How Do You Get Top Talent To Join Your Unfunded Startup?
It's an age old problem. You just started your company and you don't have any money to pay the top talent you want to hire.
I don't have any magic tricks to sell you in this short video, but I do have reality. I'll share with you the approach we took to bring on top talent when we were getting started.
Read The Video Transcript Below:
So how do you get great talent to join your startup when you don't have the money to pay them? This is a classic problem that all of us have when we're just getting started.
So let me tell you what I did and hopefully it'll spur some ideas for you. So when we were getting started, we couldn't afford to pay people anything. I was self funding the company. I wasn't paying myself anything. I wasn't paying my cofounders anything. You know, we were just surviving.
So I don't have magic tricks for you. I just have reality to sell you. So here's reality. Number one is you can't afford to pay anybody anything. So guess what? You're not going to, you're only going to work with people who can afford to work with you.
Therefore, just be honest, be straight forward, give them a good equity package. But the reality is, is that anybody who can't afford to go without salary isn't going to be working with you.
So those people are not going to join you for now. We'll get back to them in a minute. So that's thing one to do what's thing two? You know what? You sell people on your vision. You sell people on the great team of people that you have, that you're working with and people that are like-minded and really are fanatical about what you're doing. They'll join you if they can afford it right at the start. If they don't believe they're not going to join and not by the way, it's going to hold true through the life of your company.
Now, what's the third thing? Let's go back to those people that didn't want to join you but believed in what you are doing but couldn't afford it. Keep recruiting, always be recruiting as the CEO of a startup. It will pay off for you. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but those people that don't want to join you now who can't afford to join but believe in the vision.
You just keep interviewing those people. Keep recruiting those people and eventually guess what? Once you have money, you can get those people to join. That's what we did. We had a whole whole bunch of people lined up to join the business right at the start and those people joined us. It was a super smart thing to do. I highly recommend that you do it as well. I'm brett@brettjfox.com have a great, great day.