As I mentioned in a previous post, being at home with my kids I had less time to do everything I needed to launch explor.ai. On the bright side, it forced me to delegate early on. And as I had learned in the past, surrounding yourself with the right people is a must.
Since I launched the day all businesses were ordered to close their offices... I had no choice but to do all my networking online. And early on, we decided explor.ai would not have a corporate office for its first 2-3 years.
Go to online job fairs.
Recruit employees online.
Meet potential clients online.
Do my networking in online events.... you get the point. All my thanks to DataPreneur on that note, they were among the first incubator to pivot to virtual meetings only.
Hiring remotely
My early employees were people I had met before. But hiring remotely is trickier. I needed to be able to find people with the proper fit (personality) with the company culture I was creating.
Furthermore, these employees would be working remotely, alone in their room / kitchen / living room ... I needed to be sure they were capable (and wanted!) to work from home for the next 2-3 years. That's not for everybody!
What ultimately worked best for us was to test the fit through a 4 months internship or a first, part-time project.
Building a community of experts
When I posted the first job offer for explor.ai (for an AI expert), I got 350 applications. For a startup, without office and limited funding, that was quite a lot!
After meeting around 20 interesting people, I decided to create a community of experts. These people were good, had experience, and were willing to start part time on projects.
So I kept meeting experts, eventually meeting 50-60 of them, and I offered them to join our organisation as on-demand experts in their field.
The community kept growing, fueled by new meetings and referrals, up to a point were I had above a hundred experts.
Now I had a new problem : how would I keep this many experts happy? They were counting on me to bring them projects they could work on... We do have projects... just not hundreds a year (that would be one project every three days!).
Which brings me to my next post... next time I will be discussing marketing strategies!
