I had a meeting today with a good friend that I met at my last company. He and I worked together on building revolutionary software for the company and industry that we worked in. Not to oversell it – it was cloud based data storage and data analysis that is commonplace in different tech industries, but for this industry, no company was (or still is) doing what we did. He and I worked incredibly well together; he as the lead developer and technical architect and me as the product manager. We understand each other well and can quickly communicate big ideas and complex topics to each other. This is the person that I wanted to partner with on this new endeavor.
I shared with him the PR/FAQ I wrote a few days back. Interested, he wanted to get together to discuss. We’ve talked about doing our own thing in the past, and even kicked around ideas before, but he was always hesitant and never fully committed.
The meeting started off well, him firing off questions and me walking through answers. As we talked, I saw that same hesitation I’ve seen in the past. Seeing this hesitation, I just asked him flat out, “you seem hesitant… what is stopping you from saying yes?” He said his real issue is context switching. Neither of us are in a position to quit our day jobs, which means he’s got to think all day about the work for his job: Systems, integrations, databases, workflows, applications, interfaces, and then he would come home and have to get all that out of his head so he could work with totally different systems, integrations, databases, etc. to get this idea up and running. It’s a difficult thing for sure. What I focused on with him was the alternative. “You’re not happy where you are, so you can suffer, get a new job, or do ‘Plan B’ with me and it will suck context switching for a while but if we’re successful, you will eventually be much better off. Suffer isn’t really a choice and the other option is to go work for somebody else again, be fine for a while, eventually figure out things are different, but not really better, and be in this same position again in 4-5 years.”
He ultimately agreed, so we are working now on next steps! We’re looking at architecture now, and identifying technical requirements of what we are going to build. We’re also looking at how we break development up so we can release with a functional product that isn’t “the whole thing” so we can start generating interest, traffic, and revenue sooner. With him on board, this is a new shot of excitement on the continued development of this project.
Who do you need to recruit to get your project off the ground? What techniques are you using to pull that off?