Textpert – Ray Christian
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About the Episode
Are you looking for a co-founder to start your next business? Well today’s guest found his co-founders through mutual friends and he talks about the key questions that helped him decide if they were a good fit or not. Also, listen to how he leverage a post that Huffington Post published about his app to gain even more press coverage.
Ray Christian is CEO at Textpert.
Show Notes
Deciding Whether a Co-Founder is a Good Fit
One of Ray’s mentors always said, “Hire slowly and fire fast” and so he tried to do just that by ensuring that he doesn’t just look at a resume and hire them. He ensures he has a process in place and gets to know them to ensure that there are no issues he has not uncovered because you have only met them once. Especially in scouting for a co-founder, meet with them the 2nd, 3rd or even 4th time around because this is like a marriage so you have to poke around and even ask the same questions multiple different ways. Take your time, meet with them multiple times and at the end of the day, trust your gut.
During the interaction, he would usually give questions in scenario form to gauge the decision-making and pragmatic skills of the person. For the all-too-common question, “Tell me about your weaknesses”, Ray puts a spin on this and makes it a two-part question. He would ask, “Tell me what your last boss would say you are good at and what would he say you are not good at.”
Leveraging a Big Break to Reach Out to Others
Ray had a very interesting story on how he got featured in Huffington Post but he didn’t stop there. From there, they decided it was time to leverage social proof. They hyperlinked that article and went back to all their media bloggers and informed them about the Huffington Post article and asked if they can cater their app too. It was effectively as they now had social proof and people now wanted to follow suit. They got into popular tech magazines, podcasts, even college newsletters. They used that one break to reach out to the others.
Show Mentions
– Fav app: Sonos: (iTunes | Google Play)
I liked the idea of texpert so went to their website to learn more. Their site had no example details of how to use their app. I think they lose a lot of PR that way.