Ask HN: As a first-time solopreneur how would you go about hiring the first team

Re:Ask HN: As a first-time solopreneur how would you go abou... by olegp on Thursday November 09, 2023 @09:24AM (#38205346)

My advice would be to find advisors who are experts in these skills and have them screen for them, while you do everything else. Pay them for their time in cash or options. Make sure to hire senior level people first and then have them screen for these skills in subsequent hires going forward.

Finding external recruiters that are able to screen for these skills is another option, but such recruiters are few and far between and their interests may not be aligned with yours.

At Toughbyte we do tech recruitment and have helped early stage startups hire CTOs on a few occasions where I have been the one assessing their tech skills and culture fit, but this isn't something that I have yet figured out how to delegate properly to other team members.

When it comes to assessing tech skills, this blog post I wrote is worth a read: https://www.toughbyte.com/blog/how-to-effectively-assess-cod...

Other posts tagged Hiring may also be of interest.

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Re:Ask HN: As a first-time solopreneur how would you go abou... by RamblingCTO on Thursday November 09, 2023 @10:10AM (#38205969)

So now we get linkedin spam on hackernews, nice!

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Re:Ask HN: As a first-time solopreneur how would you go abou... by olegp on Thursday November 09, 2023 @10:24AM (#38206151)

What is it about my comment that made you classify it as such? The link to the blog post I wrote or something else?

I'm genuinely curious.

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Re:Ask HN: As a first-time solopreneur how would you go abou... by RamblingCTO on Thursday November 09, 2023 @11:10AM (#38206856)

First 50% of your comment is a plug for a service you coincidentally provide, while the other half is a plug for your service/blog (as you serve me a 503 I can't check, but this is most probably a marketing blog). But maybe I'm just so used to seeing this stuff in my linkedin inbox (80% of requests I get).

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Re:Ask HN: As a first-time solopreneur how would you go abou... by olegp on Thursday November 09, 2023 @11:46AM (#38207361)

Thanks for taking the time to explain!

I suppose I wasn't clear, but we don't typically help with the first tech hires, since I haven't figured out how to do it in a scalable manner. I also believe that very few external recruiters can help here, since most don't have the tech skills required.

Fair point about the blog. I probably wouldn't have written the comment if I didn't think that we have relevant useful content there that I could link to.

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Re:Ask HN: As a first-time solopreneur how would you go abou... by RamblingCTO on Thursday November 09, 2023 @12:46PM (#38208219)

Well, thank you for staying polite and good luck with your endeavours ;)

A point I would also like to make is interest: a tech recruiter/"virtual team" provider might have misaligned goals to yours.

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Re:Ask HN: As a first-time solopreneur how would you go abou... by seanthemon on Thursday November 09, 2023 @10:33AM (#38206287)

Yep, a strong technical recruiter can make a world of a difference

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