My week as a startup founder

How does a startup founder use his time?

Here's a breakdown of my full week, including everything I had on my calendar and a short analyze whether it was a productive week. The times might seem a bit weird for you --> I live in Las Palmas at the moment, and most of our team is in the Finnish time zone, so it means some early mornings for me.

Monday 16th of January

6:30 Send email login information to our newest employee Gui so he can access everything and join our morning meeting!

7:00 - 7:45 🐝 Hive's weekly where we go through our week: What's going on, do we have some roadblocks, does someone need help?

7:45 - 8:00 Update the newsletter that we send to potential customers. It includes stuff around Talent Acquisition and, this time, the news that Gui had joined our team. Siiri & Nea took a picture of Gui with a yellow hoodie, and I added it there. I also learned to change some contacts in HubSpot to marketing contacts because this was the first time we sent our newsletter. Want to get monthly insights into Talent Acquisition? Sign up here.

8:00 - 9:00 I had a session with our new employee Gui; it was his first day! We mainly focused on going through our strategy & focus points for this year. I think this is important to understand before all the other onboarding sessions around more specific topics. We have 3 focus points for this year:

1) Employee Experience

2) Building TalentBee brand

3) Growing monthly recurring revenue

9:00 - 9:15 I had a quick meeting with one recruiter from a gaming company to learn more about recruitment around the gaming industry.

9:15 - 11:00 was about going through my to-do-list and having a break. To-do-list mainly included building offers and preparing for the week.

11:00 - 12:30 We had our "management team"  = our weekly with the co-founders. We discuss the biggest bottlenecks and go through sales, recruitment & customer work.

12:30 - 13:00 I had a decision call with a customer about potential cooperation. Their CTO has changed, and it will take a bit more time to decide. Now I need to think about how to participate in the CTO since he will also be participating the decision-making.

13:30 - 14:30 Weekly LinkedIn session with the whole company. Here's what we go through:

1) What kind of content has been working?

2) Do we have some potential leads from there?

3) Content for the upcoming week?

14:30 --> End the work day. I went to the gym and played a game of Padel in the evening.

Tuesday 17th of January

7:00 - 8:00 Customer meeting with a Saas company where we went through the customer situation so we could build an offer for them. A lot of questions about their growth goals, hiring goals, and much more.

8:00 -  9:00 A call with a financing consultant since we are planning to scale even more in the upcoming months and are figuring out different options to do that add-on to the cashflows the business is generating.

9:30 - 10:00 A call with a potential customer who is recruiting a content marketing person. We pitched our ideas to them and they seemed extremely promising.

10:00 - 11:00 Lunch break

11:00 - 11:30 A decision-making call with customers around Employer Branding - Their growth wasn't going as planned, so we needed to take a short timeout for this. They will reconsider this in a few months. However, they wanted to have an offer around recruitment cooperation. From all their options, we were their favorite one, and they liked our own branding game.

11:30 - 12:00 I had a meeting with our advisor Karim. He has been helping us with a few things around January, including:

1) Going through our offers and giving some insights for those.

2) As a Head of Talent Acquisition, he gets many messages from salespeople. I asked him to share some of the best & worst and tell me how he would approach our sales messaging.

3) Linkedin & our marketing: What are topics he would be interested in reading (he represents our ideal customer profile quite well!)

4) Insights from the Netherlands market, including agencies, pricing & salary levels.

12:00 - 13:00 A call with a potential new customer where we presented our ideas. I think they liked us and I see this as a potential partnership. We have a catch-up in early February around this.

13:00 - 14:00 Random stuff.

14:00 - 15:00 A call with a customer that didn't go so well. The main reason was that our main stakeholder, newer joined the call, but two other people from the company did (they didn't know exactly why they were invited).  That happens, and it's ok. Some valuable learnings.

15:00 --> Out from work to play some Padel.

Wednesday 18th of January

8:00 - 9:00 Podcast recording with Linnea Bywall from Alva Labs.

9:00 - 10:00 Podcast recording with Faisal Amin from Upsy Shopping.

10:00 - 12:00 Going through our sales pipeline and doing some follow-ups, and having some lunch

12:00 - 13:30 Padel game. We won!

13:30 - 15:30 Building offers and preparing for future podcast episodes. I also got a yes from the customer; we had meeting on Tuesday and prepared the contract, and got it signed! So we have a new customer 🙌

15:30 --> Padel and gym.

Thursday, 19th of January

7:00 - 9:00 Session with Gui about our ideal customer profilele and our way of doing sales & marketing. We got some great ideas about how to take our frameworks to a new level.

9:00 - 10:30 Working around sales cases and doing some prospecting. Preparing for the podcast recording for today.

10:30 - 12:00 Padel Match (Yes, I love to play Padel and do it quite often in the middle of the day. It also increases my productivity to have a sports break in the middle of the day.)

12:00 - 12:30 Customer call sharing our approach to recruitment & Employer Branding. It went well; customers liked our different approach and that we are not like everyone else. They are also changing their market and like we are doing the same around recruitment.

12:30 - 13:30 Writing this blog post and publishing this. After this, I have one more podcast recording for today, and I'm done.

Friday 20th of January

We are doing a 4-day workweek so just chilling. Most likely gym, Padel & good food. And maybe some beach time.

Want to read more about the 4-day workweek? Check out this article!