In a startup, co-founders pretty much do all type of tasks until they have the initial employees and some organizational structure. Having a sense of who does what, even if the tasks rotate, can be beneficial. It not only helps in having adequate discipline amidst chaos in the initial period, but it also establishes commitment and accountability.
An interesting thing to do is to measure which tasks have the most impact to the bottom line (users? money? some other metric?), then focus on those. Some tasks have a very long arch till they produce results (e.g., most of sales-related tasks), whereas others are easy to measure.
Different times will call for more focus on some roles. That is, roles are in flux. For example, once the product stands for itself, focus on sales may be it. During product building time, CTO role is key, and all hands do some of it. These are the roles we have in our startup:
Product Design & Interface
- Interviews ‘out of the building’, UX
- Hypothesis generation
- Hypothesis testing
Sales
- LinkedIn, Forums
- Cold calls/ relationship building
- Blogging, creating the company image
- Face-to-face client meetings
Support-Tester
- Answer mail
- Close tickets
- Find bugs, open tickets
- Know the product deeply
CEO
- Vision
- Hiring
- Make sure there’s money on the bank
Community manager
- Find ways to make the community grow
- Find where to start a new community next
- Prevents communities from dying (fights, implosion, negative PR)
CTO
- Develops new features
- Fixes bugs
- Sysadmin
Culture ambassador
- Translation
- local knowledge use to detect what works or not
Note that there’s no design role J
