In the spirit of Inno Madness, a bracket-style tech-enabled startup competition sweeping across The Business Journals nationwide which started in March, including Fractio’s nomination in the Tampa Bay Business Journal’s Inno Madness, our team decided to blend our startup experiences with insights from founders and investors.
The result? A hilarious yet insightful parody of life on an early-stage startup team. Who can relate? 🙌
Curious how we drew parallels between basketball positions and startup team roles? Each position on a basketball team has unique responsibilities, just like different types of workers contribute distinct skills to a startup.
1. The Point Guard (PG): Project Manager
🎯 Startup Founders: You know that feeling when you’re orchestrating plays, distributing the ball, and ensuring smooth coordination? Well, that’s our PG—our project manager. They’re the ones juggling tasks, adapting on the fly, and collaborating with different teams. Just like a startup founder, they’re the glue holding everything together. They set the plays, meaning the tasks and the milestones, across the team.
2. The Small Forward (SF): Consultants
🌟 Consultants: SFs are the Swiss Army knives of a basketball team. They’re adaptable, skilled in various areas, and contribute both offensively and defensively. Consultants, anyone? They’re the ones solving complex problems and advising us through the startup maze. But, sometimes their expertise falls short when it comes to execution because an early stage startup is sometimes just too unpredictable and tactical.
3. The Shooting Guard (SG): Sales and Marketing
🔥 Salespeople: Our SGs are like sharpshooters from beyond the arc. They want to score points efficiently and close deals with precision. Just as salespeople hit targets, our SGs want to hit revenue goals. But, waiting on qualified leads and working against a startup’s cash burn rate to bring in enough revenue fast enough is the challenge at early stage companies that hire too soon.
4. The Center: Engineering
🏗️ Engineers: Centers anchor the basketball team. They protect the rim, dominate the paint, and build the foundation. Attention to detail? That’s their superpower. Whether it’s coding or constructing, they’re the unsung heroes. Except, the pressure to perform at an early stage startup and keep up with development based on user stories and features coming in from customers, advisors, market research, and other sources at an early stage startup can cause a lot of stress.
5. The Power Forward (PF): Operations
⚙️ Operations Managers: Our PFs work in the trenches—rebounding, defending, and setting screens. Just like operations managers, they ensure the gears keep turning. Logistics? Check. Day-to-day processes? Sorted. Except, early stage startups pivot and change direction a lot, which means operations is going to be mitigating risk all the time.
Fractional Workers: The MVPs
While freelancers are good at repetitive or short term tasks related to larger objectives, they are seldom dedicated to a single team and are too far removed from the team to contribute offensively or defensively on a startup team long term.
Fractional practitioners on the other hand want to be mission-aligned with a team, can be available as-needed and on-demand through the Fractio platform where payment is based on usage. This means that startups can subscribe to any number of fractionals in the platform and pay for the skills and talent consumed across tasks and milestones that are aligned with their startup objectives and project managed for them within the platform. That’s right – using Fractio’s platform is like having a built-in Point Guard!
Startup Survival Tip: Team Matters
🚫 Startup Failure Symptoms: Until a startup is de-risked for all stakeholders (investors and future employees alike), it’s too soon to burden business operations with a cash burn rate that makes talent the number one fixed cost. In fact, the symptoms of startup failure include things like running out of money, not achieving product-market fit, or missing milestones, but the reason comes down to the team.
