Hiring my first employee (why, when, how?)
Hey folks,
I have two projects that are starting to make some real revenue (~20k/month, split almost 50/50). One is a SaaS cloud app focused on the healthcare space and the other is an adsense-driven financial information website.
I’m worried that I will have a hard time scaling these out properly, since there’s only so many hours in a day.
So I started to look into hiring someone to help me. I have a lot of experience hiring engineers at work and I am one by trade so i recently interviewed a lot of referrals + people through upwork.
I think there’s definitely some work to be done technically on both, but I think the biggest item for me to solve is content-marketing and figuring out a reliable sales channel for the SaaS app.
Hiring someone also makes me feel nervous. It’s my first time hiring a contractor to work full-time for me on a side-project. Would love tips on how to get past the nerves.
What do you think I should do? Make the first hire a sales/marketing person or hire an engineer so I can take over more of those functions? Should I hire anyone at all?
Would love tips. :)
Yes you have to hire to help you scale. I'm in a similar situation to you (SaaS app similar revenue) and have tried a bunch of different options re hiring.
Hiring full time can work out, but its a big cost and risk if you hire the wrong person, you could make you stressed trying to keep them fully occupied, and it's likely, as you kind of mentioned, that you may benefit, at your scale, from several niche skills (eg sales, content writing, development) as opposed to one full timer in a specific role.
My best recommendation is to start with hourly contractors on Upwork - it's easy to test them out so that there is no difficulty parting ways if it doesn't work out, you can start to learn how to manage people effectively, they can scale with any work availability, normally even up to full time, you can also hire several good contractors to fill the specific skill gaps that you have.
The other thing to point out, which Rand Fishkin (founder of Moz) articulates really well in his book, is that founder will inherently struggle to hire in areas that are not their areas of expertise. It is just like a law of physics, so you may need to go through trial and error to hire sales guys, marketing guys etc.
Back to your question specifically - hire contractors for both to start, ideally to work on lower value work while you shift to higher value, if they're awesome find a way to scale up their involvement.
Best of luck.
Yes, I believe you should hire someone to help you scale.... You cant go to the next level alone...
Are you going to wire someone remotely? If yes I would recommend to use Upwork because they make everything more easy and convenient, plus they give you lots of easy tools to hire an rehire every time you need, invoices, and more.