Ari Last is the founder and CEO of Bubble, a childcare platform connecting nannies and babysitters with families.

In this week’s Founder in Five Q&A, Last discusses hiring exceptional talent over blindly growing headcounts, the concerning impact of social media on kids and starting at his career as a football commentator for UEFA.

What one thing do you wish you’d done differently when launching your company?  

I wish I’d spent more time pre-launch thinking really practically about how we’d win our first thousand customers. Every founder has different skills and passions and I was definitely product-leaning; so when I think back, I didn’t get the ratio right between time spent on product design versus go-to-market strategy.

Winning customers is without doubt the hardest thing about starting a business. But in my personal experience, and from what I see elsewhere, founders often tend to obsess over other elements of the business far more. This is probably because designing new products tend to be fun, whilst acquiring customers from scratch is really hard, and as humans we tend to put the hardest tasks off till last….