Industry and Trends
Industry and its trends change continuously. So, a team must have knowledge of the industry and its changing trends. A team must know about emerging and popular technology and trends and develop quality software products implementing those trends and technology.
A Clear Understanding of Roles and Responsibilities
A team must clearly understand the roles and responsibilities given to them. They should know what the company is expecting from them and give their 100 percent to achieve the company’s goals and objectives.
Difficulties Faced by a Founder When Gathering a Development Team for a Startup
You need a development team, but it is not so easy to get the right team easily and immediately. He/she faces many problems and they are:
Lack of Capital
Capital is obviously the deciding factor for running a company. Not all startups have the capital to run a company. Until and unless you have investors, you will have difficulty hiring a team. Most importantly, you need to pay their salaries. Who likes to work in a company that just started and have no idea if it can pay their salaries or not?
Inexperienced People
Another biggest challenge you face is finding a team with experience. The truth is that experienced people do not like to work with a company that has just started and that cannot pay for their experience. So, experienced people look for salary as well as look for big and reputed companies.
Limited Talent to Choose From
The founder has very limited talent to choose from. Those who are skilled and experienced prefer to work in big and reputed companies. So, the founder has to hire people from a limited talent pool such as inexperienced people and semi-skilled people.
Bad Hires
Because you lack the capital and have to hire from a limited talent pool, you sometimes make bad hires. It is not your fault, but you don't have a choice either.
Employees Lack Knowledge of Industry and Trends
As explained above, sometimes you make bad hires such as employees lacking knowledge of industry and trends. Such a team is unaware of the industry and fails to implement the right technology and trends in software products.
Employees Lack Understanding of Their Roles and Responsibilities Clearly
Since you have to hire an inexperienced team, the team fails to understand their roles and responsibilities. Until and unless you give them instructions, they are unable to fulfill their roles and responsibilities and fully adapt to the working culture.
These are not only the problems faced by you, as a founder. Since you have to run the startup successfully, you have the pressure to pay employees’ salaries timely, pay for rent, pay for utilities, and many more.
You have the responsibility to manage everything, train inexperienced employees, maintain the relationship with clients, manage every project, produce expected results, deliver within deadlines, and many more.
Imagine how much pressure you have to go through? How can one manage everything alone? Only those who have experienced such a situation know the pain and know how tough it is.
You have to go through a very tough time. But, the team doesn’t know anything. What can you do? Because there is no one to share your feelings and you can’t even share those feelings. It is best to hide those feelings because it is not wise and beneficial to tell employees who have just started working.
Sometimes, you even have to spend from your own pocket to cover all the expenses. At this time, many of the founders might not be able to handle such situations and pressure and might quit halfway. More importantly, a founder who doesn’t have money to operate the basic business functions might lose his/her patience and shut down the company.
Moreover, without the capital, the business might go bankrupt. So, you have to face many challenges when starting a company and gathering the development team.
What Can a Founder Do?
It is very hard for you to run a tech company, but to reduce cost as much as possible and to reduce workload pressure, you can
Form a Small Web Development team structure
Instead of doing everything alone, you can form a small web development team structure that can include a designer, a developer, and a project manager to work on projects. You can be part of the team initially and can handle one or two roles.
Here, the project manager can do the job of requirements analyst and communicate with clients too. And, a web designer or a web developer can do the testing part too to ensure quality. So the absence of QA.
Hire Remotely
Hiring an in-house team can be costly for the founder, so you can hire a team from an outsourcing company on a contract basis. Once the projects or tasks are finished, the team is disbanded. But make a good relationship with such company or team members because you never know when you need them again.
You can also hire a freelancer. Hiring from an outsourcing company or hiring a freelancer is much easier and less expensive than hiring and building an in-house team. But, building an in-house team is a must because hiring remotely might not always be feasible.
Set Clear Expectations
As a founder, you need to set clear expectations. Give them clear instructions and set clear goals and objectives. Appreciate them and keep motivating them to improve their skills and knowledge.
Keep checking the progress of the new employees. Observe them and suggest to them the areas where they need to improve. They are the future of your company.
At What Stage, a Founder Needs More People?
Is it possible to run a company with a small development team forever? No. Because there comes a time when you need more people to run your company and make it successful. The situation and condition might not favor you always, so you need to grow your team. So let’s see when a founder needs more people.
Growth of the Company or Company isn’t Growing
The founder needs people whether the company is growing or not. If the company is growing, then roles and responsibilities increase. You, as a founder, need additional manpower to delegate roles and responsibilities.
If your company is extending its services to another place or another country, then it is not possible for you to look after every business. It is not possible for you to manage everything, so you need more people.
Even if the company isn’t growing, you need additional manpower to find the underlying problem that is preventing your company from growing. Initially, your company might not grow, but not growing at all means it's time to think why your company isn’t growing at all. In such a situation, you may need the help of experts to identify the problems and solve them.
Once your company grows, you need more skilled and experienced people.
Can Afford to Hire More Employees
Some startups have investors whereas some don’t have. Some startups have high capital whereas some have less capital. If you are one of those who can afford to hire more employees, then you need to hire skilled and experienced people to achieve the company’s goals and objectives, to grow your business.
Difficulty to Manage Organizations, Employees, Obligations, and so on
As mentioned earlier, it is not possible to manage everything by yourself, so you need more people. You, as a founder, have other obligations also such as attending seminars, meetings, press conferences, and other events. You can’t attend such events and manage your company, manage your employees at the same time, so you need someone to manage your company, manage your employees in your absence.
Company Builds an Image, Reputation, and as a Brand in the Market
When a company builds an image, reputation, and establishes itself as a brand in the market, you need more people. There arises two situations to hire more people.
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Increase in Customer Needs and Requirements
When you establish your company as a brand, then more people will trust your company and more will be ready to work with you. As a result, their expectations from you increases and their needs and requirements increase as well. And, you need more people to handle all those customer requests.
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More and More Projects
Once you start getting more clients, you will automatically have more and more projects on your hand to work on. Your current employees might not be able to work on old and new projects at the same time. So, you need more people to work on new projects.
The Need for Skills and Experience
Sometimes, your current team might not have enough skills and experience to work on some projects. In such a time, you need people who can handle those projects, so you need to hire skilled and experienced people.
The Complexity of Tasks Increases
The tasks your team does might not always be easy. Sometimes, the complexity of tasks increases and your team might not have what it takes to handle such complexities. So, your only choice is to hire people who can handle such tasks easily.
Increase in Workload
When workload increases, you and your team carry each other burdens and help each other even if you have to overwork. But, is it beneficial? No, because it causes physical and mental distress.
In such a situation, you need more people to work on increased workload. You should look after the health of your employees as well.
Quality is Decreasing
When instead of increasing the quality of products, the quality decreases, then you need to find the root cause. The problem might be your employees’ skills and experience. Their skills and experience might not be enough to polish your products.
What can you do here? Either you can train them. But training them and improving their skills take time. If you have enough time, then you can train them. Or, you can hire more people whose skills and experience can help you to increase the quality of your products.
In Conclusion
Gathering the best and reliable team is a must for any business. When starting a business, you need a team whom you can rely on and help you to start your business and help you to handle business operations. You need a team to focus on quality, deadlines, customer satisfaction, and the growth of the business.
If you have a great business idea, then we, at Truemark, will help you to start your business. We will provide you the best development team we have to work on your idea and make your dream project a reality. So, if you want to work with us, please feel free to contact us.
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