Ask HN: How to grow from co-founders to team of developers?

We are a bootstrapped company in year four, offering a supply chain product to business customers. We make >€1M annually and grow about 10% per month.

Everything we do is backed by a carefully designed Rails app covering a whole lot of complex business logic. The software was built by me and one other person. We became very good at understanding and weighing up business requirements, implementation cost, performance, usability and maintainability. We would figure out the best trade-offs and ship features within days. There were very few bugs and zero overhead. It was exhausting at times but success made up for it.

Then we realized our situation was not sustainable. On one hand the company was depending heavily on two individuals (bus factor). On the other hand we started to feel exhausted and wanted a plan B (exit strategy).

So we set out to hire a team. Soon we realized, few people even apply for the job. I guess mostly because we are competing with glamorous household names and miss the PR of well-funded competitors. People who do apply all consider themselves "senior" and ask for heavy paychecks, despite deficits in basic bread-and-butter topics like database indexes and most common Rails idioms.

Lacking better alternatives we ended up hiring a bunch, spending a shit-ton and investing heavily in onboarding. Yet after months, I'm still baffled by the lack of output, quality of work and overall knowledge. This situation is draining energy even faster than before we started hiring. I feel stuck. What can I do?

Using a throwaway account for obvious reasons.