NEVER start with a team.

the common mistake i unfortunately did and the lessons for those who want to start to work on something big.

there is a super-common mistake that you may make and i also did—collecting a bunch of people to be a "team" to achieve more than what we can achieve personally. but, in this blog, i'm gonna write about this big mistake which i've not even solved it, but i'm trying.

first of all, accept that you don't need a team! think about it. what can you not do completely by yourself? that's not too much! you, even when you’re not that delusional, know that you can do almost everything by yourself, using the tools other people created for you, and are accessible on the internet, mostly for free! so there isn't any doubt on this subject.

but we tend to make a team when we think that we're gonna achieve something big. we do small and personal projects by ourselves. but when it comes to building a startup, we think that we should make a team to perform better (than what we can do personally). but that's a big mistake.

in order to make it clear to yourself that you shouldn't make a team, think about the thoughts that make it reasonable to have a team. you will first reach things like "we can do more", "there will be many more ideas" and things like that. but that's completely incorrect. you’ll not do more with a team. you'll not have more ideas with a bigger community. you'll not achieve more when you work aside from someone else. you, if you dive in yourself as i did recently, just want to have someone under your control, the people like employees. but that’s not the thing you can achieve your goal with. that just will result in a big failure.

but your problems will grow exponentially when you have a team and your role, instead of working truly on the product, will be the team's therapist. you, like what i did, may think that this is what is called “leadership”. but it's not. leadership isn't about dealing with people to work as much as what a single person can do. this is a misadventure that just will ruin your friendships, especially when you hire your friends as your first employees.

when you have a team, people's problems will be each other's problems. that's an extremely bad situation. in this situation, you don't know that you should think about one of your teammates' last breakup, or other teammates's bad daily routine, or the emotions of that younger one! it’s obvious that this is one of the most important reasons why many teams fail. :(

besides all those problems, you'll be uninspired, when you're trying to fix your team and this is the worst thing that may happen! but at this time and right at this time, you must work on the thing you've been inspired by. as naval says:

so you’d extremely better not to start with a team and never hire anyone else until you’ve to. because inspiration is very rare and once you become inspired, just go and make it and never think about making a team!

you can send your thoughts to me through sina80mor@gmail.com.

sina
july 25, 2024