You are a diamond 💎 - strong and precious 🤩

Hi FTF Friends 👋🏼,

I hope you are keeping well.

Five Things Friday' (aka FTF). FTF is a short weekly dose of inspiration; this email captures five things I encounter in my startup journey. This includes, the books I read, blogs, podcasts, favourite productivity hack, startup strategy, quote I'm pondering, smart tools and stories.

This is an exciting post about my last week

🔥 Building an A-Team

🚀 The power of personal branding and its benefit to the startup

🤩  How do I select the best podcast to silent?

🤔  What does success mean to me?

It is all about the people.

Can you build an amazing, engaged and high performing remote team?
A question that many startup founders have. I was no different and had the same challenge.

But it has changed; my team at MyGigsters and Megamind Creations LLP helped me build an incredible team and workplace, busting all myths around #remotework.

75% of my team is offshore, and they work from 3 countries. All of us are digitally connected and driven to help our users.

A few things that helped me

❤️ On-board people that love the problem you are solving.
We hired people for their passion and drive to make a difference.

One of my favourite interview questions - If you are starting over again, what skill or areas of specialisation will you chose and why?

✅ Move the decision to where the information is.
Empower your team to make decisions, allowing them to learn from mistakes

🏆 We don't work on time; instead, we work on tasks. My team gets total flexibility with where and when they want to work.

🧠 Allocate tasks they love and driven to challenge them.

🕺 Have fun, celebrate and connect personally. All the hustle and grinding needs a pause to appreciate the team and enjoy the journey.

Personal branding is key.

I have connected with over 100,000 people so far this year 😲

During the same period last year, I wasn't engaged and didn't share my experiences, learnings, questions, thoughts, and informational value to others.

This year, I decided to consistently share valuable information and build my network on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

A startup founder’s guide to personal branding — why and how

Having a strong personal brand as a founder can make the difference between your startup being a success or another failed idea.

icebreakervcMari Luukkainen

Consistently share informational value.

All I did was consistently share information value to my network of professional connections, friends and network. I am no expert, but I decided to share my experience, be vulnerable, authentic and share my story.  If you are not following me on LinkedIn, I post at least four times a week.

How do you come up with content topics and how much time do you spend writing these posts?

My content topic comes from everything that happens around my life. The news I read, the conversations I had, new people I met, sutle things I paid attention to, book and podcast I listened to, my startup experience and more..

I usually spend 1 hour in total writing all my posts. Sometimes, I write them over the weekend and schedule them for posting.

What I was able to achieve

🥳 connect with 100+ extraordinary individuals

🚀 share my story and journey with others

👍🏻 Got invited to speak at six panels, two interviews and significantly increased my visibility

🏆 Tell my stakeholders the passion behind my startups

💰 Attracted 6 Investors and connected with countless C-suite executives in less than four months

🤝 To acquire talent and engage with them: Four of my team members connected to me over LinkedIn and engaged with MyGigsters

If you are a startup founder or someone aspiring to become one, You should think about building your personal brand.

How to select what to listen to

There are currently over two million podcasts and more than 48 million podcast episodes

My tips on that would be

• Follow people you are interested in and see what they are listening to
• Read reviews of the podcast before listening to it
• Check the average episode duration and pick a few that suits different availabilities. I have a few I would like to hear to while driving (for more than 30 minutes) and some when taking shower (less than 15 mins)
• Choose a podcast style, genre and topic that you are passionate about
• Always read the podcast description and then listen to the podcast

If you are reading this email, I share my favourite podcast episodes and channel. You can also try a few of my recommendations and you may like them.

What I am listening at the moment 👇

Recommended audio book format. - Click here to check it out https://amzn.to/2VeQRu5

In this book, Jordan combines the hard-won truths of ancient wisdom with decades of clinical experience to provide twelve profound and practical principles, from setting your house in order before criticising others to comparing yourself to who you were yesterday, not to someone else today.

Quote, I'm pondering 📖

Most people want to be successful, rich and famous. What drives that motivation?
There is always something above or below something. What defines the ceiling of success and being the epitome of one's journey?

I will leave you with this quote.

Well, that's all for this week. 😁

I hope you like my FTF posts. Please share your feedback, suggestions in the comments below, and I would write things that are most interesting and valuable to you. Also, if you think anyone in your network will benefit from these posts, please share.

Take care and be safe. 👋🏼