Thank you Aditi! I still feel inadequate every single day. The earliest learning was how to work with my co-founders. There’s three of us, Rebecca is our Chief Design Officer and Trong is our Chief Technical Officer. To make it more difficult, we had time zone differences and at the beginning we were all working on Flodesk on nights and weekends, so our schedules were all over the place. We had very poor communication. We were all trying to prove to each other that we could do this, which was a big issue. Thankfully we learned pretty quickly that we needed to leave all ego at the door and admit when we didn’t know how to do something, when we were going to be delayed with a deliverable, we let go of the attempt to be perfect and started working on really transparent, frequent communication. As soon as we started interacting with customers (or potential customers at the beginning) this became a lot easier because one thing we were all aligned on from the get go is that what matters the most is that we’re serving our customers well.
On the skillset or competencies side, we are honest with ourselves when we’re no longer able to be the best at what we do, and that means hiring someone. I had to do that with accounting and support. It was hard to let go at the beginning, but it came down to doing the task myself first for as long as possible so I could understand what we’d need to hire for, then I focused on hiring someone who was way better than me at that competency, and just as important, I’d make sure to trust them and let them run independently once they were onboarded.