I'm a non-developer founder.
I needed to recruit a developer to make my idea come to life. I put listings out on Upwork.
I found someone who sounded like just what I needed. He asked that I pay 20% to get started. (I knew better).
But in hindsight, there were multiple red flags - no real references, no great examples of jobs he had done, but he talked a good game and I was super eager to get started.
He actually had one reference that said he did a pretty good job, some issues, but not enough to convince me not to move forward.
I paid up front - but he took so long to start (and never actually did), it fell outside Upwork's period to try and recoup anything.
It was a painful way to start, but I learned a lot and ended up finding a fantastic developer that I have been working with ever since. So, in the end, it was $2K payment to a really tough lesson that luckily turned out for the better.
Anyone else have a painful 'getting started' story?
Yikes! Sorry to hear this happened.
My story didn’t happen quite the same, but it was related to hiring too. Twice actually. Once with a developer who basically did work really, really slowly and always left things so incomplete that I had to redo a lot of it. The second was a customer service agent who barely answered tickets. I hired her part time and the person was located on the other side of the world. My thinking was so that we could provide 24/7 coverage. 🤦♂️
I think the transition from solo founder to multi employee phase is perhaps one of the most difficult transitions without the resources that come with an accelerator or funding. I find those institutions provide other assets (Eg. Legal, HR network, etc) that doesn’t come so readily for us on the bootstrapped path.
Hey Simon - Thanks for sharing your story. Totally agree, finding the right people to move some of the work load around is tricky, especially while bootstrapping.
I luckily was able to quickly find a better team I have been working with for a couple years now, so it was a big silver lining, but it was quite painful at the time.