Ask HN: Who were your first 10 hires? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Who were your first 10 hires?

Curious what roles other startups hire for in the early stages. For example, at which point did you hire a full time designer? A full time DevOps guy?

I'll start. We're in seed stage (pre-revenue) and building a B2C app. We have a CEO/"business guy", a CTO/backend developer (myself) and a frontend developer. We're planning on hiring either a designer or another backend developer next.

What about you?

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As our company grew, so did the roles needed to keep it on the path. Initially it was just the CEO and CTO(me). Then came the CMO. That took us to 6 months and some solid revenue. Then we needed help with raising funds, so our first financier became our CFO. Then we needed help with growing a sales team so a Director of Sales came to being. And a year from that, after hitting 10MM Rev/Yr we need a COO to manage all the customer service issues.

I think it depends on the business, care elaborating what kind of business it is? Currently its just CEO/Designer plus CTO (me) and a marketing person

French Startup here, created in 2016. We're developing a SaaS software for e-commerce merchants. First we hired a back-end dev, then a full time graphic designer / illustrator, because we think it's crucial to have a strong visual identity.

> We're developing a SaaS software for e-commerce merchants.

Mind elaborating? That's exactly what our SaaS platform is. :)

We're working on a module for popular e-commerce platforms that will unify referral / customer loyalty and membership rewards!

I'm not sure I would give myself a CTO title if I were a single backend developer in a company of 3. Seems a bit ridiculous.

But technically he /she is the chief technology officer

I guess you are right. But CTO is an executive-level position. It doesn't really make sense in a company of three where.

It's like me technically being a director of a company while working as a contractor.

It is technically true but when I get asked about my previous role at interview I'd say I was a software engineer / consultant, not director.

Usually seed stage startup founders assume the roles CEO / CTO from the onset.

CEO is also an executive level position, but one that is expected to be filled in even a 3 person company. If his day to day work is technical, but he still has comparative decision making power, it is appropriate to denote that by naming himself CTO.

I agree with you. It sounds pretentious. Chief of what? Yourself? Chief by definition means chief of others also in a decision making position.

Founder is enough; Founder is a big enough title to encompass the challenge, struggle and reward doing something new, independent or fresh.

This varies widely between startups: we are an AI/ML (machine vision) company, so our first hires were 2 AI/ML developers, added 1 web dev (frontend) and 1 backend engineer to build our MVP. Now are a 15 strong team (added sales, customer success members later)

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