Founder's Journey Unplugged

As a founder, you're often inundated with a myriad of urgent tasks, making it challenging to prioritize the truly critical ones. One highly effective approach to ease the load during the early stages is bringing on board an Entrepreneur in Residence (EIR). This dynamic individual can serve as your invaluable partner, working closely with you for a few months, and potentially evolving into a pivotal role within your company, growing alongside it.

What you'll learn:

1️⃣ What is the difference between entrepreneur resident, founder associate, chief of staff, and founder resident?

2️⃣ When is the right time, and why would you hire this role

3️⃣ How we did this at Flinn.ai

4️⃣ The responsibilities of these hires and what should stay with the founder.

5️⃣ How to find or recruit them

6️⃣ What should you look for when hiring this profile

This episode is about balancing the long-term vision of a company vs. the go-to-market focus (the first version of your product). Often overlooked, this balance is crucial for founders. Some emphasize their visionary goals, yet stumble in generating short-term traction. Others hyper-focus on early steps, losing sight of the broader picture. We will elaborate in this podcast on:

• Why this balance is critical and why it matters a lot.
• How do we, at Flinn Comply, try to balance this trade-off when we pitch/sell our company (to investors, customers, potential employees) and when we develop our product.

Join us for a candid conversation that sheds light on a challenge all founders face. Together, let's learn to thread the needle between visionary aspirations and tangible progress.

When we started Flinn.ai, we embraced a fully remote approach to attract Europe’s best talent and provide flexibility for our team. Over time, as we grew from 3 to almost 30 people, we refined our approach to remote work.
We will talk about:

• Why a fully remote setup worked so well in the pre-seed phase and the shifts we made as our team expanded.
• The role of off-sites in building strong team connections.
• How we’ve balanced the benefits of flexibility with the need for in-person collaboration.
• Why we trust our team to decide where they work best, inspired by Spotify’s philosophy that “employees aren’t children”.

We are a product led company, this means we validate ideas and critical assumptions with experiments and research. In this episode, we explain how we have tested, validated and researched our ideal customer profile (ICP).

Every startup works towards product-market fit, but how do you really know when you’ve reached it? Without it, scaling too early can be a costly mistake - yet waiting too long can mean missing the market. In this episode, we break down the process from early validation to measurable traction, sharing lessons from our own journey at Flinn.ai.

What we cover:

• The different stages of product-market fit and how to measure progress.
• Common myths vs. reality - why “you’ll just feel it” isn’t enough.
• The metrics that matter: NPS, retention, churn, and referral rates.
• How we approached product-market fit at Flinn.ai, from LOIs to our first paying customers.
• The nuances of achieving PMF in B2B SaaS vs. B2C.