
Ask HN: I am doing $2M annually as a solopreneur and need your help - techcorner
I work as a sole founder with little work outsourced and an employee to help with chores. My technical background coupled with marketing exposure I am able to enjoy awesome profit margins in my eLearning business. I now plan to expand my offerings and hence team but have no clue where to start. I don&#x27;t want a co-founder as such. Right from the smallest of technicalities like giving control of my domains, server, sites to employees scares me. Then whom should I hire first, a core employee or a HR person? I have never dealt with such stuff and no clue how to proceed. How do small companies deals with such issues? Is there any exhaustive resource&#x2F;course&#x2F;book&#x2F;video&#x2F;case-study which lays down a process to take a 1 man company to a &#x27;n&#x27; person organization?
Sorry for my naivety. Would love to get answers from the super awesome HN community.
======
hoodoof
I would love to be in your position.

My deepest, most honest urging to you is to NOT do what you are contemplating.

Just keep doing what you are doing for as long as you can and take the cash
out and put it into stable investments for your retirement. By a nice house
and car, have holidays, take care of your family. Use this to complete the
task of gaining financial independence for the rest of your life. When that is
well and truly done then sure, treat your business as something potentially
disposable and turn it into a "company" \- but even then I would not advise
that.

I have done the company thing and always regretted not keeping it one-man-
small and just milking all the cash out.

You are sitting on an incredibly valuable thing to you personally. Don't blow
it by spending all the good cash on making a company.

The whole point of being in business is to make money for YOU. You have
succeeded, you are past the finish line of my ultimate goal. Do not employ
even a single person.

The fact that you are inexperienced in running a company emphasizes my point
tenfold.

~~~
techcorner
Thanks for your inputs. Nice House. Check. Nice Car. Check. Happily Married.
Check.

 _Just keep doing what you are doing for as long as you can and take the cash
out._

I am quite a super ambitious guy and I don't wish to keep all my eggs-in-one
basket. Though am doing good for several years but we can never be sure of
things when technology changes so abruptly. I feel if I am able to expand, I
can multiply my finances and the value that I can give back to society many
folds.

I sincerely thank you for putting in your time to answer my question but my
original question remains :).

~~~
hoodoof
OK well all I urge is that you continue in your current configuration until
you never need to work another day in your life. THEN do the company thing.

You will regret it beyond all understanding if you take this incredible
position you are in and within five years turn it into a financial disaster
back to square one.

Frankly you are undervaluing what you have achieved and underestimating how
hard the task is to tenfold that.

In ten years of continuing in your current configuration it sound like you
could take home more than $1,000,000 per year AFTER TAX. A "company" can
easily run for ten years and not have yielded that much money either through
revenue or acquisition.

~~~
patrickmn
It's painful how much I agree.

~~~
hoodoof
The problem is that if success comes too easily and/or too early then it is
undervalued.

I made a big pile of cash very early in my career and thinking that such big
piles of cash were easy to make, promptly wasted it on "starting a company". I
certainly gained value from that money though. The value I gained is the
wisdom that I imparted in the top level suggests to the OP.

Cash never came as easy again.

The OP doesn't realise that he has attained one of the possible levels of
startup holy grail nirvana of success - the incrediprofitable one man company.

~~~
techcorner
_The problem is that if success comes too easily and /or too early then it is
undervalued._

I am sorry if I made that impression. It was never an easy thing. I have had
my fair share of all-nighters and even I do those now at times. I had to self-
learn, un-learn several things after leaving a comfortable job several years
ago. It was (and still) not at all an easy task. As a quote goes _It took me
10 years to become an overnight success_

~~~
hoodoof
My point is not about how you got there. My point is that you undervalue what
you have.

Perhaps the most important point, and one not made here elsewhere, is that
merely the fact of starting to create a company will impact your existing
revenue stream. You will _instantly_ become distracted by "working on the
company", and whatever your current magic formula is will suffer and revenue
will go down. The moment you start to "make a company" your magic formula will
get less and less magic until soon you've got 10 employees, a lease on an
office, taxes, problems, a sales team, politics, accountants, hiring and
recruiting, and then you need to feed that beast with ever increasing numbers,
and you'll stop taking all that juicy cash for yourself because you'll be
"investing it in the company", which is to say "spending it/getting rid of
it". Your magic formula will be gone and you'll be just another ordinary
company.

And if it did take ten years to get to this point then why the heck are you in
such a damn hurry to change your situation.

I think what you should do is change the way you see your current position.

Currently you are WILDLY SUCCESSFUL. You seem desperate to risk that for what
- greater success?

What you propose makes no sense. Just keep doing what you are doing. Keep
raking cash off the table and start to think to yourself "wow, I'm one of the
most successful people in business".

The problem for you is you are addicted to "entrepreneur porn" \- you are
reading about all these other people who run REAL companies, who EMPLOY
people, have OFFICES, and INVESTORS and IPOs. All that stuff is nowhere near
as valuable as it is made out to be. You have done the most incredible thing
which is to pull in huge amounts of cash with _none of that crap_. Wow. But
you seem to feel that it's not enough success. Readjust the way you see your
achievements to date and readjust what the real value is of "having a
company".

~~~
majani
Not to mention he is in education - a universally moral category. This is
startup nirvana if I ever saw it. I'm sure there are famous billionaires who
would trade places with him if they could

~~~
techcorner
_Not to mention he is in education - a universally moral category_

I sincerely hope that is not to be taken as sarcasm?

 _This is startup nirvana if I ever saw it. I 'm sure there are famous
billionaires who would trade places with him if they could_

Can you be more detailed please?

~~~
Stratoscope
I'm pretty sure majani simply meant that your helping people learn is a Good
Thing.

So you are doing well by doing good.

------
danielvf
If you are going to leave being solo, don't start by bringing in people from
the top. Start with the bottom.

Define one or two jobs that you are doing now that can be spun off. Perhaps
customer support or material writting. Document how to do that job, then bring
someone in, train them, learn how to manage them, and update you docs with
what you learn that you've missed.

In this way you stay in control, you can back out if you need to, and you can
gradually replace yourself with systems.

A good book on doing this is the oddly named "E-myth revisited". Just don't
take everything in the book too literally.

\--

Remember, a startup is a search for a product that people want to buy. You
already have both. That means that much of the startup advice is actually
posion your company. Listen to your gut.

And good luck! I wrote a backend system for a training and certification
company - I'm familiar with the nutso profit margins.

------
btaitelb
I do a lot of work helping early and mid-stage companies scale their workforce
and technology. Some companies scale by the seat of their pants: they hire
people for specific needs as they arise (e.g. servers crashing, or too many
sales requests coming in). Other companies scale in a more organized, planned
process, like having a big vision of becoming a global company in 5 years. In
both of these scenarios, especially because you don't have a co-founder,
you're going to find that it's hard to give your #2 hire a sense of agency.
You'll likely feel disappointed in their style (different coding practices,
different customer interactions, etc.) and want to micromanage. To help with
this, start them off on a non-mission-critical project (like expanding to a
new region or building a feature that's been in the backlog), and be clear
with them about what "success" means for that project. Having the definition
of success be written by them, in their words, will also help ensure a two-way
communication here. After they have a successful project under their belt,
you'll find it easier to trust them with more important work. Also keep in
mind that right now you have a product, but when you hire your second
employee, you'll also be establishing a culture, so it's worth putting thought
into what culture you want to promote.

------
WheelsAtLarge
Here are a few tips that will help you.

1st do not hire anyone unless you are 100% sure you can define a full time
position for them. Outsource as much as you can until you feel it's cheaper to
bring some one in house than to hire a consultant. $2 million seems like a lot
but it's amazing how fast that gets spent once you get others involved.

2nd spend the time to define what you want your business to look like in five
years. Define every year and set goals on how to get there.

Create a business plan. This will force you to look at your business more
broadly. There are plenty of books that will show you how to start. A good
question that will be answered is whether your business can grow or if it's
just a small niche.

Educate yourself, if you don't, others will be happy to tell you what to do
and how to spend your money. But don't expect them to have your best interest
in mind.

Your 1st goal as a business owner is to make yourself obsolete. You can be an
employee but the company can not be dependent on you. Once you do that then
you can guide the company's future. Delegating will be extremely hard but if
you hire right then there should not be any question as to whether it's
possible.

Going from 1 person to many is a great change. Your goal is to get everyone to
work towards the same goal. Make sure everyone knows what that is.
Communicate, communicate and make sure you communicate. Getting your vision
from your head to someone else's is hard.

Lastly, don't be in a hurry to spend money. It's funny how it works. If you
can define a viable business then people will be happy to give you money to
keep it going. There's the other side too. Don't be cheap. Cheapness can do
more harm than good. It's a balance. You'll have to find it.

Good luck!

------
swivelmaster
I'm going to disagree with some of the sentiments here. There are a number of
tasks that you are more or less wasting your time on every day because you
could hire people to do them, thus allowing you to free up your time to focus
on what your competitive advantage is. It's really important that you called
these things "chores." That says a lot about those tasks.

What you don't want is to hire a bunch of people you don't trust with any
responsibility - that's a recipe for micromanagement, which is even more of a
waste of time than doing the "chores" to begin with!

Take a long time to hire someone, but hire someone who can take the largest
percentage possible of tasks off your plate. If you're worried about data
loss, have backups. If you're worried about credentials, make separate
accounts with different access. But you need someone who you can trust, who
you feel like is smarter than you at some useful set of skills. Someone who is
as passionate as you are about what you do, and hungry to make a good
impression.

I was an early employee at a startup that was acquired less than two years
after I joined. We grew from seven to seventy employees in about twenty
months. My contact info is in my HN profile if you want to know more.

~~~
techcorner
_But you need someone who you can trust, who you feel like is smarter than you
at some useful set of skills._

Tell me a recipe to hire such a guy. Please.

 _Someone who is as passionate as you are about what you do_

hmmm this is probably easier said than done.

~~~
swivelmaster
The recipe? It's not easy. It's all easier said than done.

But you already built a two-million-dollar-a-year business. Did you expect
this to get easier? :)

It's probably not too hard to find someone who is better than you at server
administration, and it may not be too difficult finding someone who is
passionate about what you do. Finding someone who fits both categories is what
makes it difficult.

There's a lot you can do to start looking. Define the job, all the
responsibilities, technical requirements, etc. Post ads or fish around in your
network. Ask who knows smart people. Make sure you're clear about what you do
and that you're looking for someone with an interest in it.

It is possible to find someone who is the kind of geek who likes to get paid
to solve the technical problems and will do a great job without caring about
your mission - it's up to you whether or not that's an acceptable hire at this
stage. (IMO it's usually not a good idea with the first few employees, but
once you have more, it's okay as long as they're still a culture fit in other
ways.)

If you find someone who is passionate and hungry but doesn't have all the
skills, this is potentially a very good hire. Hire and train them, and
eventually they'll get better than you at their area of expertise.

Most technical people won't have the EXACT experience you're looking for, so
you have to think about gauging them by their potential to learn - look at
past projects, ask questions that test their curiosity and ability to explain
things, try explaining a new idea to them and see how quickly they pick it up
and run with it.

This is one of my favorite parts of building a startup. I just quit my job to
start one and I'm not at the phase of hiring yet (still doing everything
myself, nothing to release yet), but I'm REALLY looking forward to it,
assuming things go well enough to get there.

------
b0p1x
I agree with the others who have pointed out that you're already successful,
don't break it!

That said, don't even consider HR as your first hire. Not even for a second.
Their role is to police contracts and resolve issues. You won't have that
until you have more people.

Get someone who wants to do the stuff you are tired of doing.

~~~
hoodoof
I really don't want to criticize the OP, but as an observation, the question
reveals such a deep level of naivety about how to run a company that it bodes
very poorly for the transition of this company to same-but-multiple-time-
bigger-and-more-profitable.

~~~
techcorner
Yes I am aware of my shortcomings and I did qualify that already in my
original question.

I am a fast learner and open to learning - given a good source.

~~~
ahazred8ta
Step One: talk to a local temp-to-perm agency about computer literate clerical
staff or a personal assistant. This lets you defer ALL the HR/payroll/tax
issues until much later.

[Also: please put contact info in your
[https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=techcorner](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=techcorner)
HN profile]

------
techcorner
I would like to thank each and everyone of you who took time for your valuable
answers. However, with due respect, I see that most of the people are over-
fixated on why I should not expand. I am already in an extremely comfortable
position when it comes to money. All little necessities of life like
insurances, house, car have been already being taken care of. The place where
I come from even if I stop working today, I can live comfortably for next 10
years. Except a couple, most of the answers are telling me why it is not a
good idea to expand. I understand their sentiments but this was not my
original question. To give you more details - This is an eLearning
subscription model. Other than questions in my OP, hiring, managing, trusting
emp with sensitive info, finding very high quality content creators remains as
one of my biggest challenges. I am not from any of the _developed_ countries.
I dominate my current niche but looking to expand into other related niches
where I see a good competition.

------
ryanjmo
I was in a very similar position to you about 2 years ago. I was running a
company on my own doing great with revenue and profit. Currently, I have a 6
person company.

The way I ended up expanding was first starting to work with one other really
great person. I ended up needing a professional sales side to the company and
Lizzie came in and did that. She was also better and more experienced than me
at hiring and managing others, so luckily, she was able to hire the person
that is now my lead programer as a second critical hire.

Then we hired on two more developers.

During this time, the people I had that were "helping me with my chores"
originally did more and more of that and began helping with other random areas
of the business, and they became full-time employees.

At some point, one of our developers left.

So now it is me, Lizzie, our lead developer, a jr developer and two assistants
who help with sales and chores.

I love it so much more than being on my own. It wouldn't even be necessary for
me to program anymore, but I do when I want something done or it just makes
sense for me to do it or I'm just trying to make the business better. My point
is that my lead developer is so good, I can trust him to do a great job on any
idea I have. It took a while to get to that point, but now that it's
happening, it's awesome.

Lizzie now does so much on the business end (and has taken over most of my
emailing) that I have freed up a ton of my time.

I now get to look at the bigger picture, figure out how to expand the
business, manage people and have fun.

I think by far my favorite part about all this, is that now all I have to do
is have an idea and I know that I have a team behind me that can make that
idea happen. Also, I can go on vacation.

It seems to me that if you are making $2M, then a couple of really good
employees at $125,000 should be able to help you bring in more money than they
will cost.

I hope my story helps you. I think it worked out really well for me. I didn't
really have a plan, I just got lucky in many ways, but I was also always
paying attention and I trusted myself to know when someone was right to work
with and when someone was not right to work with. In general, if I had to give
advice from my personal experience, it would be to hire the best people you
can. Make sure they are remarkable. And get rid of people that you have any
issues with or aren't that good.

~~~
techcorner
Thanks for chiming in. How do you keep their motivation going especially for a
talented developer? Don't they just want to leave a small startup and want to
work for biggies out there?

~~~
ryanjmo
Well, right now, my whole company (plus wives and girlfriends) and I are on
our way to burning man.

We also live in Aspen, and my lead programer is a huge skier, so it is a
unique and fun opportunity for him to ski and live in Aspen.

Also, I pay them competitively and give them a profit share.

We have a lot of fun and have a lot of fun at work trying to grow the business
too, because it's good for everyone.

~~~
csallen
The profit sharing is what would hook me and, I'm sure, plenty of other
entrepreneur-minded programmers. That's something you can do at a small
company that a big company won't do. It also gives employees a since of
ownership, and aligns their incentives with the company's. I believe Wufoo did
something similar with great success.

~~~
jacknews
Right, anything else in such a people-dependent industry is capitalist
bullshit. The company consists of the people in it, they deserve a direct
share in the profits.

------
robertelder
This lecture series specifically talks about the different problems faced at
various stages of scaling, and it includes a lot of reputable people who have
actually done it:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3RrVmv5WwA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3RrVmv5WwA)

The YC series is of course good too:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBYhVcO4WgI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBYhVcO4WgI)

I'm not actually qualified to answer your question, but it sounds like you
haven't discovered a bottleneck in your business yet, and until you do, you
probably shouldn't hire any employees.

------
WhitneyLand
You don't provide enough detail for specific suggestions, but it sounds like
you would benefit from having a mentor who has been down this path before.

Another way is start inviting smart and experienced people to lunch to bat
around ideas. You don't even have to know them personally - a lot of people
are glad to chat casually over lunch in the spirit of helping fellow
entrepreneurs.

After having a few discussions like this you'll be able to see things from
multiple perspectives and choose the best path to fit your business.

This will cost you nothing but lunch in exchange for some very valuable
advice.

------
wgtoner
Hi Techcorner,

(First time on this site, someone sent me this thread)

About 16 years ago, I was in a kinda similar place to you - making a lot of
money but ambitious and wanted to grow grow grow. Not a tech biz but very
information centered.

Very long story short, while it was far from easy or an uninterrupted "up and
go the right" path I was fortunate enough to survive my gazillion mistakes and
we currently have about 150 staff in 7 countries. I don't have any investors,
partners, or significant debt. I spend about 95+% working "on" my business vs.
"in" it.

It sounds like you're a good guy and perhaps my input can help you think
through your options. If you drop me a note we can do a brief call and see if
the chemistry is a fit. I've never done any coaching or mentoring outside my
own organization before but I wish I had had access to a resource like the
2016 me along the way so it stands to reason some of my takeaways from my
journey could be of value to you.

Best wishes for continued success.

------
kenesom1
Think about what specific aspects of the business generate profits and where
your costs lie. To rapidly expand, you'll want a multiplier that greatly
increases profits or drastically cuts costs.

As a thought exercise, think about what you'd need to do to double or triple
your sales. A bigger marketing budget? Institutional clients? More staff?
Content? The details will depend on the specific nature of your business. Once
you have one or more scenarios laid out, work backwards and figure out what's
required to get there. The result will give you a good idea of what
investments to make to grow your business.

------
wslh
We scaled a 2 men (my partner and me) 15 year old profitable (no investors)
company to 12 people and we never were in a market position to scale much more
but we are good (much better than the average) hiring.

We started with a combination of a few developers (indeed we started with
one!) and one QA or tester to check the work done by developers. Even if the
developers are excellent, having QA in place unload work from the developers,
increase the delivery quality, and save you a lot of time. I think this is a
basic framework. Setup development, testing and/or staging, and production
environments, so if you don't want to give a lot of control, at least you can
deploy and configure stuff once it is working in the staging phase and be more
confident about a new release or configuration.

We always hired for a 30-hour work week, obviously we want people who will
stay until the critical problems are solved but we try to keep longer hours
work at a bare minimum. Our first hires were oriented to some specific
technology plus a flexibility to use technologies outside their comfort zone.
For example, a C/C++ expert who could do part of the work in Visual Basic
because it was the right technology for the project, or people who can move
from Node to Python easily, and at the end of the day are not mad if they
choose React or Angular.

Like everyone else, we want to hire the best and trustworthy professionals via
people we already worked with. If we can't hire the best we look for people
with an excellent predisposition, a more than average intelligence, and very
good communication. Communication is key, if they found a problem that is
really difficult to solve we want to know this as soon as possible and will
discuss it with part of the team to help as a group. We don't like heroes who
engage in very difficult problems without giving us a warning.

We have a few remote employees who really know how to work remotely. We would
never start growing with remote employees, except if you know them very well
and can be on-site too.

Beyond this, our hiring process is simple and mainly based on experience/work-
portfolio. No puzzles.

Disclaimer: Since my business is not based in US there can be many differences
in the way we handle similar issues.

------
shostack
Can you share any additional details on your business? Do you sell an
elearning book or is it a full on subscription? Would love to know any
additional specifics you'd share.

~~~
techcorner
Yes, it works on a subscription model and I pretty much dominate my micro
niche. I am looking forward to rine-repeat this model to other micro niches in
my parent niche.

~~~
shostack
Thanks for confirming. Any chance you would share your site? Or does the fact
that it is a micro niche mean you worry about competitors starting up and
can't promote it more widely?

------
mullen
I going to be in the Don't category on this one.

However, if you are really set on doing this, you should list all the stuff
you don't want to, say like pay bills, working deals on the phone or support.
List the things you don't like doing and then see if you could bring in one
person to handle those jobs. Not a manager, but someone you could quickly
train and easily manage. Start farming things out to them and when they hit
capacity, possibly hire another person who can handle the other stuff you
don't want to do.

You have an incredible opportunity here. You are profitable, now you just need
to start adding people on to handle the stuff you don't want to do and then
you are free to do the things you want too or need too. Don't grow your staff
for the sake of growing your staff to convince yourself you run a "real
business". You already run a Real Business.

------
hanniabu
Is there a way for you to restrict access(limited access) to these accounts?

I'm interested in hearing what others have to say as I have been wondering
this myself about giving away sensitive account access. However, I would have
to side with hoodoof. You're in a position right now that's a sure thing and
it's bringing you money. You never know what lies beyond so I would milk it as
well. Yes, you can find even another source of income just as lucrative, if
not more so, but you can also wind up not finding anything and losing your
current income. Be careful not to underestimate how difficult it is to get to
where you are with your current business just because you're able to do it
once. It's well known that luck plays a huge roll, and with that said, I wish
you the best of luck.

------
jagtesh
Hugely impressed by what you're doing. Congratulations! If I were you, I'd
start by hiring an assistant to help me deal with distractions. Maybe even a
junior accountant / clerk to help manage payments, bills and some basic
finances. So I could focus more on the core-business.

~~~
zachlatta
+1 on this. Before scaling your team, scale yourself.

You can hire remote assistants extremely cheaply – I've had success with
Zirtual and Upwork.

------
sharemywin
You may just want to look at hiring an assistant first. Some one that can take
on the easy time consuming tasks. Let them build trust with you before you
"hand over any keys" also I wouldn't hand everything over to one person. If
you want someone with more experience then find someone with traits and
interests exactly opposite of the things you want to do. here's a pretty good
article on hiring a vp of sales:

[https://www.saastr.com/what-a-vp-sales-actually-does-
where-t...](https://www.saastr.com/what-a-vp-sales-actually-does-where-the-
magic-is-and-when-to-hire-one/)

------
tedmiston
> Then whom should I hire first, a core employee or a HR person?

What is the biggest problem or pain point you have? Put another way, what
activity consumes a lot of your time that someone else could just as well as
you could (or better)?

~~~
techcorner
Very high quality content creation. Difficult to find people who can provide
content at quality which I aspire for.

~~~
tedmiston
Do you mean that you need instructors or people to take existing material and
get it into your platform?

------
csallen
There are some interviews on IndieHackers.com from people who've been in
situations that are semi-similar to yours. Happy to make an intro to any of
the interviewees you'd like to talk to.

~~~
techcorner
Thanks. Beautiful site. Looks interesting.

------
GoinAum
Leave your current company alone, and safe, and use a years worth of the
profits to start something new. Keep doing that until second thing is making
as much money as the first, then start changing your old company around. Best
of both worlds, and you can still follow everyone's wonderful advice. Be safe
man, don't goof up that absolute boon you are sitting in the middle of.
Paramahamsa Hariharananda - "Shirk not opportunity, for opportunity may not
come again."

------
winkv
creating quality content is not easy but you have a good start. I think you
should adopt a publisher model, you already have captive audience in terms of
paying customers for your niche. You can find out what else would be relevant
to your customers and design a curriculum around it, no content, just the
table of content for your next course. You might as well publish it to your
website in coming soon section and give early bird discount(which would
guarantee paying customer and fund the development of course.) if you don't
get any customers don't go further in developing that course. Outsource the
research on material for your TOC to virtual assistants, they will be
responsible for curating and providing you the quality material. Once you have
all these you can as well hire an intern with good communication skills who is
interested in this course (say machine learning) but may not have the
knowledge. Groom him and ask him to come up with writeup for your TOC. Hier
high paid thought leader for this course as identified by your assistants
while doing the research and let him be the editor for the content. RESIST any
attempt to do it yourself if intern/assistants are not able to do it the way
you want, just be patient. Rinse and repeat and send me 1M$ that you make from
your next niche ;-)

------
cpeneguy
I worked for a company years ago that was in the same situation that you are
in now. I was the first employee brought in to assist with the more day to day
operations of the business. Things went well for a while. We added on more
staff and I moved up and that's when I started to see the problems with the
founder. His lack of management skills began to take its toll and the company
was dead in the water six months later.

Dealing with tech is the easy part, it's the people that will get you.

------
michaelrhansen
Congrats to your success. I think it starts with your objectives. Do you have
other product ideas you want to get off the ground? Do you want to stop
wearing a few hats (like marketing, finance customer service, etc). Where do
you see the business in 2,4, and 8 years? I am currently in a great position
leading product for a healthcare technology company and I have asked myself
the same questions. A hiring plan fell out of that discussion and has so far
been very successful.

~~~
techcorner
_Do you have other product ideas you want to get off the ground?_ I have a
list of ideas sitting in my To-Do. I am limited by my time. Wish I can hire
some smart folks to execute them. <\- Hiring smarter folks than the owner is
the sentiment echoed in several comments in this post. How to do that is what
we all need. Share profit percentage? Yes, but how much? on what basis?

------
barrystaes
_Right from the smallest of technicalities like giving control of my domains,
server, sites to employees scares me._

Sounds simple but.. when you hire a technical guy; hire/keep the ones that are
smarter than you. This allows you to let it go. If you thrust them to doing a
better job than you would, its easyer to not get in their way.

On HR vs core employee: if you have fulltime work for a core employee, get one
asap. This frees up the time you need to build your bussiness instead.

~~~
techcorner
_hire /keep the ones that are smarter than you._ How? Why would they join a
small company?

~~~
mastercoder82
> Why would they join a small company?

Once the basic needs are met, many smart and talented people look for internal
motivation. It doesn't matter if it is a small or a large company, as long as
they are happy and satisfied. According to Daniel Pink's theory of motivation
[0], there are 3 aspects of intrinsic motivation: 1\. Autonomy - trust them,
don't micromanage, let them take decisions 2\. Mastery - allow them to get
better and acquire skills 3\. Purpose - give them a meaningful purpose and
sell them your vision

Internal motivation may mean differently for different individuals, but I
believe the above three aspects cover the most of it.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drive:_The_Surprising_Truth_Ab...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drive:_The_Surprising_Truth_About_What_Motivates_Us)

------
greenleafjacob
Take it from Sam Altman: don't hire employees [1].

[1]: [https://youtu.be/CVfnkM44Urs?t=473](https://youtu.be/CVfnkM44Urs?t=473)

------
baccheion
Outsource as much as you can (except the financials/accounting, unless you can
find a trustworthy accountant).

Your first hire should either be someone that complements you, or that does
your job (redundancy/"fault tolerance").

If you've managed to survive without a co-founder, then keep going without
one. If someone ends up with enough responsibility to be the equivalent, then
make them COO, CTO, CEO, or something along those lines.

------
fudged71
First goal should be to get rid of the tedious small tasks, allowing you to
focus on core responsibilities. Pay for a virtual personal assistant on the
other side of the world to do menial tasks for you while you sleep.

After that, I recommend meeting with other medium-size startup CEOs in your
region and getting their advice for what role could provide the highest
leverage for your company.

------
LukeFitzpatrick
That's awesome and glad to hear you're doing well. I think you have a couple
of options:

1/ Keep running it by yourself. 2/ Hire an assistant to take care of time-
consuming small tasks. 3/ You could always talk to a couple of larger
competitors and see if they're interested in buying you out.

------
wouterds
Seeing from your earlier post about a year ago when you seemed to be dealing
with a burnout, I would recommend getting a co-founder or someone experienced
who can guide you.

Handing out _some_ responsibilities is not bad, it's what happens when you
grow. It will help you to scale and grow more easily with less stress.

Good luck!

------
akulbe
As another solopreneur, who is doing a fraction of what you are doing... I
would _love_ to talk to you about how to get to something even close to the
position that you're in now.

I want to grow my business, and be even a fraction of that successful. Care to
talk?

------
codeholio
First, how do companies deal with the issues you mention? Answer: learn to let
go and trust the people you hire.

If you are making that kind of money solo, you are a small minority. I would
stay where you are. If it's not broken, don't fix it.

------
diehell
OP, is there any chance that you have some time to impart your wisdom and
mentoring a person(me) that aspire to achieve something similar. It would be
awesome if i could learn what you learned in being an overnight(10yrs journey)
success.

~~~
techcorner
Have been doing so within my friends/family. Will consider mentoring on a
larger scale as and when I can get time.

------
joshmn
If it's not broke, don't fix it.

I think it'd be important to define what do you need to organize (because an
organization is about, well, organizing), and how it will contribute, where it
will contribute.

Happy to chat more. Email in profile.

------
Zelmor
In case you are looking for associates in the EU, drop me a mail. I'll share
LinkedIn if you wish, and we can discuss matters privately. @gmail.com
prefixed by my username.

------
myoung8
I've seen a few friends go down this path, happy to introduce you if you're
interested.

Contact info is in my profile.

------
husseinhallak
I spent 25 years running successful small businesses and moving them from 1
man shows to becoming team based businesses. Here is the process I used
successfully time after time in my business and helping other businesses.

1\. Be super clear on your why: You must start by clarifying why are you doing
what you are doing; why are you in an eLearning business. You are making good
money and from what I read in some of your replies you are doing well fro
yourself, so what drives you to wake up every day and go to work, what brings
you joy. Why is this so important, because it's the key to everything else,
for example, if you want to hire people for the long term, the must believe
what you believe, if you want your business to grow beyond you, ie must be
driven by a clear purpose (your why) Your why is a great for rapid decision-
making, which speeds up things in your business, in hiring, in growing your
customer base...etc

2\. Be super clear on your goals: You have a successful business as it is, and
expanding it is not going to be easy, it is more work for you, so why are
doing that, what will things look like when your effort to expand your
business are successful and you get everything you want, just the way you want
it. This will help you clarify where you are heading and so you will be able
to choose your the steps and measure your progress towards achieving your
goals.

3\. Start with 20%: In every business there is 20% of tasks and things to be
done that are repetitive, mundane, laborious, maybe even boring for you. Even
if you love what you do, there will still be things you like more than others.
Start finding people to do those tasks. People who believe what you believe
and love doing these tasks. This is a very safe starting point since these are
not the major tasks that have major impact on your business.

4\. Hire for personality more than skill: This may sound strange, but the top
team members that I've every worked with and that outperformed everyone else
were the ones that had the least skill but the biggest appetite for learning
and growth. They were like a sponge, were willing to learn, and most
importantly, they were not affected by the way things are done out in the
world. As a one man show you may be doing things differently than how things
are done in other big companies or the regular practices in other businesses,
so you may want people that are willing to learn your way of doing things.
People who are used to doing things in a certain way will drive you crazy
trying to unlearn how they do things, while people who have less experience
and more appetite for learning, are more open to learning your way. This is
not to say that people with a lot of experience are bad, in fact if you can
find great people with great experience, that would be ideal, as long as they
are open to learning, willing to work with you and love to grow.

5\. Continue your journey to 80%: Now that you have handed over 20% of the
work to new team members. The ideal goal I suggest is to continue hand over
tasks to existing and new team members until you reach 80% of your tasks
delegated and handed over, that way you are only doing 20% of the work. You do
thins gradually 30%, 40%, 50%...etc Keep identifying the tasks that are
repetitive, the tasks that give you the least pleasure and joy, and keep
finding people to do it. until you are left with only 20% of the work you
originally used to handle, this 20% is the most important work that only you
can do, it's the heart and soul of your business and your brand, the reason
why people come to you and work with you. So you are still in full control of
what matters most in your business.

6\. Ensure Continuity with Processes: One of the things that will increase the
value of your business and make it thrive no matter what happens to you, is to
make it a process driven business. Make sure the people you hire spend 80% of
their time doing the work, and 20% on enhancing and documenting how it's done.
This is very different than reporting to you and increasing paperwork, that is
not necessary. This is about them learning to do it better, not just from you,
but on their own, and instead of just doing it, they create processes that
describe how they do it now, and they keep updating the process as it evolves.
The documentation needs to be clear to the point that they can easily hand it
over to anyone on the team. This is crucial as this means that if they leave
or anything happens, you can easily hire for the same position without having
to lose the intelligence that has gone into teaching that person and the
learning they developed by doing and enhancing their work. Documenting the
process of how they do their work, will ensure that they learn more and
advance in their work.

7\. Never delegate leadership, develop leaders: you are the only person that
is responsible for the totality of your business, so you must do the above
yourself, do not delegate your responsibility, this is your business, you lead
it, don't leave leadership to anyone else. You must develop your people to
become leaders, by giving them the space to lead and working with them,
helping them, supporting them, but neve hand them leadership, that is not how
it works. By following the steps above, and by creating an environment where
people are given the space to shine, you will see your team rising up to the
tasks they are given and show up as leaders. One of the other ways people can
show you what kind of leaders they are is to have them help you choose the new
people, train them, and support them, even if they have different tasks and
different roles, they are still a team and that dynamic will help you discover
what kind of people they are.

8\. Security and protection: While you can never fully protect anything, you
can take conscious steps to make sure your business and the assets of your
business (domains, sites...etc) are secure. Make sure you structure your
contracts with your team to include nondisclosures and protection of business
secrets. Include no competition clauses so they can't leave and take your
clients or work for a competitor for at least 6-12 months. Finally, never give
passwords away to give people access, use password protection services like
LastPass to give people access to things without sharing your passwords. Also
you can request form your service providers certain accesses to team members,
that way you still have admin rights and you have the ability to add or remove
people without giving access to the main account.

9\. Be the role model, Keep on learning and growing: There are many mentors,
coaches, business experts out there that you can work with to continue to grow
and learn how to run your business better, explore that. And there are always
brilliant business books that can expand your thinking and ability to lead.
Here are a few I recommend: Anything for Jim Collins, especially Great By
Choice Anything Seth Godin, especially Tribes Anything Simon Sinek, especially
Start With Why and Leaders Eat Last Anything Charles Duhigg, especially The
Power of Habit

I trust this is clear and helpful

Wish you all the best, and please reach out if you think there more I can help
you with

~~~
techcorner
This was one of the better responses on this thread. Couldn't find your
contact details. Please reach out to me through email mentioned on my profile.

~~~
husseinhallak
Glad you found the reply helpful, will reach out :)

------
cylinder
Would you be willing to license your platform to an overseas franchisee?

------
tmaly
a friend was in a similar situation. he has a team now and a CTO to handle day
to day technical issues.

he does a 1 hour call a week now

------
matthewhall
Contact me at matthew349hall@hotmail.com

------
avichal
I'm going to disagree with a lot of the sentiment here. I think it's rare to
find a business that really truly works and you may have found the beginnings
of one. Be ambitious. Figure out how to scale this 100x.

In terms of what you should do, it's hard to know without the specifics of
what your business does, who you are, what you are good at, how your business
will grow, etc.

I think there are some general thoughts that may help:

1\. Early on, overpivot on people you can trust who happen to be good, not
people you can't trust but who are great. Also don't hire your friends. Most
people want to hire the best people they can but I've found that loyalty, work
ethic, and trust are more important for the first or second people you hire.
But hiring friends or family can often blow up so avoid that.

2\. Figuring out how to hire people is hard. Managing employees is hard. Keep
the stakes low initially and then figure out how to hand off ownership of more
core things after you feel like you have a good sense for how to hire and who
to hire. Start with something you know really well that is not going to lead
your business to fail if you hire the wrong person. Hiring someone to do work
you know well lets evaluate the quality of someone's work. Putting them in a
role where they aren't working on something critical minimizes your risk. For
example, if you are doing all of your customer support right now hire an
Android developer if you know Android really well to add a new feature to your
app. Don't hire an engineer to work on your payment system if you don't know
that part of your stack or if you can't afford for your payment system to go
down.

3\. There is no comprehensive resource because every business is different so
you will have to spend a lot of time reading. Read through everything related
to business, entrepreneurship, hiring, scaling a business, etc. on Quora. Ask
questions there and see who responds. Find the courses similar to what you
want to learn at top business or engineering management schools (Stanford,
Harvard, MIT) and look at their curricula. Read everything in their curricula.
Read this post I wrote several years ago about the dynamics in the education
space in the US to make sure you don't fall in to the trap that many education
entrepreneurs do around thinking that your business can actually scale far
beyond where you are today: [https://avichal.wordpress.com/2011/10/07/why-
education-start...](https://avichal.wordpress.com/2011/10/07/why-education-
startups-do-not-succeed/) Google searching will get you quite far too:
[https://www.google.com/#q=hire+first+employee+startup](https://www.google.com/#q=hire+first+employee+startup)

4\. Find successful people who have built a business in your space that is 10x
bigger than yours, 100x bigger than yours, and if possible 1000x bigger than
yours. Email these people and ask for advice. See which of them you click
with. Ask them all of the questions you have and see where a relationship
develops. Ask them for the best resources thy know about related to your
business or how to scale a business. For example, I tell a lot of
entrepreneurs to read High Output Management by Andy Grove to see how an
experienced manager and executive thinks about running a large organization.
You are not yet running a large organization but you will learn a lot and can
work backwards to lessons that are relevant for your business today. In
general, you will be surprised at how often successful people will actually
help out. It's entirely possible (and likely) the woman that has a $200M
business today was in your shoes a just few years ago and is willing to help.

5\. Find successful people that you respect outside of your space and do the
same as in #4. Consider raising investment from experienced people who can
help you. Applying to YCombinator is a good option if you don't even know
where to start.

6\. See if you can find people that want to learn what you've done and could
help you. For example, there are probably people who want to learn what you've
done to bootstrap your business but who are running a small part of a very
large company. These middle managers could teach you how to build an org and
you could teach them how to start their own business.

------
allendoerfer
I am currently doing the exact same thing. Started to employ freelancers and
half-time people to do the things I do. Thought I could handle the stress and
just figure things out while I go. Well I could not. Revenue went up but
profit went down. Was still a good experience, because it showed me, that it
can be done and what I have to do to make it work. So I took a step back and I
am now documenting. Every. Single. Thing.

You cannot imagine how people find ways to do stuff differently than a sane
person/you would do it. Might sound like a small thing, but the final drop for
me was, when I asked for the results as a zip archive and got a .7z file
starting with two dashes (--for myname.7z). I decided, my time is not well
spent when I have to look up how to handle files like that in bash. How can
you even possibly come up with something like that? The guy must have been
very talented at QA, because he clearly knew how to produce edge cases.

Another thing I do not want to do a single time again is setting up
environments. Even if you use something like Vagrant, this is such a huge pain
in the ass, because even these technologies do not just work. Yeah, they work
the same on the same version of OS X or Ubuntu, but the real fun begins, when
helping over the internet to set it up on an OS you are not on yourself. I
will not do this again. I am not sure on how to solve this yet, I am currently
leaning to just defining the environment and just require it, require them to
work over SSH or literally send a laptop out. This is so much pain. "That's
it"-story here was a guy on a test project, who did not manage to set up
Ioncube Loader, because he had the wrong PHP version and literally manipulated
a screenshot of phpinfo(). I did not know whether I wanted to laugh or cry.

So now I document all the things. I have a huge collection of linters and
checkers bookmarked. I write style guides for every product, with even the
smallest things defined ("how to name a file"). For every task there should be
a checklist. Enterprises call these "standard operating procedures". I have a
flow chart on how to spend my own time, starting with "Is there a new email in
the inbox?" all the way down to questions that handle bankruptcy.

What I do not have yet is a really good way to make these documents
accessible. There are SaaSs out there (process.st, sweetprocess.com), but for
me these did not cover all the cases. I used Google Forms a bit, but
ultimately I want a nice platform to handle everything together so user
authentication etc. is unified. My current plan is to just use Gravity Forms
and WP Knowledgebase. I think ultimately I will end up with something custom
done, but until then done is better than perfect.

What many people here already recommended and I cannot stress enough is this:
You do not want employees. The huge benefit of software or consultants over
employees are obviously no running costs and the ability to just require
perfect results. Request what you want, attach your style guides and SOPs to
the contract/code, deadline, contractual penalty and done. So first write your
processes down, after that: standard software > custom software > freelancers
> employees.

Also what other people already have said: Start from the bottom. You do not
want sales automated, first you just do not want obvious false positives
inside the inbox either trough automated filters or through a person with a
process to specify if you actually do what is requested in the email. Now you
are left with actually relevant emails, what would be the next step? Huge
benefit of this is obviously, that you can use cheap workers. Now write a
process on how to find them. Then write a process on how to write that
process.

At the end, hire a COO to execute the top level process. Ideally he or she
should now not be running your company, but creating companies similar to
yours. Of course, this probably will not happen, there will always be fires to
extinguish.

Regarding your specific questions around access management etc.:

You typically want to find out how enterprises do these things or what the
industry standard is and then go from there. So for example you would write
down a process on how to set up a server, now look what tools are used to
automate this. The answer is Chef or Puppet. Are there simpler/easier tools
suited for smaller companies? Yes, Ansible. Bingo, rewrite the process as an
Ansible script/buy one, you have now automated the process.

With access management, the keywords are key-based authentication, LDAP, a
contract of what evil will come on these who abuse their trust, a process to
onboard, a process to fire (where do I need to restrict access?).

~~~
AznHisoka
I think this applies to hiring employees as well, no?

You can't hire hire someone and expect them to do the job unless they have a
well written spec and there's extensive documentation on setting up a dev
environment, deploy process, etc.

~~~
allendoerfer
Sure, but you still have to pay them, if they anyway manage to screw it up.

------
orware
I'd love to be in a position to work with/learn from someone that's been as
succesful as you in building a more or less solo business.

You didn't share a whole lot regarding which area/niche you target in your
eLearning business (I'm guessing that it doesn't cover a wide variety of
topics, unless you're a superstar that has a whole bunch of knowledge across a
wide variety of topics :-).

But if I were in your shoes and looking to expand it would probably make sense
to want to try and recreate the same success as the existing eLearning
products in a new niche/area so you might need to recruit someone with a
different specialty that has the requisite knowledge.

Another strategy I've seen used (this was about 10 years ago when I was fresh
out of college and looking into how I could make money online), mainly by
folks that were selling products in the "how to make money online" category,
was the cross-selling between different groups of these people. Essentially,
if you had purchased from one of them, it wouldn't take too long until you
started getting emails from the one you had purchased from that mentioned a
product from "one of their good friends" that sounded very good too and it was
difficult to pass up wanting to purchase the other products (I definitely
spent way too much during this period on these sorts of things before I
realized how much money I was spending and realized I really needed to tone it
down). It was effective though, and was more of a collaboration between
similar eLearning companies selling products in this cross-selling fashion.

From the pure employee side, it looks like ZenPayroll has changed their name
to Gusto ([https://gusto.com/](https://gusto.com/)), but I think they have a
pretty good offering for a small business wanting to expand and hire employees
by helping to simplify the tax parts of things for you.

You also didn't mention if you were operating as a sole proprietorship or
already as some sort of safer Corporation/LLC organization, which you would
want to consider doing as well to help protect yourself, particularly if you
would be hiring employees.

I myself have wondered / thought about the same problem you yourself have
asked here though...I've just never been successful enough to actually be able
to act on it (my little software business only makes about $100/sales or so
per month so not enough to hire anybody unfortunately :-). How do small
companies deal with this stuff? I think in a lot of ways they deal with it by
having someone that's experienced with all of the "paperwork" side of things.
My uncle for example ran a small business with his son painting cars, and
neither was particularly knowledgeable about any of the business side...they
just knew how to paint cars. My aunt on the other hand had experience with
that sort of paperwork and taking care of it so she "abstracted" that away
from having to deal with it. You'd likely need someone similar to help with
those sorts of things (though again, Gusto may help with quite a bit of it, at
least with some of the regular stuff related to taxes if their product hasn't
changed much from the ZenPayroll days).

I wish you the best of luck, and if you ever want an eager, young fellow to
work with feel free to contact me (email's in my profile :-)!

~~~
techcorner
_I 'm guessing that it doesn't cover a wide variety of topics_

Your guess is spot-on. That's why the need to hire talented folks and seeking
suggestions here.

------
bbcbasic
I recommend reading The EMyth and to a lesser extent the 4 hour week.

~~~
techcorner
ok thanks. This is the 2nd rec for EMyth today. Will definitely put it in my
reading list.

~~~
randomnumber314
I'd put it at the top of your list, considering it touches on exactly what
you're about to endure.

