> but frankly do not have a need for technical advice by itself.

Then it sounds like you made the correct decision.

If the project is really open source, maybe you need to shift from feature implementation to community-building. If the userbase is large and has a cause, then that can be a better carrot for a first SWE than an outsized salary.

It’s possible that your issue is allocating too much equity to investors and advisors and not enough to employees.

I wholeheartedly agree that technical advice isn’t needed at this stage and likely the main thing to solve for is how fast can you iterate to an MVP and PMF-solution that could allow you to fundraise further. I’ve worked with some startups where they outsourced on a solution basis to alleviate the risk of building the wrong thing. Architecture was ok but not the most important issue at the current stage.

Disclaimer: I run a consulting firm with fractional CTO services for startups and previously founded a startup.