Building a successful startup is a huge challenge

What makes a startup successful is not the money, nor the idea, but the team. And it’s not as easy as you might think.

Building a successful startup is a huge challenge. Only 1% of startups have a future, it’s tough, a very tough journey.

Over the past 7 years I’ve led 4 different startups and I can say that 3 of the biggest challenges that every young company has to face in order to succeed on the market are:

1. Money: yes, the first obstacle is definitely money. You want to prototype? Do you need a dev? Or a cool landing page? Do you want to scale up? It doesn’t matter if the startup is in its initial stage or is just looking to grow up, in the first 3–5 years you will always be in need of money.
2. Execution: it’s not as tangible as money, but being able to deliver what you have proposed is often hard. In my experience, the execution phase is a mix of having a clear vision, utilising your past experiences, keen organisational skills, and being delivery oriented. The important thing here is being able to manage time and resources wisely. New companies usually have limited resources so it’s fundamental to understand how to be efficient.
3. The team: building the right team is key! You need to find talented people, who are available, able to work well together, appealing for investors and able to fit your company needs.

At Faire we do credit automation based on Open Banking and other alternative sources of data. Our goal is to democratize access to credit, especially for Millennials and GenZ. The team of Gian, Gilberto and myself, came together in September 2020 and shortly after joined by Cristina and Claudia.

In the last 6 months our team has grown from the 5 founders to 12 people and it has been swift. After more than 1,000 applications received, we now have a team of excellent young professionals. Anyway, instead of saying how cool we are I want to share some tips on the approach and challenges we have met in arriving here.

A set of shared of values and beers

The first thing we did was to align internally on what kind of company we wanted to be. Even though we were aligned on the project we had never discussed our values. Fortunately, we were all on the same page.

Before deciding on the team members needed, we agreed on the following:

• International people were super welcome
• We do love diversity: at Faire we are building an inclusive credit score. The team needs to be heterogeneous from a demographic to a social point of view
• As founders we are all from fintech backgrounds, so, we needed people with different perspectives from other industries
• Talented people, eager to grow, eager to use the latest technology, able to embrace the dynamism a startup has. Passionate about the project.
• Last but not least: the best candidate is someone we would like to have a beer with

Once this set of values was decided upon, we forecasted the project and with reference to our previous experiences, we decided which professional figures we needed:

• 3 Devs
• 3 Data scientists
• 1 Designer
• 1 Legal
• Board of Advisors

The scarcest resource in this world: the techs

With every passing day the world is becoming more evolved, more connected, more digitized and still tech people are like unicorns. It’s nearly impossible to find one, and when you find one they then need to fit the team.

We are a tech company, our core business is data and software. We needed 6 tech people. We had money for making attractive offers, we had money for advertising and we had a strong network. Still it was a nightmare: to complete the team we spent 4 months pushing like hell to find the perfect candidates.

Who the hell are you? Faire!

Do not underestimate the company brand. If you want to attract talented people you need to have a strong brand, competitive salary offers or a very appealing project.

Also to mitigate this factor we used a lot of PR with Digital Pro Agency, pushing our positioning in the Italian market with interviews, events and podcasts.

Problem? Take it easy, we’ve got a solution

The biggest problems we found:

• Low number of on target applications from Linkedin ads
• Low retention: after first intro-call, very few candidates were sending us the test case assigned
• At least one month notice period
• Few candidates with the right seniority were applying
• High fees asked by headhunters (average of 20% of RAL)

Before sharing how we have overcome these problems, I wanted to explain how we structured our actions internally:

• All the candidatures were collected in a spreadsheet with key info: personal info, contacts, motivation, notice period, expected salary, etc.
• The process was clear: collect the leads, select the leads based on technology and experience (not age), first step intro call, then email with the case, technical interview, CEO call, offer
• Every step was mapped on the excel and during the weekly recruitment update

Now, what we did:

• We used tech communities on social media. Posting our announcements organically and paid
• We involved proactive headhunting companies
• We showed in our candidature the salary range, knowing it was an attractive salary
• The first intro-call was always with a founder to increase the retention on the case
• We hired 2 back-end developers as freelancers to speed up our operations to hit the delivery date
• Fintech is a very regulated market, so we decided to use the support of Alessandro Negri and his studio to address all the legal topics. Definitely the best choice, Alessandro’s was key in making the fully compliant set-up possible.

What we learned:

• Money can’t buy happiness but you can pay badass freelancers, employees and headhunters
• The first call is straight with the founder, that’s the key to engage talents
• As a still unknown company, PR is fundamental, in order to get published in the most important italian & international publications. It helps to create brand awareness and trust, and increases visibility for hiring
• It is important to communicate to candidates that we are an innovative company that uses the latest technologies with open-minded and collaborative leaders
• Mixing remote and physical presence is the best combination for everyone