Hi Everyone 👋

I started this week in beautiful Gothenburg, Sweden.

I was there to do jury work for the startup competition Venture Cup.

Venture Cup is the biggest startup competition in Sweden.

We had 14 startups pitching.

6 categories to decide on.

And 11 brilliant jury members and myself.

The winners are:

• Startup of the year: WindowGlass Recycling

• Beyond academic: Geografisk Intelligens

• Game changer: Tomorrow Machine

• Best traction: WindowGlass Recycling

• Impact Maker: Mabel AI

• The Award From the Audience: WindowGlass Recycling

Congratulations to the incredible entrepreneurs and their teams.

I can’t wait to follow their journey.

🏎️💨 Hiring Advice for Early Stage Startups

Hiring the wrong people can literally make or break your company.

Hiring IS really hard.

That’s why you should get help from someone who can help you avoid making unnecessary mistakes.

Here’s some of the hiring advice I give to early stage startups I work with

Hire for the right phase of your growth

If you're an early stage startup, you should skip the Salesforce/Google hire.

They often struggle in a startup environment.

And you should also skip the mistake of hiring the “VP of Spreadsheets”.

This is the last thing you need as an early stage startup.

You need someone who is hands-on and not afraid of getting their hands dirty.

We are operating in an economic climate that requires everyone to be hands-on, and adapt.

If they tell you they have a playbook that they always use, this is not the right candidate. The market is CHANGING.

What is being built right now is a new go-to-market playbook.

The old way doesn’t work anymore.

Hiring for the right phase of your startup is key.

Don't oversell the role. Be honest and attract the right people instead. There's a big difference in selling the vision and exaggerating the status of the company.

You will save yourself and the candidate time and headache.

🍰 RECOMMENDATIONS & SOME INSPIRATION

📈: Excited to announce that I have started working with Kothinker as Growth Advisor - Kothinker is a co-learning platform for product people. I’m excited to help them with their go to market.

💸: Your LinkedIn profile is where your content converts. Turn your profile into a landing page. Start here with my guide.

❤️: This is by far the BEST employer branding video I've seen in my life. Well done X-Team

🦁: If you need help to build dashboards in Hubspot, a sales onboarding program or build your sales infrastructure - reach out to us at Huntrs

Here’s how you find a VP of Get-Shit-Done

They are hands-on and can give you several examples of this.

They have several people in their network that they want to bring with them.

This is also a great way to see if they are a great leader.

They understand that traditional marketing is out. They actively spend time on building audience, content creation, community and brand through authentic, engaging and organic content.

They invest in their team, they celebrate wins, and they know how to create belonging.

They trust their team to work wherever they want and feel productive.

They know that the way to scale is to empower their team.

If you don’t have a VP of Get-Shit-Done on your team, go and find one.

Build lean

Keep your team LEAN.

Ask yourself; do we really need a full-time employee on this position?

It might be enough in the beginning with a freelancer.

Bring in freelancers for specific tasks/projects.

So…

Hire people who get shit done.

This is what you need more than anything in the beginning.

You need the doers, the go-getters and the builders.

People who have a built-in urgency.

People that take ownership and goes for it.

If you don’t know the answer to the above?

Do yourself a favour and ask someone who does. It’s important to get right.

The team you build is the company you build.

Time’s up for this week.

If you like this newsletter, please share it with someone you think would benefit from it.

It would help so much 🙏

👋 Work with Hanna

Whenever you're ready there's 3 ways I can help you:

1. I help startups build revenue growth, audience and high-performing teams. If you want to work with me as your GTM Advisor, reach out here or send me an email: [email protected]

2. Work with me 1:1 and build your audience on LinkedIn. You will learn the exact strategy I used to build 72,000+ followers and 48 million+ impressions and how you can do the same and fuel revenue growth to your company. Learn more here.

3. Go-To-Market with Huntrs. Reach us here. 🔥