Things to consider before joining an early-stage startup
By: Pushkar Dongare
Tags: Framework, Early Stage, Startup Life, Startup, Startup Lessons

An early-stage startup is a great place to accelerate your career in terms of learning and growth. The team is small, all of them learn things on the go build, fail, build again and succeed. One gets more responsibilities and powers while working in an early-stage startup. I was lucky when I joined Lokal in its first month. The founders and investors were great, the market seemed huge and I was offered fair enough compensation. But honestly, I didn’t know much while joining Lokal about the challenges of an early-stage start-up and it was a leap of faith. Fortunately, it worked out well. I would recommend checking the following things before making a decision.

Founder-Market fit

One of the most important aspects which would give the startup an advantage over its competitors. If you have read Shoe Dog, you would know that Nike overtook Adidas because founders were athletes. They were the users of their own products. They knew what problems their users were facing and hence they kept innovating on those fronts.

If the founders are entering a new market, a replacement for a founder-market fit would be user obsession. Check how many users have they interacted with before launching the product and how well do they know the user they are building for. You-Market fit

You will be devoting the next few years to the startup. If the challenge that you would be working on isn’t interesting enough, you would give up in a few months. Since you will be an early employee, you are like a founder and hence the founder-market fit applies to you as well. If you are new to the market, ask yourself if the problem/user/market seems interesting to you and if there are no early employee benefits, would you still like to work on the problem? Total Addressable Market

Since you will be spending a lot of your time in this start-up, you would expect high returns. If the total addressable market is small, the returns might not be satisfying. Think of different metrics the startup will be chasing- DAU, number of transactions, revenue, etc. Then check how high the ceiling is for these metrics. You would get a ballpark idea of the scale you would be working on.

Huge plus if the founders have a monetisation model since the beginning. Founder’s grit

Nothing pushes you harder than founders who are more hard-working than you and who would do anything (fair) to succeed. The motivation of the team would always be high. Even during the rainy days, the focus will be on working and not bother about the circumstances. If losing is an option for a founder, they will get ample chances to quit. They just need one, and it’s done. Ask the founders how much they have thought about the idea, what are the challenges they foresee and how are they going to solve them. You-Founder fit

Everyone has different working styles. Some need infinite trust, some need someone to push them all the time, some need challenges thrown at them, etc. Check if your founders align with your working style. Will they keep pushing you out of your comfort zone? Can they trust you? Can you trust them? Do they have skills which you don’t have? And most importantly, are you ready to spend the next few years of life with them, because technically, you will spend more time with them than anyone else. ESOPs pool and ESOP policies

Don’t look at ESOPs as just returns for your efforts. ESOP pool and policies tell a lot about the founders. Especially, how much they care about their employees. It’s important to understand how do they value more — investors or employees. ESOPs policies are quite confusing in the beginning. Check how friendly the ESOP policies are. Many founders look ESOPs a way to retain their employees, some of them look at ESOPs as a way to reward them. You can compare good ESOP policies from bad in this thread.

Coming to my story, I wanted to work on problems which are at the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy, problems which would affect the masses and make their lives a little better. The problem Lokal was trying to solve was huge, the next billion space was untapped. And there were fewer players in the market, hence giving us an early mover advantage. My founders were working on a news app for 2 years prior to Lokal. They had spent a lot of time understanding the media space.

Vipul is the CTO and the co-founder who I knew, personally, from college. He was a great mentor while I was in college. So, I could trust him.

Along with all the exciting problems, the founders had a good enough ESOPs pool and I was compensated fairly when I joined. Hence, Lokal turned out to be a good bet for me.

I hope this article helps you in deciding what should you look at before you make your next career move. If you feel, there is any other parameter I should add, I would love to hear from you. 🖐🏽 Say Hi and we can grab chai! ☕

(Photo by Amy Hirschi on Unsplash)