Seattle 2.0 Blog

In the early days of any startup, the focus is so intense on that “one big thing” that tons of secondary opportunities fall by the wayside.  While extreme focus is necessary, there can be a downside.  Ripe opportunities – even if not crucial or core – certainly can add a ton to the experience and the value of a startup.  While you can’t distract your core resources from their #1 priority, it makes even less sense to ignore the issues all together.  What’s worked for me as I try and manage the balancing act? Guns for hire.

Guns for hire come in many shapes and sizes.  Call them what you will – consultants, sole practitioners, agencies, whatever – used correctly, they can help you quickly round out your offering.  The downside of guns for hire – they charge a premium for their skills.  So use them wisely.  I’ve found there are five practical things you can do to ensure these hires go off without a hitch.

1 – Find the straight shooters
Combing your business network is the best way to find the best straight shooters.  Who would your network recommend?  More importantly, who would they hire again?  Word-of-mouth is the currency of this type of work.  If your network doesn’t turn up options, dig for examples of what you’re looking for and start dialing.  Guns for hire do one thing really well – promote their best work.  They really do want you to find them.

2 – Get the right sized gun
The high profile guns are high profile for a reason – they have sexy results for well-healed clients.  But rarely are the biggest guns the right fit for a startup.  For one, it’s expensive to sit at the high roller table.  Beyond that, a multitude of clients compete for their time.  Will you get the attention and effort you need from someone with so many suitors?  One the other hand, the young affordable upstart might have the skills but certainly won’t have the track record.  Can you afford the risk associated with someone who hasn’t been there, done that a hundred times before.  In my experience – accept risk where you personally have some experience; hire the sure thing in areas outside your comfort zone.  And always tell them your expectations up front so there are no surprises.

3 – Give them the right challenge
While the work you’re hiring out might not be core, the hired gun doesn’t want to hear that.  They want to hear how what they’re doing is going to make a difference.  If they don’t feel that importance, they end up doing the job for the money and we all know how that date ends.  My marketing VP showed me the right approach on this one:  he asks every creative agency he interviews what they are going to do on this assignment that will put the work on the cover of their portfolio.  The ones that are doing the assignment for love light up when asked that question, while those in it for the money or not in it at all are flat.  Another fun challenge – ask them to show you at least one idea that will get you fired.  Most clients really want safe, boring, blah.  Demand that your assignment be breakthrough by letting them do what they’ve love to do – breaking all the rules to craft something extraordinary. 

4 – Let them do what they do best
Do you really trust your hired gun?  I don’t mean ‘a little bit’…I’m talking really trust them.  If you do, you’re willing to let them do what they do best.  You’re willing to get out of the way and consider things you’ve never even thought of.  You listen, you encourage, and you challenge constructively.  But you never meddle and you never micromanage.  The hired gun is a hired gun for a reason – they work better without oversight.  So without that trust, you won’t get that breakthrough idea because you’ll kill it.  And trust me, if you hired the right hired gun, they know way more than you ever will about the best way to overcome your challenge. 

5 – Share the love
Being a hired gun is a lonely job.  They don’t own their work – you do.  So to close that motivational loop, when they do deliver that breakthrough idea, be sure to share it far and wide.  Give them all the credit.  Like Hornall-Anderson, who crafted the Wetpaint brand; and Lee and Satchi and Branson who created these wiki videos.  And Matt and Becca, who sketched the Wetpaint site and experience.  Hired guns love feeling appreciated by their clients.  And if you don’t appreciate them, chances are they really didn’t deliver the value you expected.  I love sharing my best hired guns with others.  While that might seem counterintuitive because the best guns are always booked, nothing could be further from the truth.  It’s easy to jump to the front of the line with the best hired guns when they consider you their favorite client.

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Ben Elowitz is the CEO of Wetpaint, a company that lets anyone start a wiki website for free.

    There are unlimited ways of building software, from the overall architecture to the minutiae of the files structures, from the componentization to the preferred order of parameters on the APIs. Because of that, no two piece of software are the same, which is very much different from other engineering projects, like building a submarine where you will end up with two identical replicas even if they are built by different builders following the same specification.

    Any software company (or software project) will define its DNA on its initial months. The tone of the application will be set by the initial developers, managers and designers, and it permeates through everything the application is and for the rest of the application life.

    Changing this DNA is very hard. If you ever worked on version 5 or 6 of a product, you know how it is to maintain backward compatible code because of decisions made on version 1. Rewriting everything and dropping all “old ways” is like starting a new company and most of the time is not what investors, customers and partners would consider good business practice.

    You can do facelifts on your application, and completely change the user interface and experience, like Microsoft Word 2007 did, but the core continues to be the same. You can replace components with faster versions re-written from scratch, but the DNA of the application will not be different, it will just mutate a bit. If, an application lives long enough, like AutoCAD, Microsoft Word or Unix, its current DNA mutated so much that it doesn’t resemble the original one anymore, but such change probably takes 15 years or more.