
Who Should a Startup Hire First? - prostoalex
https://shift.newco.co/who-should-a-startup-hire-first-c12b279814aa?_hsenc=p2ANqtz-_PCXMqeUnmSOzPWyBIGy31CyC-5UU43rFLyLvKWs9ImS-ILur5n7fPrpvHNLBqL6uP62y3R0kT6GfuHQNJ5ohkuSCLVg&_hsmi=36077482#.dx41p7m5o
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dsugarman
I think this is a bit roundabout but mostly true. Here's what I see and the
right conclusion, in my experience / my humble opinion.

trend: startup founders who have never done sales want to hire a sales expert

problem: there is no sales script, the product is too infant to sell for a
seasoned sales person. the sales person doesn't know what they can and can't
promise to dictate the roadmap and vision of the company as a whole.

solution: as painful as it is, founders need to do all the selling until the
product is mature enough and there is a repeatable sales process that doesn't
require a crazy amount of dev work for each new customer

~~~
mountaineer22
Please correct me if I am wrong, but this sounds like there really was no MVP
that solved the pain point of multiple potential customers (that the startup
has identified)?

~~~
leesalminen
We sell a business management SaaS that aims to cover 80% of business
operations in a niche space.

After building a MVP with a handful of businesses and people with industry
experience we learned through the sales process that there was a vast amount
of differences between each individual business.

We (the founders) had to be the initial salespeople to gain knowledge from
several hundred businesses to identify the commonalities and weed out the
crazies and formulate a dev plan on how to cover these differences.

I guess my point is that you don't know what you don't know until you do
something. Having this knowledge funnel down through a non technical
salesperson would have been detrimental.

It gets better! 18 months in and we are successful with having a dedicated
salesperson with limited product knowledge backed by a technical onboarding
team.

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kalehrishi
First person to hire is a admin/someone who could take of simple tasks eating
pie of your time. Figure out what is time consuming and find someone to
delegate it.

~~~
Avshalom
Yup admin/secretarial. It's not glamorous but good secretarial staff is what
lets/keeps every one else working on what they were actually hired for.

~~~
jorgemf
When the startup is starting and there is only a couple of founders what is it
going to do a secretarial? Bring you coffee in the morning? When you have a
team and you have your secound round of investment, then a secretarial is a
must for the reasons you said, but at the beginning I don't see it.

~~~
Avshalom
If you're at a point where it's actually hiring and not 'talking some one into
spec work by calling them a founder' some one has to answer phones, schedule
appointments, file old shit, start looking through health plans, make sure
bills get paid etc. It can be you, or you can work on your product.

'part time secretary needed, light admin duties, possibility of position
growing to full time' is a completely normal job ad. Any temp agency in any
city you happen to be in can give a hundred applicants if you're hesitant
about hiring someone too early.

~~~
jorgemf
If you are 2-3 on your team and you feel you need someone to care about all
those things, something is wrong in your company (for most companies). You
probably receive a phone call and a couple of emails a day for customer
support or other things, and probably don't have so many bills to pay. So you
don't need someone full time or part time for this, unless you are a special
case that need 4-5 meetings a day with different people.

~~~
andrewflnr
> probably receive a phone call and a couple of emails a day

I'm not sure if this is too optimistic or too pessimistic, but I definitely
don't buy it in general. Founders want to be building the product and talking
to users. I can only imagine there's all kind of other crap that would be
smart to hire someone to take care of.

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DelaneyM
Early hires should be solely dictated by the needs of the business.

That said, I hear where he's coming from. It's nearly impossible to build a
great sales team if you, yourself, don't know sales. Ditto for ops, product,
business development, fundraising, etc.

But you don't have to do it all yourself. One of the valuable things you
should look to early investors to bring to the table (besides money) is
connections and deep expertise. In my last founding experience, we delegated
the hiring of our first top salesperson to an investor, then did the same
thing for marketing. It could not have worked out better.

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falloutx
Do sales people have something important other than their interpersonal
skills? Like if I am just a 1 person startup, I am pretty sure the 2nd guy to
hire would always be some confident full-stack guy. I am not going to go and
find some sales pro. There would be no way to convince that guy to work for a
small startup.

~~~
visakanv
> Do sales people have something important other than their interpersonal
> skills?

Consider the difference between my dad telling a joke at dinner and a standup
comedian doing a 2 hour set to a sold out arena. They both technically are
"just telling jokes", but there's a lot more that goes into the latter –
pacing, rhythm, crowd control dynamics, an extensive repertoire, so on and so
forth.

Similarly, great salespeople have 'advanced interpersonal skills'. They have a
great understanding of human motivations, how people think about how to make
decisions, and they're great at systematically breaking through worries and
concerns and so on. They also typically have great networks and relationships
with others, which can be very useful.

But yeah, I wouldn't hire a sales person until much later either.

~~~
danvasquez29
it's not just the skills, but the dedicated time. Cultivating leads and
developing marketing plans takes time that you as a tech lead shouldn't have
and skills that you probably don't either.

It's a full time job to do well, and your technical people's time is too
valuable to have them half-assing it.

~~~
quirkot
A big part of the value a successful salesperson brings to the table isn't "I
can talk well," but being adept at A) determining who is valuable to talk with
B) finding out how to speak to them C) in the language they use to make
decisions

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brianwawok
Seems reasonable. You want to hire what you don't know, but you will likely
suck at it (unless you are lucky). So hire for what you already know, so you
can do more.

~~~
k__
Also, it's easier to give such a person meaningful tasks, because you
understand what they do.

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mkarazin
Many people have commented about how to hire a skill you don't know about, and
it was a top highlight in the article.

I know a company trying to solve this. Expert Interview -
[http://expertinterview.com/](http://expertinterview.com/) . I've used them
for hiring specialty technical areas and I was about 90% happy with the
result. Disclosure, I know the CEO personally because we have a common
investor.

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smallnamespace
Article spends a lot of words establishing the distinction between comparative
advantage[1] and absolute advantage[2].

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_advantage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_advantage)

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iamthepieman
Me. They should hire me first. Then somebody else like me to support me, but
not as important as me. And then the people who do various other unrelated
jobs that aren't as important as my job. Then, and only if they are doing well
and only if they have enough parking and private office spaces should they
hire people who are both not like me and whose jobs I do not entirely
understand and who are therefore much less important to me (and the company).

~~~
misterbwong
A players hire A players. B players hire C players.

You're definitely describing a B (or a C) :)

~~~
iamthepieman
A players are a myth. The only A players are the ones who are creating the
game. Everyone else is just there to have a good time.

The game is dead...long live the game.

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satysin
If it is a tech startup and _you_ are already the tech person then you want to
get a good technical project manager to help you organise and prioritise
everything. However you want a TPM with good general admin skills over expert
technical skills. Someone who can understand technical issues but can also
deal with all the other crap you don't want to have to deal with as it is just
a distraction.

~~~
martinald
Agreed 100%. A good TPM will save you so much time to focus on other stuff.

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edoceo
I'm a technical founder. My first hire was sales. Second hire was
support+sales, third hire is sales. Fourth is another tech.

~~~
spamizbad
Sounds very smart. How is that working out?

~~~
edoceo
Company is default alive. No outside money (yet). Growth was slow so any
interested investors first complement on the profitability milestone the ask
why growth is not some exponential curve. I just point back to our profitable
company. Pick one: "explosive" growth, requires funding. A small, profitable
and growing company may not, founders get more action and customers get more
focus. And I get more time with the family than my last "growth" oriented gig.

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hw
I think as a founder you would want to hire someone who is a clone of you -
someone who, like you, are able to tackle most if not all areas of running a
business, willing to work as hard and as long as you to get your first X
users. Someone who is as passionate as you are in your business / industry /
niche. Someone who can offer second opinions on things like tech, product,
sales, and work with you on the roadmap.

Of course, once a startup grows to teens of employees, then you start hiring
more based on your business' needs, but initially you'd want someone who can
(and are willing to) do everything.

~~~
hueving
>Someone who is as passionate as you are in your business / industry / niche

But is willing to do it for a 0.1% equity stake...

~~~
hw
If you can get someone who is, why not? :D But more than likely you'd have to
fork out a bit more. All about sacrifices. Rather give up a slightly bigger
chunk of equity and grow 10x, than not hire and end up in the deadpool after a
while.

~~~
Jemmeh
That's unlikely. Talking like this you're hiring someone to be a co-founder.

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smartwave7
This is solid advice if you want your company to grow linearly at the rate you
acquire knowledge. Hire people who are verifiable more knowledgeable than you
in areas you seek to grow.

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haraball
After working 3 years each in 2 tech startups with mostly tech people, the
missing link were in both someone to take care of the design, usability and
user research of the products. Design was an afterthough ("Not enough work for
a designer"), and usability was a not a known concept. Kind of hard to become
a "viral" success when there's no feedback loop from the people you want as
your users.

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20years
Customer support and administration. Both of these will suck up the founders
time and can more easily be hired for vs software dev or sales. This will also
free up the founders time to focus on other things such growth.

I personally think sales should be done by the founders until there is a solid
& predicable sales process and business model in place.

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pklausler
Not people who use "whom", apparently.

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ikeboy
This also mostly applies to a non-startup.

I've always said that to properly automate/outsource something, you need to be
capable of doing it yourself. This applies regardless of the business,
although there may be exceptions.

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vacri
This doesn't work in reverse for me. A founder who is good at business and
sales should hire a sales staffer first? The tech side of a business generally
moves a lot slower - and recovers a lot slower - than sales. The longer you
have poor technical decisions being made, the greater the tech debt.

One company I work for has taken about 18 months to get rid of some technical
debt from the origins of the company, which didn't have a senior-level techie.
The database still has seven different ways of representing a timestamp in it
from those early days.

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Kpourdeilami
I know that our first hire is definitely gonna be a front-end developer so I
can focus solely on the backend

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theophrastus
Having spent too much time with Biotech CEOs the old maxim that accountants
are "first to be hired and last to be fired" is statistically valid. Their
awareness of the raison d'etre of any business should be available to guide
all the decisions.

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jlebrech
it depends who you're selling to, are you selling the public or or selling the
company to an investor.

then it's either an engineer or a designer.

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psadri
A bit contrarian but I think the first hire should be a great technical
recruiter.

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ausjke
The best metaphor I have not read for a while, which I totally agree. Thanks!

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Frogolocalypse
So. The article writer's theory is that everyone should be like him.

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msane
A clear recipe for hiring B's under a clickbait title.

I'd fire that guy first.

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l1feh4ck
Hire some one who can hire people better.

~~~
haggy
Nobody knows who better to hire than the founder of a super early stage
startup (< 5 people). The founder knows exactly what issues need to be
tackled, has the most information about the product/service being sold, and
knows what kinds of people they mesh well with. Bringing in a recruiter at
this stage is not only wasting vast amounts of precious startup capital but
could also thoroughly damage or kill the startup because wasted time, effort,
and improper direction.

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unixhero
Cto, hr, sales, devs

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supercoder
A designer.

~~~
sintaxi
A good designer is quite important but I'd only suggest making them a 1st hire
if said designer manages social media and provides customer support.

~~~
supercoder
Would you say the same thing about a developer ?

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User23
Your first hire should be a woman PoC because diversity has to start at the
beginning.

