

Ask HN: Optimal number of employees? - fooshint

How do I determine how many employees I should hire for my startup throughout its lifecycle?
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nostrademons
Look for bottlenecks. Are you overwhelmed with work? Can you partition off
some of the work and explain it to someone else to do in less time than it
takes for you to do it yourself? Will the work bring in more money than that
person will cost?

If the answer to all those is yes, it's time to hire. Otherwise, it's not.

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zer00eyz
This works in most cases but "Will the work bring in more money than that
person will cost" sometimes isn't so cut and dry.

Customer service is a great example of this. A good CS person is going to
create value for you in the long run (retaining customers, and preserving
relationships). Your still going to be aligning income to staffing, but the
numbers may be a bit less tangible in some cases.

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rahimnathwani
I'm assuming you're asking how to do this in advance, rather than how to make
each hiring decision. A few ideas:

\- Hiring is only part of your wider planning process. Do you know what you
need to do in the future? If so, use that as a guide.

\- Hiring is only part of your wider budgeting process. You will want to
create a financial plan for your business, in order to force yourself to be
explicit about your assumptions, and to work out whether there is a viable
business there.

\- Other similar companies may provide some indication of what you need, e.g.
if you're a SaaS business then you could look at other SaaS business with
similar customers and deal sizes, to figure out how many sales people you need
for a given volume of sales. But you should probably do your own thinking
bottom up first, rather than just triangulating from external data.

