Surrounding yourself with the right people to grow better

Is it hard to find the right team?
Hard, no. Long, yes. The first step was obviously an associate, because becoming associates is like getting married to a certain extent, to be very clear. So, finding the right person who has the same ideas, who will join in your project I would say can be easy enough. We all have friends, family… But I needed to have someone with me who had very complementary skills. I think there are things to look at when choosing an associate: you need to look at personalities. Because if you have two big personalities, who maybe both want to handle the press, it can create imbalances and problems. In the end, I took my time. When you have a startup, you can’t necessarily take your time to recruit, but I did anyway, because it was important to me to find people with an entrepreneurial mindset, something like myself, who want to launch a project they may not have on their own, but who can see the impact of their daily works on the end product. Either way, for things like sales, marketing, etc. it all went through unsolicited applications, so I had loads of candidates to choose from at a high level of quality. It wasn’t the same for engineers because they’re harder profiles to come across. But I did some headhunting on LinkedIn still looking for the same mindset. Because in Luxembourg, we can’t compete with restaurant vouchers, company cars, high-ranking bank jobs, salaries… Clearly, a startup can’t compete with that. We had different things to offer and I really needed to find entrepreneurial personalities.

Who did you start with?
When I started recruiting, I hired a business developer first, then a content marketer, then app development, and little by little we grew. Now there are 10 of us.