We Hired 10 Employees!
We started Kapwing (an online image and video editor) almost two years ago and grew the company from 2 co-founders to 12 full-time employees in the last 12 months. Our team is based full-time in San Francisco, where the unemployment rate is astonishingly low. I wanted to write up a brief article on our learnings around hiring for other first-time entrepreneurs trying to hire engineers.
Like marketing and sales, hiring requires hustle. There’s no silver bullet and no easy way. We’ve spent less than $1000 on hiring, but I’ve had coffees or breakfasts with probably hundreds of candidates. Measured by hours, recruiting is one of our largest investments.
In this article, I summarize the channels and tactics that worked and didn't work for us. This list is not exhausted, but it does give you a place to start if you're trying to source talent in SF.
Read more on the Kapwing blog
I wonder if you really need so many people :)))
Right, you always hear about how many people are on the team, but never about WHY so many people are even needed.
We're not VC funded but at similar revenue numbers. We have 13 people including myself, but not all full time. Here's the breakdown...
3 - Marketing
2 - Sales
3- Customer Success / Support
3 - Product Development (dev, qa, tech lead)
1 - manager of sales and customer success
They are VC funded. Exponential growth is a must!
Yeah, it just answers the question "How are they paying?" but not the question "Why do they need so many people?" :)))))
Exponential growth of customers - right
Exponential growth of sales - right
Exponential growth of employees - hmmmm....
How much did you pay lever.co to host your jobs?
About $4k, which is a lot. But it has saved us time and given us a code-free way to update job openings.
Congrats!
How are you acquiring users right now?
Mostly SEO. The product also has some built-in virality because of the watermark and because people share their video URLs with each other.