From Zero to One Employee: Hire as Soon As You Can
I have worked on Smartbnb solo for the first year, starting in August 2016 with the launch of Messaging.
The Solo Year
Smartbnb had humble beginnings, but it was quick profitable enough to allow me to pay my rent and stop my (not so healthy) instant ramen diet. I created Smartbnb’s first job: mine.
The first months were a learning experience. It was about interviewing early users to understand their pains, improving the product to make them happy, and closing (some) sales.
A year later, in August 2017, something not so funny happened: I was overwhelmed.
I spent the better part of the month pinned down in bed continuously answering customer questions from the morning until late night. Every morning I would take my breakfast to my room, and raise my eyes at 4pm realizing I had not touched it. This was affecting my ability to keep iterating on the product.
Hiring early, rather than when overworked
I thought this was a good time to hire, with a now comfortable recurring revenue secured and enough volume of support inquiries to warrant a full-time job.
I know now that it was wrong: I should have hired the minute I could afford it. Deciding to hire when there was there was enough work for a full-time job means having to keep doing that work on my own, plus recruiting, plus doing all the other things (development, marketing, sales..).
This will be disruptive to any small team; it would be especially so in a team of one.
Let’s go do this hiring thing!
The first job ad!
I put my first job ad on Upwork for a customer service agent to handle the European night shift, so a person that would be based in Asia.
The idea would be to start the day with an inbox zero and being able to answers most questions from the US West Coast and the Asia-Pacific region. Since I was expecting it would take about 6 months of training to be autonomous, they should be operational for the summer in Australia and New Zealand!
The (easiest) first interview and the first hire!
The job ad was pretty open and generic, so it received a lot of generic applications.
Luckily one application was really standing out. Marii was Estonian (now that is practical: the company is incorporated in Estonia), digital nomad (i.e., she has some Airbnb experience as a guest), planning to spend the next year in Australia and South East Asia.
What made that application stand out in my view was that she identified Smartbnb from a completely anonymized job ad, with just a general pitch (and the place of incorporation, granted).
I valued this. It meant she really investigated the employer until she was comfortable enough to let that show in her application. If she was wrong in her conclusion, her application would have failed on this basis alone. I thought this investigative mind would be really beneficial in checking with a user that their configuration is okay and properly escalate bug reports. That was key to autonomy and trust.
I found myself getting really excited about meeting Marii: how could she trace that job back to Smartbnb, how did she do it? We had an interview very soon after I received her application, and I think I spent 80% of the Skype call selling the position rather than properly asking questions. We decided to give it a go for a few weeks. I had not interviewed anyone else for the position and I have never regretted this ever since.
Although Marii’s recruitment process was unlike anything that has happened since, there were a few takeaways still:
- A great candidate should be exciting. You want to daydream about hiring them and think of the potential it brings to the team.
- Generic ads will be met with generic interest. When you are in competition with every job ad from much larger brands,that is a good exercise as it forces you to find out who you are; you won’t be able to lie about it.
- Take the luck that life throws at you (like Marii’s recruitment), because every unfair advantage matters. The problem is that this obviously doesn’t scale well. That is what the nexts steps taught me.
After hiring
From my perspective, things went quite well for a few months. The business kept growing, and I could have more time to focus on the product. Also, new realisations dawned on me:
- There would need to be more hires: I had a bit more time to handle the issues and focus on the development, but I was still in charge of the customer service for Europe and working late night for the US.
- Communicating in the context of a distributed team was still new. With Marii being in Australia, followed by Indonesia, there wasn’t that much of an overlap. We organized one meeting weekly over Skype, in addition to the asynchronous back and forth on Slack. This put a lot of pressure on that one meeting, where all subjects had to be discussed because that was the one occasion.
- A team of two. Something new happened: when there were issues, I could reach out to someone. That was instrumental to brainstorm new ideas and overcome the specific challenges that occurred then. Being a team of two gives strength and endurance.
- I am a boss now 🙈. Being a team means having to enjoy some of the fun stuff: compensating fairly, handling holidays, retaining and motivating. All of this is still a learning experience for me even at this point — more than a year after that first hire! The best indicator of success is that Marii is still here, and very much the chief investigator of our customer success team! 🙏
