Are you hiring a solution maker?

A 'solution maker' is a proactive individual who identifies, owns, and transforms challenges into creative, effective solutions.

We hire people for their experience.

Perfectly fine but are those experiences worth enough?

Did they just ride the growing wave and didn't have many challenges to face?

Did they go through a rollercoaster and create solutions, hence worthy experiences?

Have they failed in their solution implementations?

These questions set the model for why a few startups succeed in setting up a great team.        

If you have worked in a start-up or if you have been a founder, you know the start-up journey is a rollercoaster. Literally, the journey changes almost every week or maybe a couple of times a week, exciting and often, unpredictable.

Whether it's fluctuations in market conditions, managing growth predictions, aligning member expectations, or dealing with failures - the dynamic nature of startups means that the predictability we aim for doesn’t last long.

Whereas in a mature corporation where everything is defined and designed, and dozens of people & partners are all around and the problem is somehow not as tragic.

In a Startup, unlike established corporates, there's no cushion or a huge team to distribute the workload.

This constant problem-solving might seem too much, but it's part of the charm, the call to innovation that startups embrace.

For any startup to succeed, it needs a collective solution-oriented mindset across all team members, beyond just founders or the top management team. Being a 'solution maker' in an uncertain situation in a startup elevates your perception of problems and transforms your role into a formidable one!

Such constant problems/challenging scenarios also filter those who whine.

Therefore, the 'solution maker' framework is the best way to nurture and grow your team members, bring innovation while solving problems and enable you “build to last” companies.

I highly recommend you use 'solution maker' framework in your hiring process.

Ask these questions:

What challenges did your previous Startup face?

How critical were those challenges?

How did your team solve those challenges?

What did you contribute?

Which team member came up with a unique perspective or inside while proposing the solution?

How did the solution impact immediate and long-term opportunities?

Did the solution become something unique for other competitors to copy it?

Have they failed earlier?

Offer some problems/challenges your startup is currently facing and ask them to come back with a few solutions.

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Plus, there are many questions to align your team dynamics, culture codes and practices too!

However, do consider some failures even if you hire rockstar solution makers. Every startup's context is different from another! Hence someone being a rockstar earlier doesn't guarantee success but what it guarantees is that the person will take initiative and find smarter ways.

There are numerous examples of startups with challenges and the solution makers who made the company where they are now.

Google Ad: The idea of Google Ads is credited to a team rather than a single individual. A critical player, however, in this transformative launch was Salar Kamangar, who joined Google as its ninth employee.

Slack: When the online game Glitch failed, the company's co-founder Stewart Butterfield capitalized on an internal tool they had used for team communication. This tool became what we now know as Slack.

Airbnb: The idea to offer professional photography services for listings on Airbnb came from co-founder Joe Gebbia. During the early days of Airbnb, the platform struggled to gain traction and bookings were low.

Flipkart: Cash-on-Delivery payment COD was a major game-changer in India's e-commerce business, pioneered by Flipkart. It was instrumental in removing millions of customers' skepticism towards online retail.

Many such examples….

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I have been in the Startup space for a few decades, running my previous Startup Explara, for 12+ years and now running Foundership - Accelerator to enable Founders to build Emerging-Tech Startups (Web3, AI, Deeptech and more).

As we grew the business at Explara, we faced several existential crisis-type challenges and severe problems. I see 100s of startups at Foundership both in our programs and outside having fantastic team members and some struggling due to a lack of solutions makers.

My post encourages startups to have a “solution-makers” hiring mindset.        

Do share some of your favourite examples of incredible solutions in various startups and people who spearheaded those solutions?