Awesome People - Ep 102
on demand creative team, leadership styles, new experiment
Hi founders and fellow VC Friends!
We deliver awesome people to your inbox. These are the people you need to know—the marketers, sales gurus, engineers, ops wizzes— who give your startup superpowers 🚀. The best part is, everyone is hireable.
In addition to this newsletter, we also run a Web3 Pallet job board.
Know someone who wants to work in web3? Tell them to join our Pallet board.
Want to hire top talent? Join our Pallet Collective to get access to 180+ pre-vetted candidates.
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Announcement 📣
We’ve started running a new talent collective experiment 👀
It works like this: vetted companies can join the talent collective for free. If you’re accepted, you share all your open recs.
We collect awesome talent. This talent is mostly referral based. Right now we have friends of friends from Stripe, OpenSea, Coinbase, and other top cos. If someone is referred that we think is a fit for one of your roles, we’ll make a double-opt-in intro.
If you make a hire, we take a recruiting fee. If you don’t make a hire, you pay nothing. The talent collective is designed to opportunistically augment your current hiring strategy. Notably, this is not a recruiting agency.
We’re opening up the awesome people talent collective to a select few companies. Web2 and Web3 companies are both welcome.
Want to try it? Lmk and we can discuss if you’re a fit!
Please meet Tom, the CEO of GoodWork 😎
I met Tom, the founder of GoodWork, via our mutual friend Ed Walters who runs a large climate x crypto fund. Tom and I both are obsessed with connecting awesome talent and projects. When we met, Tom was figuring out what to do next. Through his exploration, Tom started GoodWork. I’m excited to feature his new talent platform today.
GoodWork provides companies with on-demand creative teams. The teams operate on a retainer basis and flex up and down. You get a dedicated team lead and a fractional creative team for your ongoing creative needs — think social, video, print, digital, websites, and case studies. The dedicated team lead and freelancer structure allow you to maintain continuity and flexibility. Given the economy and marketing layoffs, GoodWork is a high-quality budget-friendly way to keep your marketing and content engines rolling. Here are a few examples of the type of creative teams you can work with on GoodWork.
Prior to starting GoodWork, Tom founded Beco, a workplace analytics platform that was acquired by Convene. Over the course of his career, he’s founded two companies (in addition to GoodWork) that have generated $300M+ in revenue. One little-known fact about Tom is he dropped out of college to build his first startup, i2Systems. He financed it early on by reselling boat parts on eBay 🤯. Too good 👏.
GoodWork is trusted by Sequoia and Union Square Ventures-backed companies. They work with startups and growth-stage companies.
Want an intro to Tom and GoodWork? Respond to this email and I’ll connect you!
Tom was gracious enough to share some pro tips with us here ✨
Augment your early team vs. outsourcing
Working with a creative agency early on can be tempting — they already have a team, a portfolio, and have worked with successful brands. My advice — don’t do it. Focus on augmenting your team with creatives who can become deeply immersed in your business, even if it's a part-time freelancer or fractional team.
Back in the early days of my startup Beco, we hired a marketing agency to build our website and early brand messaging. At the time, we failed to recognize just how fast we were learning. Our messaging and value prop evolved equally as fast. The result was a big knowledge gap between our team and the agency. It required a tremendous amount of energy and expense to keep everyone synced. Even then, a lot got lost in translation. In the end, it didn’t work out and we ended up redoing a majority of the work.
As a startup, no one gets your ethos, brand, product, and language, better than you do. The best thing I’ve found is to surround yourself with great creative resources that function as an extension of your team. Once they’re onboarded, you can iterate on your brand messaging, content, and ultimately growth strategy in the same way you iterate on your product.
Integrate martech with your product early
Martech tools like Hubspot and others are incredibly flexible and easy to integrate with your core product from day one. It's worth it for three reasons.
The low code nature of martech products makes testing new ideas, capturing insights, and iterating easy. At GoodWork we leverage Hubspot CMS and workflow automations to enable GoodWork teams to quickly create templatized web-based proposals. Clients then click-to-book and checkout on Stripe. That data flows seamlessly into our CRM. It works amazingly well, saves us tons of ops time, and only took a few days to build and implement.
Martech helps build alignment across product and marketing teams. This helps avoid disparate datasets and redundant systems as you grow. The alternative is your marketing team stands up Hubspot or Marketo, and your engineering team stands up Segment or Braze, and they never talk to each other. Before you know it, you have different data stuck in multiple systems. Integrating a martech product allows your team to have shared data, verbiage, reporting, and visibility across your customer journey.
A lightweight CRM saves you a lot of future pain. Bolting on a CRM down the road can be expensive, messy, and include a whole lot of ETLs (extra, transform, load) that no one wants to do. On the bright stride, having a CRM grants you access to early funnel metrics to improve your sales and marketing strategy. Data like conversion rates, average order value, and time to close, will help you make better decisions.
Check your communications style to be sure you don’t derail your team
While not marketing or creative specific, I think this is a SUPER important tip for all leaders. In growth companies, there’s a mantra about being comfortable with being uncomfortable. Discomfort is expected given the inherent uncertainty, rapid growth, and fast learning. In this environment, it’s important as a leader to remember to be a source of stability for your team, especially in your communication style.
There are the obvious do’s and don’ts, but here are a few of the more subtle communication mistakes I’ve made or witnessed in my career:
If you’re a functional leader, one of the best things you can do for your team is be a great cross-functional leader. A lot of leaders struggle to see outside of their functional lane — after all, that’s how you’re measured. But without the broader view, and the ability to communicate both up, down, and across, your team risks lacking the broader context and the ‘why’ behind their work.
Don’t come into a meeting too hot — as in high energy or too ready for action. It’s the fastest way to get everyone present to agree with you (willing or unwilling). But it’s also the fastest way to suck all the oxygen out of the room and leave no room for what might be a better idea or strategy.
Don’t think out loud. This can be casual in nature. Playing out both sides of an idea, or an unresolved strategy, can be incredibly helpful. But I’ve found that too often it can be interpreted as a directive. Before you know it, you’ve accidentally set a team member down a new path only to reverse it later.
Want an intro to Tom and GoodWork? Respond to this email and I’ll connect you!
As always, please let me know if you have any questions, you’re interested in the latest Talent Collect experiment, and if you want an intro to Tom!
Stay awesome,
Founder of Awesome People Ventures & Talent
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Awesome People Continued 🤩
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