Some of us start our journey as a solo tech entrepreneur. Others start with several co-founders. Here is one way to start and grow your team in the initial stages of your tech entrepreneur journey.

Ideal Initial Team Structure

At the very beginning, there are only two focused areas, these being:

• Build
• Sell

What above means is that your efforts need to focus on developing a product and finding customers for it. We all start with an idea. The idea should be fully validated before the product can be designed and built. As part of the validation, you need to speak to individuals or entities, which suffer from the problem that your product will eventually solve.

If you are a solo founder, you would undertake both parts. If you have a co-founder or another pair of hands, then these can be split.

Enlargement Stage 1

The next iteration of the team needs to focus on one additional area, i.e. Operation. So all together:

• Build
• Sell
• Operate

Under Build, you will start to focus on concept validation and initial product design. Under Sell, you will continue with customer development but will also expand to developing and refining your value proposition. Additionally, you will now need to start thinking about planning the business and how to operate it. At this stage, the team could be 3 individuals.

Enlargement Stage 2

In the next team iteration, you will onboard more people into your team but core focus areas will remain very much unchanged. The expanded build team will now include product development having validated the concept and designed it. The sell team will start to focus on demand generation for your product in addition to continue focusing on customer development. The operate team will now start to explore how to finance the operation including fundraising from Friends, Family and Fools (FFF).

Enlargement Stage 3

At the next iteration, you will start to see the formation of traditional teams such as:

• Product Team
• Marketing Team
• Sales, Customer Acquisition & Support Team.

Operational Team will largely remain the same.