Hire to Go Faster

It’s always hard to find the money to grow a team, as you always have projects that you could do if you could just hire more people.

It’s especially hard to free up the cash in a bootstrapped company, where you don’t have that extra injected capital to lubricate your cash flows, but the trade off of speed v. equity given up is real. I certainly feel it every day when every new task has to slot into an already full schedule. Every decision to do one thing instead of another is a trade off between “urgent today” and “important tomorrow”.

Specifically, this shows itself in the tension between bug fixes and building new features. With even 3 or 4 engineers, features can be shuffled, rescoped or pushed back without feeling a loss of momentum. With a single engineer however, you are single-tracking. Every task is directly substituted for another, so a bug fix now pushes back every feature delivery date, even if just by a few hours.

I try to regularly meet people for coffee to get advice, and I'm always grateful to get it whether I decide to take it or not. As a great song¹ goes:

Be careful whose advice you buy, but be patient with those who supply it.

Anyway, a week or two ago I met with a friend of mine who has been a SaaS Founder (CEO) for the past few years and asked him how long it took him to get his product to where it feels like its a real product (not that these ever really feel "done"). He has 2 developers working full time, and with a small number of integrations it’s taken about a year to get where he is. He has clients, so he’s been iterating with them too.

It’s not his first time founding a company, and his main advice about growth was that if you want to go faster you need more people.

We are at least in the lucky position to be able to afford to pay the few salaries we have right now, and it seems fairly certain that we have more cash coming in in the next few months. This feeling of almost being able to afford more staff keeps us in limbo. The tantalizing promise of cash (just not quite yet) to cover the extra expenses is a risk. Will we delay too much: past the point where they could have made the difference? For now at least, that’s a gamble we’re taking.

Originally an essay by Mary Schmich in the Chicago Tribune (June 1, 1997). "Advice, like youth, probably just wasted on the young". Recorded by Baz Luhrmann as "Everybody's Free (to wear sunscreen)", also in 1997. ↩

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