TLDR: Chekr Director of Solutions, formerly Director of Strategic Sales (and first business hire), starts client on-boarding company (nice idea, streamline a lot to minimize hand-holding).
This anecdote about how some particular connections were formed and later led to real opportunities seems like a good example of how things often happen in the Bay Area tech world.
Perhaps someday there’ll be a general theory of how opportunities are created, but in the meantime if you want to learn how things happen, there are only anecdotes to learn from.
Doesn't that regard the first few early hires (who'd take some form of senior/management positions later on)? For me a person who delivers projects means somebody who's very involved in the process; somebody that calls significant decisions about the product.
Should all hires be like that? Isn't being able to execute the tasks you're assigned enough?
If you manage to build an org where everyone is a self-starter who takes on projects from ideation to delivery repeatedly you work in a crazy awesome env. There are some people that are really good at getting work done, but if you don't give them a clearly defined task, they will flounder.
When you are in startup land, most of what you are doing is undefined. You need someone who is really good at saying "is this working? Should I keep doing this? How do we do this better?" Over and over and over again until you find product market fit and aren't burning through cash.
If you are running an enterprise mature SaaS product a lot of those variables are solved (but possibly could be optimized). The majority of people don't need to be solving for profitability. In startupland of 10 employees or less, almost everyone should.
It's the same logic that a "startup founder" may not make the best "enterprise CEO". An "early hire" may not make the best "gear in a 300 person machine".
And sometimes you need someone who is really good at saying "let's just get this done." Diversity is a good thing on any team, even in a startup.
There is handling uncertainty and there is organizing workplace to maximise unceirtenity. You described the latter.
I ended up starting my own business and I think that's the only realistic scenario for someone who likes "taking projects from inception to delivery and who actively seek out projects to own".
It turns out that people want to work on the fun and challenging tasks. Nobody put the effort into the billing system and they were doing a poor job of collecting money from their customers.
That's the thing about any organization, there's plenty of grunt work and "boring" tasks to go around, but they need to get done. Scaling up any organization is an exercise in making sure that the right things get done.
congrats and good luck!
While there may be advantages, I think you'd be hard pressed to overcome the drop off from potential users who will bounce.
Furthermore, you're not delivering a clear value proposition "JOIN THE CONVERSATION you're invited to our dinner party beta". And then you have an ambiguous call to action "start login". At no point are you giving the potential user a reason to even want to login. And then you're asking the user to overcome an email signup and confirmation flow before they even get to see what your product does. Consider the case where the product isn't what the potential user thought it was, now you've wasted their time, what good is their email signup?
Why not go for a progressive engagement flow? You can still require accounts, signup and login for continual use. However you could engage the user first, then make your email signup ask. Wouldn't that be more advantageous?
I took your feedback and added a guest login to the site to help reduce the bounce. I've also updated the banner with a better 1-liner about the platform.
So now dinnertable.chat has a simple progressive engagement flow, although it can still be polished a lot... but I'm hoping this will help.
Thanks again for all your feedback, and please do let me know if you have more! :]
Your implementation looks nice! The idea of yet _more_ people to discuss politics with however... is not for me.
I'll sign up I think!
Edit: While I was signing up, I tried copying the verification code from the email, and it copied with the period from the email, so when I pasted it into the site it didn't work. Maybe put a zero-width space in there (U+200B) or ditch the period altogether. ;- )
Edit 2: The "start login" page didn't work the first time around. In the console I saw a 404 status on something. When I refreshed, it redirected me to the right page though.
Give that signup and sign in flow a good test, I was almost ready to call it quits after trying a couple times!
Edit 3: The countdown clock is jumping around a bit. Turns out the font for the numbers (Montserrat) is proportional, and does not support OpenType tabular number variants (in CSS you select these with: { font-variant-numeric: tabular-nums; }), so the countdown clock tends to jump each time a second passes and it is updated. Maybe nitpicky but it bothers me.
re Edit) removed the period, hopefully that helps
re Edit 2) fixed the 404 issue: was a rare bug
User flow) I've now added Guest Pass login which will improve user flow in areas. I'm curious what exactly are some of the flow issues you hit more specifically.
re Edit 3) I switched to a monospaced font for the timer :)
EDIT #A: I've made the "signup/login" banner button to navigate to the registration page (with option to see login) instead of the login page by default. This should a much better flow as most users clicking the button will be those registering. Thanks for the tip!
I know you're joking a little, but aren't the people that hold incorrect beliefs exactly the type of people that need an emotional way to connect to others (the opposites) that are informed to resolve these differences? Often I find that people with strongly held views are able to reach small compromises via personal communication, rather than any counter facts/news. Whether this particular implementation/solution works, time will tell :)
Montserrat doesn't support OpenType number variants which causes a flicker.
