Ask HN: How do we build a team? (bootstrapped B2B startup) | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do we build a team? (bootstrapped B2B startup)

5 pointstheonlinx1 comment

Hi everyone, I'm 22 years old and I own a start up with my co-founder, we both just graduated college and we built a b2b SaaS that's live with 60 users and growing. We've been live since beginning of June.

I wanted to post on here because we need help, real help and we don't know where to look or who to ask or how to find reliable people. We see teams like Cluely and Whop and obviously they're billion dollar companies but how do people in start ups find a team like that? Not just employees but a team, a family almost. It is just us two and we're totally boot strapped and dialed in and we've been making it work I think really really well but as we keep growing new things keep coming up and new tasks to do, new things to learn as a company grows especially since its our first.

I was just wondering maybe some stories of how other people have found the rest of their team, that doesn't involve moving out to SF lol.

We started on our project October 2025, had the MVP built January/February and some free live users on there, then we officially launched to the pubic in June.

We are the sales guys, customer support, coders, marketers, content creators, managers, just everything right now. And we both just started our full time jobs that we graduated college for, that have nothing to do with our startup, the entire summer we were free to work on everything and that's why we got so far but now we're not going to have as much time.

Our software is working and people are interested in it and using it. There's real potential for this to be something, especially just based on the traction we've gotten with regular organic content on TikTok and one meta ad.

The goal is to be able to fully fund ourselves from the startup, go all in on it where we can devote our full time attention to it and keep growing it and the team.

We're babies at this thing, we're basically still in the womb and we're just trying to absorb as much information and guidance as possible, sorry I chose not to name the software here, just looking for advice on building a real team and I'd love to hear your guys' stories.

Thanks

Dusting off some old replies. The TL;DR is: reduce information asymmetry, expose thought processes and align (everyone knows what to do, what not to do, why, and how we got there). People should send in pull requests to your thought processes. They should be able to take decisions based on their model of your thought processes, which you can help them build. Increase leverage and fire yourself every day.

The posts that are more relevant to you (you are welcome to contact me afterwards in case you want to talk about things):

If I disappear, what will happen:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25008223

Communication, alignment:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24177646

Useful things for the team and product that add leverage:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21808439

Communication with the team (link, and subsequent clarification):

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21598632

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21614372

Fractal Communication: communication that can penetrate several layers of management and be relevant to people with different profiles and skillsets:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26123017

Product development:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22827841

Management involvement as a spectrum:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22715971

Giving a damn:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20356222

Researching topics:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25922120

Keeping up with a firehose of information:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26147502

Tips to learn from videos:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22710623

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22723586

Remote work, use existing tooling and build our own. Jitsi videos, record everything, give access to everyone so they can reference them and go back to them, meetings once a week or two weeks to align:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26179539

Less relevant to you, included nonetheless...

Understanding codebases:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19924100

Testing pipelines, scaffolding, issue templates:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26591067

Making the most out of meetings and leveraging your presence:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22873103

Consulting, understanding the problem your "client", who can be your manager, has:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24972611

Product, architecture, and impact on the team:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24503365

Onboarding new hires to a codebase, what if it were you, improve code:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22860716

Reduce information asymmetry, template for taking minutes of meetings to dispatch to the team:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21427886

On taking notes. When you're told something, or receive a remark, make sure to make a note and learn from it whether it's a mistake, or a colleague showing you something useful, or a task you must accomplish.. don't be told things twice or worse. Be on the ball and reliable:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24209518

More meeting notes. Reply to a person who had trouble talking in corporate meetings:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20323660

Reply on news.ycombinator.com