This is relevant to all early stage, bootstrapped startups and those who are lucky enough to be accepted into an accelerator program such as Y-Combinator, 500startups (where I mentor).
Based on a lot of sessions with founders who have needed to hire when they are still fund raising, have little or no money to pay someone, including an engineer who’s hungry and building your product in his mothers basement for nothing but a hope of an awesome career.. This may seem absolutely impossible and also please bear in mind, this is only ok if you are truly bootstrapped, i would not advise getting into a salary war once you grow and have funding, this is should only be a temporary measure don’t push salaries down if you can afford it.
I talked to two guys this last week that impressed me so much. One of the companies had just been accepted into 500startups, a founder, 1 engineer and another co-founder. The founder i met with wanted to hire engineers, his remit was that he wanted someone young, hungry and willing to learn and work hard. He didn’t believe in hiring someone with a CS degree and felt like a self taught individual would work well for his startup. His ideas way surpassed my own advice to him. When you are bootstrapped you have to be creative. So this is the guy who convinced a 21 yr old to work on building his product for 6 months where he lived in his mothers basement and wasn’t paid apart from some nominal costs. So how did he do it, can this repeated in a process. I thought about this – and it can’t, because its the human aspect, however there are qualities that these type of founders possess that make it more likely that they will always hire creatively and the best. I’ll call him Lucas for now. He’s charming, charasmatic, has a great style, calm and confident rolled into one. He’s a born hustler, but nice about it. I’m like a broken record with this “create a compelling story” Its as much about selling yourself. He could’ve convinced me to work for nothing!
The other founder, I’ll call him Adam hired a developer and just paid his rent and living costs – he also was charming, charasmatic and a born socialiser – he will never have trouble hiring. he was applying to accelerator progams and had no outside funding.
Luckily those of you reading this may have not had to deal with working in a corporate environment. When you interview for job, the key things that any good employee will look for is qualities of the person you are going to be working for. The best employees are ones that have a huge respect for you, like and admire you, want to be like you one day. If you can sell that you have the abillity to convince a potential engineer to work for you then start being creative. They are also more likely to have loyalty to you which is rare in the tech workspace these days.
I just hired an employee, he’s 26 yrs old – I pay him $500/month to work on my social media, scheduling, appt making, dealing with phone calls, researching articles, dealing with tech issues, basically everything else but not getting me coffee, actually he does and organizes my work life so its smooth and i can focus on core business issues without him i would not have enough time in the day- how did i get him to work for so little. Well i’m sales person at heart. I’m very transparent as a Founder. The reason he works for me and still is – becuase i did create a compelling story, he sees the potential of the business, and I talked to him extensively about what he wants out of his career. As time goes on i introduce further aspects of the business that are more crucial. He’s a complete tech nut now – finding out that he has ambitions to grow and eventually have the ability to be a Senior Advisor who then takes over my role of hiring and training new employees – he wants to be the boss, and i’d like to take a step back. I find empowering individuals goes a long way and if you are bootstrapped its the only way to go.
Now i have a developer who is working on a recruiting product for me – her comments to me were i’ll work for you for as much as you can pay. this is music to my ears, i will reward all my employees and they know it.
You know you have a great product, you see the potential, you have ambitions to grow the company and hopefully one day go IPO – get that excitement going.
If that isn’t an option or doesn’t work, not everyone can do that, its a personality thing. My suggestions are to contact your own alumni, contact school careers who can for no cost provide really strong young developers who will be eager to learn.
rubybhattacharya 