Collaboration Enhances Innovation

How our team came together, to harness our networks, and build things fast.

I’ve always wanted to be an entrepreneur. I started my first venture, my first year of college. Needless to say, I learned a number of lessons in my early days, and began to see the value in collaboration. I had wanted to be the hero, more than I wanted to run a business — and that taught me a lot very quickly. It was a fool’s errand, and one that many first time founders experience.

A few years later, I started to really fall in love with the possibilities of VR and AR. It was too soon, 360 cameras weren’t available yet, Oculus hadn’t even been founded yet. Still, I couldn’t think about anything else. I began talking obsessively about my idea for a network of collaboration. If we could just set up collaborative human-capital before it was the right time, I’d be ready. I believed that barriers could be eliminated by a voluntary opt-in to a bigger picture. When people opt-in, rather that being forced in, they pour their passion into the goal. This produces far more meaningful value in the early days and leverages the desires of those involved. All without making false promises. We get out what we put in.

After a few years of feeling like a crazy person, I met someone who shared that vision. We began meeting every week. They would help me clarify the vision for my platform, and I would help them clarify the strategy for theirs. It was beautiful. We both shared so many interests and skills, while conveniently possessing strengths in the skills the other needed help with. Best of all, if we couldn’t help each other, we probably knew someone who could.

They were already out in the world creating networks, and spending a lot of time giving back to the community. I would spend a lot of time trying to do the same, and often spent my time with wantrepreneurs rather than entrepreneurs. Not that this is a bad thing, as teaching can be the best way to solidify learning. I would look forward to our sessions together — it felt productive. I felt understood.

One day we realized — why don’t we test it. We knew the power of networking, and saw this in practice as folks came to join us for waffle breakfasts, or taco nights. We knew that if we built an environment that practiced what we preach, we could launch faster and more effectively than if we didn’t.

So — I quit my job.

**How we are collaborating:**

We came together, and decided to co-create our ventures. I wanted to build a platform with a fairly complex back-end, and he was building a platform to handle complex platforms. It felt perfect, and to this day, it is exceeding my expectations.

One of the first challenges in collaborative projects, is deciding who’s responsible for what, what each person is risking, and what the rewards are for the parties involved. We have other founding members, and each of us has been running our own business before working on our collective. It can get hairy asking everyone to drop what they’ve been doing. An individual in our network recommended that we check out “Slicing Pie Handbook” by Mike Moyer. We each bought a copy, and read it in about 5 hours. The system is powerful.

Slicing Pie is also known as a “dynamic equity split” or a “grunt fund.” Essentially what it does is account for risk attributed to the startup, with respect to time or financial contributions, and rewards the contributor with equivalent “slices” of the pie. It’s an effective system for accounting for sweat equity and financial risk, while protecting the startup in it’s vulnerable days. Before I give away all of Mr. Moyer’s secrets, I would highly recommend you check out the Slicing Pie system.

After some consideration, we elected to use Pie. Now that we had found a way to ensure that all ego’s are met, and all goals are aligned — we got straight to customer discovery and development. We were able to reach out to our direct networks, and instantly began producing mock-ups and scheduling sessions with potential customers.

Others began reaching out to us. After all, we had been promoting the idea of collaboration for so long, and now that we had something new to show of it — we made waves. We could help them and they could help us. The beauty of collaboration is that you gain many of your collaborators resources, and they gain many of yours. It’s like hiring multiple teams on a shoe-string budget. In my opinion, nothing could be more beautiful.

**Making it work:**

Now making strategic partnerships work does have certain requirements. Some things to consider are:

With a network of startups, motivated by their own personal narratives, the process becomes more market-product fit, rather than product-market fit. This is an advantage in the early days, because you are resilient as a group and can adapt quickly. Once the Value Proposition is defined, and your product is launched, you have a collective market, a valued product, and an inherent viral adoption empowering product-market fit. Basically, you’re not alone.

**Considerations**:

**Whats next:**

While we are still in the early days, we are gaining traction steadily. Our team is growing, and our requests for demo are rapidly growing. We even found our primary target market this way — we seek to empower digital agencies. They already have their customers and are frustrated with the very thing we are solving. Rather than compete, we seek to empower. Best of all, we have been gaining interest.

Collaboration is the future of business. As more people shift to freelance work, the opportunities to apply this strategy are growing every day. We all want to be the master of own future, and now we can. Only time will tell just how successful this is — and with such a high failure rate in startups, it’s amazing how great we feel. Stay tuned.

Want to keep up with our progress? Follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Collaboration Enhances Innovation was originally published in The Startup on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Originally published on Medium