Simple Questionnaire to Self-Evaluate Your Startup Team
There’s a lot of doubts when venturing into startup business — will I succeed? is just one of them. Recently, I’ve been asked to help out a couple of colleagues with their ideas, offering some early advice and came up with a questionnaire that I think could be useful for the early estimates and health of your future startup setup. Note that I’m no investor myself, so all you’ll read below is my experience with clients and some investors I’ve known personally.
When people want to launch a startup they mostly think about the product — is it good enough? Will it work? Will it be used? Will it sell? In my opinion, that puts the focus on the wrong spot.
Of course that it’ll (mostly) work — you wouldn’t be thinking about starting a business around it if your gut wasn’t saying it’s the right thing. The reason why it might not succeed lies in your team. If you have a good team, they’ll recognize issues with the product, making adjustments on the way.
This questionnaire is all about your team — look at what you’re working for, are you on the same page. Push it to your team members and see where you’re standing.
The Questionnaire
Q1: In what ways will you contribute to this project?
Idea behind this question isn’t just the actual role — it’s also about specificity of the answers. If you have all team members answering the same thing (e.g. “development”, or “sales” than you’re in a problem. Also, about half of the answers should be of a general kind (like “everything”, or “development, business, whatever is needed”). Because you’re starting small you can’t afford to have dedicated roles and you’ll be switching back & forth jumping from one role to another. You need mostly generalists at this point, and it’s important you know the expectations of your team early on. If your startup has a technical niche, then of course you should expect some specialist in the team.
Q2: How would you advertise the finished product in one sentence?
By looking at the answers you’ll quickly realize where the team is putting focus on — do they all see the same features as the winning ones or not? This question usually produces surprises because as a proven rule people tend to make assumptions about other people thoughts. Additionally, you can use this for early product discovery phase — what adjectives are being used to describe the product (“fast”, “easy to use”, “cheap”). Those will determine where the focus will be during early development.
Q3: Order your priorities
In this ranking question, you’ll gain very important insight into who you’re going to be working with. Priorities will give you a clear picture of where each member is headed for, and where to put them.
- Create value for users — people that rated this high are the ones you should be asking for opinions when exploring which feature to do next, or how the product would work best. They’re here for passion and because they believe the product will work.
- Earn money — its great if you’re doing something for passion, but unless it’s a charity or similar vocation, having at least some members with focus on monetary side is necessary. It’s not about making sure you end up with profit, it’s about ending up with a working product in a timely fashion. Too often a great product never reaches “the shelf” because it’s never finished, and members always want it to be perfect before shipping etc. Focus on selling & earning money will get you focus, make you push it lean and fast.
- Learn new technologies — people that rated this high up will be the ones that actually make the product, they’ll use the latest & greatest version known to mankind, but at the same time they’re your biggest risk to finish things in a timely fashion. They tend to loose focus from product delivery, and while their attention is on solving technical issues, you have to keep it in check that product actually advances with its features.
- Learn about business — the ones that chose this are your salesman. You make sure they’re invited when you’re discussing how to sell the thing.
- Connect with people — more often than not, people want to expand their business network. But if you don’t have members putting this up high, that means you should keep your team smaller rather than inviting too many people early on. Otherwise, prepare for some communication issues.
- Have fun — while this sounds like a good quality early on, if this one’s ranked high, these people most probably won’t stay for long… once you start facing some real issues, or start working overtime, the enthusiasm would drop as would their participation. But do not discard these people — they’ll bring you out of the box thinking, lighten the mood and help forge a much required team spirit.
Q4: How much time do you think you’ll be able to set aside for working on the project?
While trivial, it’s important to get the actual velocity you can work with. You can use these numbers to quickly check from time to time are people burning out, when can you expect to finish MVP etc.
Q5: How long do you see yourself working on this project?
This shows dedication and expectations — can you rely on someone for just a couple of months, or they actually envision themselves as here to stay.
Q6: When do you expect that the project will actually be used for the first time in production?
This is just for being “on the same page” regarding expected return of invested time and effort. It would solve some communication issues early on.
But what about the product?
If you have assembled yourself a good team around a product — then it’s a good one, I’m sure. If you have a right mix of people, then you’re gathered around something every one of you believes can succeed. No one is going to waste their time and energy around a mediocre stuff — you’re here to make history.
The main concern and misconception about product is how do you measure success? Because you could have millions of users and still end up with a failed startup — it’s not about how well you’re received, it’s about how fast can you grow. Unfortunately, if you’re not growing fast enough you should be bracing for a crash.
Have anything else to add? Remove? Change? Let’s hear it in the comments
