At an early stage startup (less than 10 people), it’s a big advantage to do everyone’s job first. That doesn’t mean you don’t scale or hire other people, but doing their job first gives the most understanding about what the job actually entails and the knowledge of how it works.
Being a founder, this can feel daunting. What do I know about customer success? I’ve never had to answer support tickets, how do I do that? And so on.
This is the source of the advantage because everything fits into your head. You can make fast decisions. You can learn who would be successful when hiring someone to do this job in the future. You can understand more fully how your business works, what the problems are, and what to do about it.
You will never have this pace of knowledge growth again.
See also:
- Being obsessed with what you are building certainly helps too
- The most effective people care a lot