No one knows how to hire, plus brand design and African tech

Editor’s Note: No one knows how to hire

Hiring is the lifeblood of the world. Few people do truly singular work; instead, nearly every facet of our civilization is built by groups of humans (and increasingly machines) working in tandem.

Image by PeopleImages via Getty Images

That presents quite the puzzle though: if teamwork is so critical to the functioning of, well, everything, why are we so god awfully bad at building teams?

Minus a couple of high functioning teams of course, the evidence for team rot is all around us. Startups go bust when teams of two (i.e. founders) can’t make simple decisions about the future of their business. Large companies exsanguinate cash while their teams spend eons debating the minutia of a pixel in the checkout flow. At even larger scale, massive infrastructure projects like California’s HSR fail because the right people weren’t planning and building it (plus ten other issues of course).

How do we get this so wrong, so consistently?

The first reason, and the one most challenging to overcome, is that human endeavors are fundamentally built upon aspirations. A startup is a dream, no different than improving Excel’s formula editor or adding traffic signals to an intersection. Action cannot happen without aspiration, and so we tend to be far more optimistic with all facets of a plan before execution.

That applies as much to estimating the time for completing a project as it does for hiring. Hiring is fundamentally a leap of faith, a belief that the person sitting in front of you is going to solve the problem that you have assigned to them. And that candidate is aspiring too! They aspire to change an organization, to make an impact, to improve things for the better.

That leads to the second wicked problem of hiring, which is positioning. Everyone, every project, and every company wants to position itself in the best light. And so we shine our resumés and LinkedIn profiles just as much as companies scrub the negative review barnacles off their Glassdoor pages. It’s a form of socially-accepted lying: you are lying, I am lying, we all know we are lying.

It’s when you mix aspirations and positioning together that you get a cauldron of despair on the other side. You wanted a marketer, the candidate sensed this and argued they would be great at it. You are busy and don’t want to interview 30 more candidates, and so you made the leap based on the best-case scenario that you dreamed in your head. This sort of denouement happens in almost every hiring process — we almost never get exactly who or what we want.

The third and final challenge is that there is ultimately little accountability on either side of the labor market to improve the situation. Experience matters, right until it doesn’t. Skill tests and other pseudoscientific trash are too reductionist, since most knowledge work requires serious integration of multiple skills. And so we always have to make a qualitative decision — quantitative salves just never seem to get us where we need to go.

And so hiring is frustrating for all parties involved. Here at Extra Crunch, hiring has been one of our on-going themes. Our Verified Experts are designed to help you cut through the positioning to find the right best service providers for your needs.

But what we haven’t done enough of (and hopefully will) is how to even identify what you need in the first place. If I am looking for growth, do I need a growth marketer? Or maybe my product is junk, and I need a product designer to come in first to make it more compelling. No one may know how to hire, but that doesn’t mean no one can know how to hire.

Verified Expert Brand Designer: Ramotion

Alright, so let’s say you actually figured out that you need a designer, who do you call? Ramotion, a remote-based brand designer might well be your first stop. The firm, led by Denis Pakhaliuk, has branded such startups as Bitmoji and Iterable, and also conducted the rebrand of Mozilla. Extra Crunch’s Yvonne Leow interviewed Denis about his work as part of our latest profile in our series of designers:

Yvonne Leow: Got it. What do you think is the most common mistake startup founders make when it comes to branding?

Denis Pakhaliuk:Branding is really important because the startup scene is so crowded and competitive. Startups need to stand out. I think some founders think they need everything, but they actually need an MVP and product design. The same goes for brand identity. They need to have some key elements like colors, typeface and the logo. There is no need to do everything in the beginning, because the logo and brand identity becomes meaningful after it’s used. It’ll eventually improve. We are a big fan of starting small: designing a small package, releasing it and then iterating on top of that. So, founders need to be focused on what’s really necessary right now for their next round of investment or product releases. Don’t overdo branding because it costs money and time.

Another example is, ironically, the opposite: when founders don’t pay enough attention to brand identity. Some of them are too focused on technology and product, and they don’t have a marketing manager or someone else who is responsible for that. They don’t pay enough attention to these important assets, and they should.

The different playbooks of D2C brands

While it seems that every day another unicorn startup emerges from the direct-to-consumer (D2C) space, the reality is that these businesses are all quite different, particularly from a brand and marketing perspective.

PipeCandy co-founder Ashwin Ramasamy helps us parse through this thicket by showing how different D2C companies build their brands and ultimately, their soaring valuations. While he looks at three categories (single product, multiple product, and aggregation), the key insight here is how constraints on a business inform the playbook and vice versa:

‘Direct to consumer’ brands’ biggest asset is not the product it has designed or the celebrity it has roped in. It’s not even its ability to acquire customers from Instagram. Their asset is their ability to anchor the purpose of their existence in the minds of the shoppers.

Product designs, new categories, better lifetime value, lower cost of acquisition – all come from mastering this one linkage between the purpose and the people.

Once that is established, it’s hard not to expand your product line to multiple categories anchored around that common purpose.

How do you evaluate your success?

One of the biggest challenges with any venture is how do you measure success. Pick the right metrics and monitor them closely, and companies will almost just organically grow as people attempt to optimize their numbers. Pick the wrong metrics, and the only metric that might be worth figuring out is how much your creditors are going to get paid back.

Scaleworks co-founder Ed Byrne is interested in how you discover those key metrics for any business, and he has a simple principle: work backwards. From his analysis:

You can do this sby looking at leading indicators. These are metrics that you can influence — and that as you act, and see them increase or decrease, you can be relatively certain of the knock-on effects on the rest of the business. For example — if you run a project management product, the number of tasks created is likely to be a good leading indicator for the growth of the business — more tasks created on the platform equals more revenue.

He walks through how to evaluate a growth funnel in reverse to uncover the best metrics to base a startup around.

Acquisitions will drive Africa’s startup success, not IPOs

One new addition to the TechCrunch family is Jake Bright, who is going to be writing on African tech for us. That’s extremely exciting, since African tech is skyrocketing, most recently seen with the massive pop following Jumia’s IPO.

Jake wrote a piece for Extra Crunch members analyzing where the future is for value on the continent, and hones in on acquisitions as the key outlet for value creation:

While $1B may barely register in markets like Silicon Valley, that volume represents a more than one-hundred percent increase in VC to Africa over a four year period, at least by one comparison.

The value thesis for African startups shapes up around demographics — primarily youth populations and urbanization — and growth, reform, and modernization in the continent’s core economies.

ICYMI: Earlier this week:

Thanks

To every member of Extra Crunch: thank you. You allow us to get off the ad-laden media churn conveyor belt and spend quality time on amazing ideas, people, and companies. If I can ever be of assistance, hit reply, or send an email to danny@techcrunch.com.