How to Delegate as a Founder

Foreword by Yuval, CEO of Glitter AI

I'm not going to lie to you: trusting others enough to delegate is still something I struggle with as a founder.

However, I did learn how to do it at Simpo, my previous startup, which I founded and grew to 21 people with $15.5 million in funding.

At Simpo, I learned the hard way that trying to do everything yourself does NOT work. I also learned what does work. Today, I'd like to share my learnings with you, and recommend a tool to use so that you feel more comfortable:

• Trusting your team

• Delegating to others

If you successfully trust and delegate, you can take back control and free up time to do what you do best: create, strategize, and grow your company.

I hope you find this useful,

Yuval,
CEO, Glitter AI

The Cost of NOT Delegating

I learned the cost of failing to trust and delegate the hard way.

At Simpo, my first startup, I rarely fully trusted my team, and rarely got out of the way.

My insistence on doing too much on my own became a bottleneck that stood in the way of my team's success and hindered my own company's growth.

But more than that, I spent so much energy doing everything myself.

So much so, that 5 years into running the startup, I became so burned out that I wanted to shut down it down, with millions of dollars still in the bank (we eventually sold).

Just as an example: I would regularly personally take hours to administer and edit data in Salesforce -- even when we were 21 people at the company.

I had a team of really smart people working for me, so why didn't I just ask them for help?

It's Scary to Delegate

I didn't ask for help because I was afraid. Delegating can be scary, especially when you don't know if things will be done right. Here were some of my reasons:

1. Fear of Losing Control
   I worried that once I delegated a task, I'd lose control of the outcome, and that could lead to mistakes or missed opportunities.

2. Perfectionism
   I built that startup from the ground up, and I wanted things done a certain way. It was hard to trust that others would meet my standards.

3. “It’s Faster to Just Do It Myself” Mentality
   In the short term, it often felt quicker and easier to handle things myself vs. explaining the task to someone else. But over time, it ended up adding up to a lot of extra hours, and more importantly - a lot of lost energy I could have spent better.

4. Fear of Failure or Poor Execution
   This took the form of the question "What if the person I delegated to doesn’t do it right?" The fear was that something might be done wrong and that was huge barrier to handing things off.

5. Lack of Trust
   I struggled to trust my team. Past experiences in life had taught me that trusting others often led to disappointment, and that made it hard to let go.

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How I Learned to Delegate—and How You Can, Too

It didn't happen overnight, but I did eventually begin to delegate. And the best way I found to do that, by far, was to document what I was doing and then hand it off.

My documentation wasn't always pretty or super detailed, but it got the job done.

With processes documented, my team didn’t need me to explain things from scratch - they had a pretty good reference point to work from.

After I started writing process docs, I realized how much more at ease I was; how much of the fear I previously had largely subsided.

Writing process docs obviously didn't resolve my trust issues completely (therapy is a helpful route to address that particular issue), but it did give me much more confidence things would be done right.

The primary issue with documentation was that writing detailed step-by-step instructions for what I was doing was a super time consuming process.

For instance, it took HOURS to write a simple guide like "Converting and Booking a Sales Qualified Lead in Saleforce" (a 12-step process document meant for SDRs).

And because creating documentation took so long, I often just didn't do it.

Which leads me to this:

If documentation is so f***ing important, why isn't there an easier way to create it?

Creating Documentation with AI

Glitter AI is a tool that watches you work, and writes process documentation for you, automatically. That way, you can easily delegate and free up time.

I'll describe how Glitter AI works in a sec, but I want to give you the backstory to it:

It was only after I created Glitter AI that I fully understood why I had done it.

I found the idea of clicking and talking out loud to create documentation "cool" when I thought of it, but I originally didn't understand why I found it so appealing.

It was only when I was writing the description for my Product Hunt launch (Glitter AI won #1 Product of the day) that I realized why the idea resonated with me on such an emotional level.

The problem I was solving was deeply personal:

If I had a tool like Glitter AI when I was running Simpo, my life would have been 10x better.

I would have found it way, way easier to document, then delegate.

I would free up time, reduce anxiety, and be much better able to run my startup.

I'm sad I didn't have a tool like Glitter AI at the time. But it makes me all the more motivated to make it awesome for you, so you don't have to suffer like I did; so you can delegate confidently and take back control.

How Glitter AI Works

With Glitter AI you create documentation just by explaining what you're doing out loud. There's no writing involved (though you can always edit your docs). As you talk, you just click through whatever software you're using, and explain your work out loud.

Your every click becomes a screenshot, and everything you say out loud, becomes an explanation that accompanies your screenshots (it works in 56 languages).

For example, I re-created the same 12-step doc that I mentioned earlier. The original doc took HOURS to create.

This doc, took just MINUTES (including blurring sensitive info - a feature of Glitter AI):

View My Guide

As you can see, with Glitter AI, you don’t have to spend hours figuring out how to break everything down. You just click, talk, and and then delegate.

Give it a Try for Free

I built Glitter AI because I never want other folks to suffer like I did in my first startup.

If documentation is the key to delegation, then it should be extremely easy to do and accessible to all.

That's why Glitter AI is completely free for the first 10 process docs (called "guides"), and very inexpensive thereafter. I invite you to give it a try:

I hope it gives you the confidence to delegate and the freedom you want.