What was it like hiring your first employee? (Advice needed)

1. It depends on how much risk they take and whether they want more equity compensation or salary.

2. A fair salary will depend on the individual. Talk with them, what do they want. It helps to have a range in mind and then ask them for a range and see if there's overlap.

3. It depends. What roles/responsibilities are they taking on? Are they taking on an employee role where you are managing them or they taking on responsibility of client and ownership of the success of company?

4. We started with outsourcing then converted our contractors. It was great because we were able to figure out who worked and who didn't prior to full-time employment. I am biased here because my company focuses exclusively on helping startups scale tech talent, but honestly unless you need a PhD level of expertise to build some sort of proprietary algorithm, I recommend people go contracting.

I understand alot of founders want control and want to have an internal engineering team. But that takes alot of time/effort to build. You should focus on building a product and selling that product, not building a tech team. If you are already profitable and have the funding to do so, then yeah go a head an hire directly.

At our company we've hired ~31 employees now. The biggest tip I can give you is treat everyone like an individual and listen to what they want/need. It will vary with everyone.

If you really want to get into the weeds of hiring, I suggest "The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age" it's a great book that discusses all of these questions at length.

• Jeff

Hi Jakub,

1. You can decide this later when you will have a few employees. You can get inspiration from Buffer open equity formula : https://buffer.com/resources/buffer-open-equity-formula/
2. The salary they accept :) Be very generous on the variable part of the salary. The more leads/traffic/growth they bring, the more they earn.
3. It does not have to be. Anyway, that's only a title, the more important question is what can this person bring to the table that you can't.
4. It can be but the ultimate person who will be in charge of Marketing will be you. You can start by hiring freelancers for specific marketing tasks, and then hire someone permanently when you are more sure of your needs.

My fire hire was not one, but two salespeople :)
This brought some healthy competition, helped me understand how to build a repeatable process, etc... They had a quite low base salary, with uncapped variable. I told them they would have some equity, but only spent time/money to settle this later.

Hope this helps