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Comment by bootstrpppin | Hacker News Reader

The main learning I took away from growing from 20 to 250ish employees, 1 product to multi-product and 1 geo to multi-country:

As a startup, your speed of execution is a function of your simplicity. It's about your only advantage over the big players.

Adding employees, adding products, and adding new markets increase your complexity non-linearly. ie. Going to 1 product to 2 products doesn't increase complexity by 2x, it increases it by 4x.

Avoid this complexity if you can: it makes you slow, makes you hire middle management, and makes what could/should be simple decisions, multi-dimensional.

So the lesson: stay as simple as you can for as long as you can. If you can't stay simple, don't underestimate the exponential drag of complexity.

Hope that's helpful

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This is how I feel, and why I'm stuck.

I have a pleasant little workflow maintaining a content-based website. I'd like to hire help, but offloading work to a first employee feels like more effort than just doing the work myself.

How do I transmit 7 years of tacit knowledge, principles and best practices to someone else so that they do good work? How do I teach a writer to use my elaborate static site generator setup that was never designed for other users?

Then comes the paperwork, and the inherent difficulty of working with other people instead of having full control over everything.

So far, I have just accepted that my work has a limited scope, and that as long as I'm satisfied with my income I don't need to change that.

You will be suprised how quickly people learn and delegation is a forcing function to make things simpler. If they are good they will help you figure out how to make things simpler.

> that as long as I'm satisfied with my income I don't need to change that.

That is the key thing. I was a 1 person consulting/contracting shop for years and it 100% put limits on my income. But they were limits I was happy to accept.

If you are interested in trying to grow, I'd think of 1-2 tasks you can cleave off and hire someone to do part time. Have them be:

- not critical path

- async

- checklist oriented

You'd be surprised at the number of folks that would be willing to help you out. And you'd learn something about whether you feel comfortable outsourcing such tasks.

Break it down into manageable chunks. Do you have things documented?

I felt this way at first when I was doing my lead generation. I documented the process and brought on someone from the Philippines. I then ran into a similar situation where there were a lot of questions that I couldn't spend my time on. So, I built a GPT to help answer questions and to build another me to help them. This was simple and saved a ton of time.

Reflect on the tasks you are doing and pass off the work that you don't want to do first. Start small and continue passing off more work. You can hire a virtual assistant for $5-8 an hour, and it's beneficial to have some basic support. I also helped motivate someone who needed work.

It doesn't take much effort, let me know if you have questions on the tools and documents you would need to support something like this. I can share what I used.

Why are your best practices better than whoever you'll hire's?

Just accept another person to be an adult, and help you in increasingly good ways and communicate well. Or fire them if they don't

Well, at some point in your personal and professional life, you need to learn to let go, hand over, or pass on your responsibilities to the next person so that you can take on bigger, more critical challenges. Yes, it will take time, and no, they won't be your copycats, but you never know—they will make things easier for you and even better for your business.

Thank you for this!

Do you think multi-country adds so much complexity that you shouldn't explore it too early?

E.g. What if you have an incredible opportunity in another geo? Should you put it on ice? How long for?

As with most things - it depends. Hard to give you a clear cut answer without knowing a lot more.

For us, multi-country added a lot of complexities because we expanded from the UK to Australia. So we needed to staff and integrate different teams (which is where most of the complexity was).

If you're a pure SaaS with no sales GTM, I think it would be a lot simpler if you can stay centrally operated.

100% this. I had almost the exact same experience and lessons learned.

100%

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