Any advice on hiring the first developer (not CTO) on an equity basis?
Hey Indie Hackers,
My name is Serge. I'm the co-founder of Approveit - Approval Management Platform Built for Teams that Love Slack.
So far, we have onboarded more than 140 teams and counting. We got amazing advisors from Google and DocuSign on board and were invited to a YC interview, but wasn't accepted this time (looking forward to the next batch).
Got our first several paying teams including big ones and getting a lot of user feedback and requests that we put into our backlog.
Since our project is fully bootstrapped and our MRR is still lower than expenses we are looking for someone who might be interested in joining our team on an equity basis until the upcoming investment round.
We are looking for frontend (JS/ReactJS/CSS/HTML) and backend (Python, Django, MySQL/PostgreSQL) dev.
I want to ask what is the best channel to find the right person? Any kind of advice is highly appreciated 🙏
If you have a CTO, they should get the first dev from their own connections. You have to make sure you hire the best people and that process can take a good while. So it makes sense that the CTO hires someone they already trust and whose talent they admire.
If you don't have a CTO, hire a CTO. I would offer an option amount equivalent to the equity amount I own.
Can I ask - if you're only hiring your first dev now then who built your platform?
best thing to do is to leave the dev staff to the CTO and concentrate on your end of things
but with your stack you going to have serious issues scaling up, React with JS is as bad as you can get (move to typescript as soon as possible), generally React and Django only works in big teams only if it is designed for big teams from the beginning. Assuming you are 2-3 people you will be OK for a while at least.
Back to the hiring thing, get someone close to your location, remote works OK when the work is organized and structured or the people are senior developers with good work ethics, but chances are you not going to find anyone like that.