Every venture progresses through various stages and people heading it have to address these changes in their role and responsibilities.

In the initial phase, the only motif is to build for your customers. Similarly, find required adoption to show investors. Get buy in on the problem’s importance and our attempt to solve it from the team.

We at Subjimandi.app also had to go through transition from proving mode to company building mode. In this version of events, one of the biggest changes was the change of my focus from executing to company building.

I decided to take the route of writing to communicate the shift to the team. This is slightly edited version of an internal post that was sent to the team when we hit marketplace market fit.

Introduction

Working on company building has become my full time job, now.

In this post i will clarify my role with respect to you (team) and my reasoning behind the process. I am trying to convey two aspects in particular.

1. Define what my role will be going forward and why?
2. Bring visibility into the process to let you know, what I am upto.

Preface

We have reached the stage where the problem we are solving and the people we are solving for, have been found. Most of these are markers of success that don’t have a number. To illustrate few pointers on our new stage.

• As a model for produce marketplace, Subjimandi.app has proved its capability of a beneficial marketplace to producers and buyers.
• As a Chief, I have found the confidence to scale the operation.
• As a team, we have gained the experience to see the wins and losses and build together.

But going forward these metrics will not be sufficient to build an institution and scale our efforts. At present, I am acting as the roadblock to our growth. There is too much dependency of day to day operations on me.

Before we move to our next stage and turn us from a small team working on a venture to building an institution that outlasts us.

• Discipline as “Chief”. Bring rigour to my working over mood, energy and momentum.
• Culture of “The Greaterfools”. (Slow reveal on this. Still thinking through it.)
• Capability to build processes that harmonise the work across people.
• Hiring for leadership and senior folks to join our company.
• Training Team to unlock their potential and grow along with the company.
  • Importance of marketing over sales.
  • Building leadership skills to work along with new team members.
• Building analytical framework to measure our progress.
  • Buyer cohorts and their retention.
  • Produce prediction at survey to actual processed yield accuracy.
• Making good decisions on our progress.
  • Which regions to move into?
  • How many more tons we should target?
  • What changes to be brought into model?

What does this mean for you?

This allows me to focus on the work that will unblock you :

• by simplifying work and bring clarity.
• by providing the resources that you would need to perform your tasks.
• by providing you the context, background and additional information that will help you with responsibility at hand.
• by aligning team efforts across all departments (functions). Especially folks who are procuring and selling.
• by setting the metrics, targets and overall direction for you to work towards.

What does company building mean?

Let me state it with an example:

• We say we are distributed. But if you come to think of it. We really are not. Today, our information within a team is siloed from each other. This is not by design but by choice. The choice of not prioritising it.

• I dabbled into a project of building “How to Basecamp @ Pipehaul” with our designer few months back. It didn’t go beyond a nice document outlining what we would like to cover.

At our stage, aligning all efforts to a common goal is very important. As Chief, it means do everything to make this top priority. And, I have not succeeded at doing it well until now.

Think of ourselves as a TV series production unit. Each one of you are actors of the show shooting together. I am acting as the director, producer, editor, writer and actor.

We are shooting the show on daily basis to release new episodes each day. Writers are creating the story line and plot of the next episode as we shoot the current episode. We have to make sure for the audience ( our customers) is engrossed in the show and cheering us on to make a spectacular show.

What is my new role?

Following points are next steps:

1. You can access my Calendar and Subscribe to it. It will show you all the work , i am doing for a given day and week.
2. Basecamp will continue to be company’s central communication tool.
3. Increasing our productivity by developing the analytical framework.
4. Focus more on important and future work over busy and urgent work.
5. I mentioned about my multi role in our production unit. I cannot be good at being all of those. Only fools think they can do it all.

So, going forward my role will be downsized consistently as we bring directors of individual departments, actors, editors and writers to make a TV series that audience(customers) loves to watch.

Epilogue

Since this shift we changed our way of operating. I was no more involved in any day to day operations. Instead dedicated my focus in expanding the operations to multiple new cities, which resulted in Pune being our next region where we grew exponentially. Leading to a crunch in both working capital and leadership.

On the other hand, I couldn’t focus on solving leadership hiring. Also, no where i mentioned raising funds. And that was a stark realisation when all of a sudden I needed to go elsewhere to raise money. We documented the reason in our closure post .

As a co-founder, the role and responsibilities continue to change as you keep growing. Communicating this change to the team takes precedent.