The First Ten Hires Playbook Your first hires decide the rest. Don't make them by accident.
You went solo on purpose. Then something works, and one day you cannot do the next thing alone. This guide is for that moment: decide the role, price it, run a process that predicts, and get the first ninety days right.
The most important decisions get the least process.
There is a pressing need, someone reasonable appears, the conversation goes well, and an offer follows. Nobody wrote down what the role was for. Nobody agreed what a no would look like. Nobody priced it in the thing you are actually short of. And the first few people are a large fraction of whatever surrounds you. A strong one compounds. A weak one fills a seat you needed, eats your attention and lowers the bar for every decision after.
None of them is "people are our greatest asset".
There is no surrounding mass to absorb a poor fit. Everything is felt, and mostly by you. Hiring habits copied from a corporate job assume a culture that does the correcting. Here you are the correcting mechanism.
Excellent people recommend excellent people. Whoever you bring in helps you judge the next one and shows daily what passes. You will see it in the quality of your tenth, and you will not be able to trace it back.
The money is the smallest part. The rest is your attention, work redone, months lost before you accept what you already knew, and the cost of unwinding it.
More building capacity when nobody knows the product buys capability you cannot use. The right question is the one thing most limiting you, and often the answer is not a person.
Many people say they want help, then keep the decisions and rebuild the work. A capable person sees it within weeks and starts looking elsewhere.
What the first few say about working with you becomes how people see you. A good experience is a recruiting engine. A bad one is a headwind you cannot outspend.
Help without undoing the model.
Not a call to build a team. A way to know exactly what is blocking you, price it in months, prefer the reversible option, write down what good looks like, and move fast once you have decided.
Five parts, in order.
Six mechanisms that only work at this size, and the honest limit: you will get one of the first few wrong. The goal is a decent hit rate and a fast, humane correction.
Hire against the constraint, not the wish list. Price it in months of runway. Choose contractor or committed on purpose. Write the ninety day outcome. Agree the bar first.
A paid work sample, the same questions for everyone, references that include people not on the list, a fast process, honest selling and a second view.
The first two weeks, the ninety day document as the spine, early feedback in both directions, acting quickly when it is not working, and noticing when you need someone to coordinate.
Before you open the role, running the process, and the first ninety days. Each line is a box you either can or cannot tick. If you cannot, that is your next task.
Nine ways a first hire goes wrong, from adding the wish rather than the constraint to waiting when it is not working. All of them are failures of definition and nerve.
Write down the single thing most limiting you this quarter, not the ten things you would like to improve. Then ask what removes it. A tool, a process change, a contractor for six weeks or your own time may do it before a person does.
Ask how many months of runway this removes, and whether the person can plausibly produce something worth that much time inside the runway that remains. It kills the hire whose real contribution arrives in year two.
What will exist, what will be different, what they own. If you cannot write it, you are not ready to bring anyone in. You are ready to think about what you need.
- You run a business alone, it works, and you are about to need a hand with something you cannot do alone.
- You want to bring someone in without giving away ownership you built this model to protect.
- You would rather spend a morning deciding than a year undoing.
- You want a method you can tick through, not a pep talk.
- You want to be told to hire. The guide says when it makes sense and when it does not.
- You are trying to build a team because it feels like progress.
- You want to pay in equity to avoid spending money. The guide calls that a mistake.
- You want hiring practices copied from a corporate job. They assume a culture that is not there.
Solo is a business model. It was never a personality.
Refuse all help on principle and you become the constraint on your own business. Give a third of it to the first plausible person and you undo the thing that made this work. The middle is unglamorous: know what is blocking you, write down what good looks like, and move fast once you have decided.
Luis Gonçalves
Twenty years in digital product development. Led the agile transformation at Nokia. Teaches at Porto Business School. Has spent the last decade working with founders across Saudi Arabia, Portugal, Brazil, and the broader emerging-market startup ecosystem.
He calls himself the Dark Entrepreneur because he believes the founder world is allergic to honesty. No success theater. No highlight reels. Just the real work that has to happen.