startup-costsI was thinking about making a tech startup. I have a great plan and lots of capital to start on, but I discovered crowd sourcing.
I figure that I can have my entire startup crowd sourced upto and including management with the promise of said product or rewards based upon the performance of the startup after X amount of time. This will benefit people by giving them experience and the excitement of possibly supporting and getting something at the end (which they don’t know, but I will replace them with real employees when I strike it big). If all goes bad, I lose nothing but time, but gain experience.
How does one recruit core key members? I want this to be similar to Kickstarter, where I can recruit many members. Is there anything I should be aware of? I spoke with a few people I know and they are interested, so this is real deal. Thanks.
Since recruitment is not one of your strong suits, I would recommend bringing on a recruiter while you focus on running your business. Don’t underestimate the time and effort that go into recruiting, especially if you are trying this unorthodox approach of crowdsourcing.
So the real question is, how do you get someone to volunteer for this recruitment position without paying them? Your best bet is bringing on an unpaid intern. There are many students out there who are trying to make a name for themselves and get experience. And having recruitment internship experience on one’s resume would really boost their career potential.
My understanding is that as well as running a start-up business, which you have funding for, but no experience with, you also want to try an experiment with how to recruit workers, where you also have no experience.
It might work, and you do need to be willing to take risks to create a start-up. However, this is a bit like buying two lottery tickets and needing both to win in order to achieve your goals.
The composition of your initial team will be critical to success or failure, and you will want to have some measures to filter applicants. Crowd-sourcing implies a scale where this would be hard to do.
I suggest you investigate the more usual routes to recruitment that have worked for start-ups in your area of industry. That is probably starting with a small core team who are either paid or who work with an equity share in the business (or some measure of both). That team will likely be recruited via networking and advertising, and relationships formalised with contracts.
If some of the initial work you need done is simple enough, and easy to define, you could look to use a "freelance" crowd-sourced worker environment such as Mechanical Turk, Fiverr or Topcoder. Perhaps you should give this a try, or at least investigate how they work, to get an understanding of what is possible under those work-for-hire models. The main difference as I understand it is that tasks need to be very well defined in order to crowd-source them effectively. An open-ended "make this product better" task needs different kind of engagement that you will usually only get from a long-term working relationship.
Assuming this hasn't put you off, here are some opinions on what your challenges would be if you want to crowd-source your core workers:
I would conjecture that your biggest challenge with crowd-sourcing start-up employees will be creating a workable effort/reward structure and somehow measuring it. Prospective crowd-sourced employees will present themselves with a wide range of skills, available time and expectations of reward. You need to engage with that range of inputs, have robust enough structure that your system cannot be gamed, and pitch the effort/reward so that there is enough motivation from workers but enough value in the combined output so that the resulting product is viable.
When looking for technical staff, you will also need to understand what your project offers to them that working on an open-source project would not. You won't have a unique selling point to those potential staff in terms of reputation for instance.
Promotion. You will need to promote your hiring in a way that it is seen by potential workers. It will be difficult to predict how and where to promote. It is likely that response rates and quality of applicants will vary a lot depending on these factors.
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