How Do You Convince Someone to Join Your Startup? - Dalton Caldwell

This is a super common question where someone wants to start a startup and they're like, "Well, how do I get a co-founder, or how do I get my first employees?" My advice is the following: first, you have to convince yourself. If you're not fully committed or if you have grave doubts that your idea is any good or it's even worth trying, how can you ever convince someone else? People can tell if you don't believe in the thing you're doing.

So, if you really have that fire, that you're onto something that's worth doing, and you're convinced, then it's much easier to convince other people to join you. You can tell them that. You can tell them how committed you are. Frankly, the same thing goes for getting your first customers, getting your first partners, getting your first employees. For everyone, it all comes down to this core of you being convinced of the story that you're telling and it being true to you. Then, your confidence will flow out to everyone else.

Okay, so how do you convince yourself and what does it mean to convince yourself? Do you ever know that feeling where an idea enters your head and you can't sleep at night? You can't think about anything else but it, and it starts to pervade your thoughts. That's a good sign. That's a sign that you might have a startup idea or a drive to work on something that will have the kind of magnetism and power to keep you on it for a while.

If you just can't get it out of your head, if you immediately are cynical about it and you're negative on it and you're just not that excited about it, that's a sign that you're not convinced. This is something that comes out in YC companies a lot. I always encourage people to work on the thing that they are very excited about and obsessed with, even at the expense of working on an idea that may seem easier to raise money for, that may seem more commercially viable, or that may seem more like something that impresses other people.

The reason I encourage this is that I have consistently seen teams that don't believe in the thing they're doing secretly, and when they run into a rough patch—and everyone always does—when they run into a rough patch, they give up. I've seen teams where they really deeply are convinced of what they're working on. They're convinced, at the very least, that they want to keep working together; they want to keep their startup going. I've seen those teams overcome almost every kind of setback you can have.

You can run out of money and somehow survive. You could have to completely pivot and change your idea, but if you believe in what you're doing, in the big sense, you can recover from that. You could have team members quit—you name it. If there's something deeply held in the mind of the startup founders about why they're doing what they're doing, they can keep going.

If you're just like, "I'm just trying this," look, things won't work out. The reason you should work on things that you really care about is the following: it would appear that it's equally hard to succeed in a startup that you don't care about and one that you do. It's almost equally hard to succeed in a startup that's a very ambitious, audacious idea as it is to do something super incremental that's not that exciting.

If we assume for a second that those are equally difficult to accomplish, do you see why you should definitely do the way more audacious idea or the thing you're way more excited about? What's the point? It's almost like if you have to travel a thousand miles to go somewhere you want to visit versus travel a thousand miles to somewhere that you're ambivalent about, always go to the place you're much more excited about. The fact is your excitement and enthusiasm about it will encourage the chance that you're actually going to get there.

So, sometimes people ask, "Can you build excitement over time? I don't really have anything that I'm super excited about yet, but I have a few ideas." Absolutely, you can get more excited. You can fall more in love with an idea, or you can fall more in love with entrepreneurship by doing it on the side and discerning if you get more and more excited about spending time on it, or less. If it feels like fun, it feels like not work to work on your startup or your side project or what have you, and it's just something you want to do because it's entertaining or enjoyable to you, that's a good sign.

I have seen people who kind of do something on the side, and it's not exactly meant to be a business, but people like it. The positive feedback loop of putting something out in the world and having people recognize it and appreciate it makes them more and more excited about spending more time on it. So, you can definitely get data points from the external world that cause you to take your side project or your idea more seriously.

In conclusion, to convince other people to join your startup, you first have to convince yourself.