Pitfalls to avoid in building a startup team?

Have you read The Founder's Dilemmas?

This book is a MUST-READ if you want to bring in cofounders, new hires, and/or investors. It will help you anticipate and avoid the most common people problems; those that are most likely to sink your early-stage startup and its founding team. These include:

1. Relationship Dilemmas
2. Role Dilemmas
3. Reward Dilemmas

Give it a read and let me know what you think.

The first question I'd ask is whether you're hiring early employees or cofounders, as they are different in terms of responsibilities and compensation, which result in different expectations.

For employees I'd suggest using your network first to find people your friends and families could make a warm intro to. Nowadays if you have a reasonable cash + equity package it shouldn't be difficult to have your early team up and running.

For cofounders, well, tough as it's a mixture of luck + persistence effort.

There are a few pitfalls you should avoid when building your startup team:

1. Don't hire too quickly. It's important to take your time and find the right people who will fit in well with your company culture and who have the skills and experience you need.

2. Avoid hiring friends or family members. While it can be tempting to hire people you know and trust, this can often lead to problems down the road.

3. Be careful of choosing co-founders who are too similar to you. It's important to have a team with different skills and perspectives so that you can bounce ideas off of each other and come up with the best solutions.

4. Don't forget to do your due diligence. Make sure you check references and do your research on potential employees and co-founders before making any decisions.

I think it depends on your goals.

If you have some income from your startup and you need to scale it then just build a team of professionals with skills you need: design, engineering, etc.

If you plan to grow your startup and now you dont have any income from it, then try to find a specialist who are interested in the same market. But there is important that if you have expertise in marketing then try to find tech-guy and vice versa. BUT. Keep in mind that before your startup/project have income, your partner/cofounder should do a lot of things outside of his expertise. For example it will be great if your tech-cofounder will do cusdevs or try to build community around your project. And of course you should be ready to do the same for your partner/cofounder. If you are not tech-guy you will need to learn about engineering and how it works. In this case T-shape persons is more suitable as co-founder/partner.

My red flags for tech-co-founders is when they said like I will code it in 1 week instead of We can build mvp on top of Notion in 2 days and start to test our hypotheses with users. Building a project is not always about code, its about value for your customers.

And do not forget to discuss all of your relationships around project before you start work together.

yes but my cofounders were my colleagues with whom i had worked earlier. You should do the same either draw from your own network ot work on some task together to see if you like working with each other before adding them as cofounder.