You Should Try Doing This Before You Hire
It will help you set realistic expectations.
So you are thinking of hiring a DevOps guy, an iOS developer, or may be someone to handle customer support? Great!
But before hiring someone for a job position, try doing it yourself first. It will make you understand and appreciate the nature of the work. You’ll be able to set the right kind of expectations — for yourself and also for your new hire, and will know what a job well done looks like.
Moreover, when you post a job description on AngelList, you’ll be able to write a realistic job description and would know what questions to ask and how to evaluate the right kind of answers. This will prevent you from writing, “Need a highly creative UX designer with great communication skills” or “In urgent need of Ninja coders.”
If you try it out yourself you’ll also know whether to hire someone full-time or part-time, outsource the work, or keep doing it yourself if it isn’t much.
This helps you become a better manager as you’ll be supervising people who are doing a job that you’ve done before. You’ll be able to set the right expectations and would know when to criticise and when to support.
In my last startup, I wrote all the code for the first version. I am not even a CS guy, so I had a friend to help me out. In my current startup, two of us are doing all the work — talking to users, doing the UX, writing code, getting feedback and everything in between. We just got started, and for the first year or two we plan to do everything all by ourselves. We intend to run with the ball as far as we can before handing it off. That way, we will know what we should be looking for once we do decide to hire.
Resisting to hire helps you stay lean and scrappy. We work from our living room, our balcony, our bedrooms, coffee shops, and bars — depending on the day and the mood. Hiring someone would require us to provide a decent workplace and bring some structure. We don’t have the need or the luxury for that.
It’s true that you may feel out of your place at times when you are taking a lot of workloads. If you are a coder and you try to design, or vice-versa, you might even feel like you suck. But that’s all right. You can hire your way out of that feeling, or you can learn your way out of it. Try learning first and when you are stuck, get help. What you give up in initial execution will be repaid many times over by the wisdom you gain.
Also, you should want to be intimately involved in all aspects of your business — one of the few luxuries of an early stage startup. Otherwise, you’ll wind up in the dark, putting your fate solely in the hands of others — that’s dangerous.
Being an early stage startup lets you do certain things that are not possible when you get big. Try to take advantage and do things that don’t scale. These will help you grow in wisdom and become a better manager so that when you become big, you won’t make the obvious mistakes big companies make.
