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Comment by tresante | Hacker News Reader

Great advice. I was wondering if anyone out there has experience of sourcing technical leads when what's primarily on offer is equity for a founding/lead role at a bootstrapped startup with an early product. Clearly you need to have a compelling vision, show potential and find people in the right frame of mind/stage in their career but I'm wondering if I'm missing any important channels? So far here are a few I've tried and my experience:

* AngelList - seem to mainly attract recent bootcamp grads

* Meetups and Networking Events - seems very inefficient and so far I've come across very few technical folks at these events, at least in digital health

* A lot of personal outreach using LinkedIn/email - probably the most successful so far..

* HN Who's Hiring - surprisingly few leads, but very high quality ones so far.

* Personal network - although similar to the author's I'm relatively new to the Bay Area

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You're missing probably the biggest one of them all - free postings on indeed. They aren't as visible as the paid ones but the traffic is massive. We got a lot of low quality leads through them, but the pure volume still made it our best recruiting tool by far.

also, Ads on stackoverflow tend to get us high q leads as well

FWIW, I really liked Angel List for finding smaller companies. I found their listings to be of high quality. Ended up taking a job across the country from Angel List.

On the hiring side, we seem to get inundated by recent grads regardless of where we post. LinkedIn and Indeed seemed like the worst offenders for us in previous gigs.

Meetup is my vector as well. I am organizing my first meetup on the topic of mechanical sympathy and low latency microservices with focus on low level details like dedicating cpu cores to interrupt request handlers, call routing within service discovery and so on. Only 5 people have confirmed but these are the folks I am interested in talking to and hearing from. It can be quite rewarding both personally and professionally.

IMO, and as you mentioned, your best bet in those early days is to rely on your network and have that insanely compelling vision with which to sell them on. I think you need a certain level of trust with people for them to be willing to bet a significant chunk of their time and such an inordinate amount of energy on your vision. Conversely no matter how much the person may love you, if your vision for the company is a giant pile of "meh" then you won't (and shouldn't) have much luck convincing them either.

The two go hand in hand for your first few hires.

> * Meetups and Networking Events - seems very inefficient and so far I've come across very few technical folks at these events, at least in digital health

I haven't tested this idea, but... consider starting a meetup that would draw more technical folks. I would personally like to see deeper technical meetups near where I am, but I haven't pulled the trigger to try and organise anything yet.

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