Welcome to Gigii's Room, a diversified newsletter on marketing, entrepreneurship and better living.

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5 minutes read. You'll save lots of points and ideas from my personal experience, I promise.

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Notes For A Fellow Founder

No one prepares first-time builders (entrepreneurs) for the back-breaking events of building a business, project, or organization.

It's like no manual completely prepares you until you experience it yourself.

The worst is when you're relatively new with little to no funds and no team, and you're struggling to gain traction.

This is similar to what bootstrapped SaaS [software as a service] first-time founders experience; I have learned this by speaking with them.

Building software—or any business—is different from building a humanitarian nonprofit, but there are similarities.

It all boils down to building a valuable product with little to no resources for execution.

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Two weeks ago on LinkedIn, I shared a post on how I was building a nonprofit team and the difficulties I face.

In today's issue, I want to share with us:

• 3 [relatable] difficulties I am experiencing while building a project
• How I am solving them and how you can tackle similar difficulties
• 3 meaningful lessons I have learned from building a small team
• What I'm testing for long-term growth

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1. Team-building is hard.

If you ask me what's the toughest thing about building an organization or project, I'd say brand affinity and people. People can make or break your business—in my case, a project. One of the metrics of a successful business is when the founder can detach themselves from certain operations, and it's managed and operated successfully by a team.

I have had my fair share of “wrong team onboarding.”

Here's what I suggest from experience:

• You have little to no budget to hire, so you want to keep your team as slim as possible.
• When starting with team building, a small team is your best shot [I should bring in an expert guest on hiring 🤔.]
• You also have to be very careful about whom you welcome onboard because you can't keep wasting time and energy on 'testing' who is a great fit.

For a nonprofit [or business] with no [little] budget, anyone can decide to be a volunteer [want the job], but you must focus on the competent (heavy on this) and skilled ones.

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2. Little funds for marketing and building:

You don't have the money to throw on meta ads and tips and tricks, so you focus on 2-3 unscalable items that will yield long-term results.

In my case, we are focusing on unscalable things like:

• Content marketing
• Creator collaborations
• Guest pitching

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3. Lack of trust:

It's easier for a business with mighty investors to get trusted than a business with none (prove me wrong if I am, please). You're up against people with heavy 'vouchers'.

We have no

- Donors

- Mighty Philanthropists

- Grants

(At least not yet.)

So it's harder to sell memberships and programs.

But instead of waiting for donors and mighty partnerships, we are focusing on building trust as a brand and a community that makes it easier to sell our message. I advise you to do the same for yours.

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Lessons I have learned from building a team:

1. Know what you want from whom you're onboarding. Research such roles in similar organizations and documents. Tell them from the interview or onboarding what is expected and unexpected from them.
2. Give your team the grace to express themselves. With your expectations, do not micromanage. Give them a chance to perform a task from start to finish, spot errors after they are done, and correct them. Let them learn from you without feeling like they are forced to.
3. Teach your team the power of teamwork. I made it clear from day 1 that everyone on the team needs everyone. If person A doesn't show up for tasks, it affects the smooth workflow for persons B & C.

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Have you experienced any of these? Kindly reply to this email and let me know if, yes, you have.

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The Other Spicy Things...

Interesting and boring things to help you stay in business:

​Image source​

It's not the kind of resource I'd share, but it counts. Number 4 seems to be a huge concern, especially in Africa. We believe that once we're better than someone, we have won.

Researching competitors to find opportunities to leverage is good. But the obsession to become better than them at all costs leaves you going around in circles of mediocrity. If you want to become better than your competitors, do something different, new, or improved.

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That's all I have for us today.

Till next time.

Reply to this email with anything you found insightful or disliked about today's issue; it encourages me to write better for you. Or simply forward the email or share the live version here.​

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-- Gigii 🥂​
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