What were the first five hires after your startup reached product market fit?
My first 5 hires at EchoSign, beyond core team once we had paying customers and first, if early, product-marketing fit:
- #1: Full-time sales rep at $8k-ish MRR. Should have hired two. Should have hired him even early. Hired once we were closing > 1 new, non self-service customer a week.
- #2. A great, paid, full-time-ish intern. A great one is a terrific force multiplier.
- #3: VP of Marketing. I hired at $20k MRR. Should have hired even earlier. Because all she had to do was improve our process and get us a few other good leads to pay for herself.
- #4: Head of Customer Support — a veteran. I can’t believe I waited so long. This made our customers 50x happier, and I didn’t have to force everyone in the company to take so many shifts in support to help out the untrained resource(s) i had staffing it before.
- #5: VP of Sales at $1.5m ARR-ish. I should have had 2 fully scaled reps first. But in the end it was the right time, I just needed someone that was a better fit for my product, ACV, and stage.
I should have hired them all, together, earlier. They were all accretive so in the end I didn’t save any money by staggering the hires. Even if I felt the pressure of not running out of money.
I also waited way, way, way too long to hire into customer success. I had support do this at first. Rookie error.
Published on March 20, 2016