Thanks for the invite! :)
What are the main challenges and problems you face?
Once I was told that my job as the founder of a startup is to:
I can achieve the 2nd one by making sure we are building a product that solves a real problem. But "hiring" is still a difficult job for me. A good team is essential to making a great product and if you don't have the right kind of people in your team everything falls apart. So, I would say the biggest challenge is to find, recruit and retain the best people in the team. When we actively hire it takes about 40-50% of my time. I enjoy talking to candidates, but most of the days I may not get good results. Fortunately, we have a remote team of six right now and we are getting so many things done on a daily basis. This is because we have the right kind of people in the team and everyone knows what our priorities are. So, as a founder, I am looking forward to being more efficient in the hiring process and team management.
What are some hard lessons you learned?
There are many actually. But I'll outline some of the important ones here:
Never hire just because the person is excellent in a particular tech. Dig deeper and see if they fit into your culture.
Don't hire only because of skills. Look for coachability and genuine love for your product.
Don't have an office. We used to have an office in the initial few years of Hashnode, but went completely remote last month. If commuting takes more than an hour of your time, you should seriously consider going remote. For me, productivity went at least 5X up after going remote. I don't waste time commuting and have a lot of flexibility in starting and ending my day. You can still have team meetings, peer reviews, watercooler conversations and so on while working remotely. I recommend this book (from Basecamp) to everyone who is looking to go remote.
Don't give up reading books.
Which skills and competencies do you work on improving?
As I mentioned above, I am working on becoming better at hiring and team management in general. I am a developer and I still build features and fix bugs along with my team (we have 2 other developers in the team right now). Sometimes I hit a wall and spend a lot of my time fixing problems in the code. Naturally, I pay less attention to what everyone else is doing or what problems they are facing during that period. I am working on getting better at this.
As we get busy managing team and achieving business goals, most of us give up reading and writing. This happened to me as well. I read no books and wrote only 2-3 blog posts in 2018. However, I have resumed the habit of writing this year. 🙌 I have also bought some interesting books (fiction and non-fiction) and I am looking forward to finishing them.
What are your resources to improve and learn those skill sets?
Well, I am trying to follow people who are good at these skills. I follow them on Twitter and try to surround myself with such persons in my daily life. :) And of course, good books on these topics definitely help.
Hope this helps! Let me know if you have any questions. :)