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Ask HN: How to hire early engineers?

2 points by arsalanb ↗ HN
I'm working on a weekend-project-turned-startup which has early users who have committed to paying (I know "committed to paying" != "paying", but I'm confident in my ability to get paid users)

The money from paid users is not enough to hire an engineer, it's barely enough to pay for hosting. I have realised over the past month that I'm an inefficient engineer myself. I cannot balance sales (which is priority #1 at the minute) with programming. I built V1 by myself but I need to work with other engineers to take this to the next level.

I am averse to the idea of "Sweaty equity" being an engineer myself I believe cash is cash, equity is "not cash". How do you go about convincing engineers to work with you when you're in a situation to not be able to pay? Goes without saying, I am happy to provide ample equity.

3 comments

[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 16.3 ms ] thread
NonEUCitizen
Raise money to pay the engineers.
startupfreak
Agreed. Your options are:

1) Beg and borrow from the people who love and trust you in the hope that either (a) you'll repay them or (b) they'll forgive you - this is known as a friends and family round.

2) Find some rich people and convince them that they will make lots of money (in tax-efficient ways) if they lend it to you - this is known as an angel round.

3) (In some countries this is still possible) Go to the bank and explain to them the viability of your idea.

brudgers 

  committed to paying == paying
if you ask them for money to pay for development of the project with the understanding that they are paying for the development. If they say "no" then the problem doesn't really solve a highly painful problem for a market that is flush with cash on hand. Or to put it this way, if a problem is costing those potential customers $15k a month, throwing $15k at a likely solution is a reasonable investment for a company with reasonable cash flow. If you're going to focus on sales, then closing sales will make it easy to hire engineers to deliver the product.

Good luck.