Can't speak from experience, but my recommendation would be to never hire someone to do work you've not done yourself. (I believe Joel Spolsky mentions this.)
So for instance try doing marketing yourself for a month. One benefit: you may discover you're good at it and don't need to hire someone, or hire someone freelance or part-time. The more important benefit: when you're interviewing a candidate, you know what you're looking for and can explain what you need from experience.
So for instance try doing marketing yourself for a month.
People who try coding for a month and based on that try to hire a programmer make terrible clients/managers. I am not sure this advice would apply to anything that has even a little depth/nuance.
Fair enough, let's add some nuance. Learn about the subject, but stay humble — with a month of trying (failures & success) you're equipped with very modest experience, there is far more you don't know, obviously.
Imagining you will know anywhere near enough about a completely new (to you) highly complex field to hire well after only a month of effort is very, very far from humble.
I dunno man, the 80/20 rule definitely applies here (and it's cousin Dunning-Kruger does as well, so yes, stay humble). Most software engineers are paid for their expertise in rapidly acquiring and mentally modeling complex domains...
Believing that spending a month of high-effort learning will teach you enough of the basics of just about any field that you can flush out terrible choices isn't _that_ ridiculous...
As a relatively successful founder of multiple companies over decades, I cannot say I would like to do this. It feels like this will make you waste time on things that potentially take a very long time to learn and it might put you in a situation where a little knowledge is a dangerous thing when trying to interview/hire.
You have a point with "would be to never hire someone to do work you've not done yourself", but I can't agree with your specific suggestion on how to handle that - instead, my recommendation would be to rely on someone you trust who has done that thing, and use their help to judge expertise and validity of candidates.
It may well be that you're not qualified to hire marketers or developers, but while there's nothing wrong with getting qualified for things, that probably isn't your priority right now, so you should spend that month on doing things that matter and "simply" get someone already qualified to do that task.
And while there are many reasons why you couldn't or wouldn't hire a friend for that role, using your personal contacts to fill gaps in expertise will be very, very important; because you can't simply buy a combination of expertise and trust anywhere.
Do you have a good guide on how to "try doing marketing yourself for a month"? To me this shit is so alien, I can't imagine I'll even scratch the surface in a month.
That's probably the whole point of the exercise. :-)
How will you be able to discern a charlatan from a good fit to your company, if what they're supposed to be at at is totally alien to you?!
Go to the library, ask around, google. Even if you completely fail at marketing, you've learned something about the skills you're missing. Which your company is missing.
But doesn't doing X for 1 month make you a charlatan? For example, consider you only did frontend/ui/ux for one month. How much rubbish you would pick up over that time by googling for tutorials or watching youtube videos to get you started; and how alien a real front-end veteran would look to you.
Yeah, the whole quote is one of those things that sounds like sage wisdom until you consider it for 30 seconds.
Even if startup founders had time to spare spending a month learning how to doing each and every task they needed to hire for
(and trading money they have for time they don't is the whole point of hiring) they'd (i) have no time left to focus on the core business (ii) do a really bad job and (iii) having barely understood the basics, run exactly the same risk of hiring good interviewees with the right credentials that were actually bad at their jobs. Maybe they'd even be more sympathetic to the bad hire because well, he's better than I was
It’s all so situational. In an early stage startup you really have to focus on the most critical things. I would question doing a lot of marketing early when it may be more important to do sales or just low scale, high touch customer testing/research. If it’s not worth your time to do it personally there is a huge risk in trying to hire someone to do it. The reason is that most people with the credentials to “run a function” in a successful business will be used to way more resources than a startup has. ICs with experience in the role will likely have only worked in structured environments where they will have all kinds of assumed constraints that are not relevant to this brand new startup.
That’s not to say I disagree with your points in general, but just that hiring is every bit as much of a minefield as doing things yourself. In either case you have to understand what is most crucial for the next stage of growth and prune everything else obsessively.
I agree it's situational (there's also a good argument that e.g. being a pretty mediocre customer-facing guy is an extremely useful learning curve about customer needs for a very early stage technical CEO despite what they don't learn about enterprise sales). The general nature of the advice was part of the objection to the original comment.
If you're really motivated to participate in x you should try, if you're a bootstrapping solopreneur you may have no choice, but if you're looking at mitigating hiring risk, a month trying to code/sell/design outside your comfort zone doesn't really move the needle on figuring out how to evaluate programmers or whether your startup actually needs a sales team. (If anything, you're more likely to get the wrong answers from the DIY approach because maybe the sales function actually would be beneficial if it was carried out by someone who could sell...).
That's where you get more insight in less time from leaning on people in your network who actually are marketers or salespeople or product people to get a view, especially if they're not financially incentivised to propose a particular route.
If you want to mitigate the risk that ICs need structure and resources, you focus your hiring on candidates that have worked without structure and resources. But even having a codebase written by someone learning not to rely on Scrum meetings and JIRA tickets to prioritise is still better than having one written by someone learning to code.
100% agree to all of this. There's an interesting balance of domain knowledge/skills/experience and potential/learning speed/adaptability. You are ostensibly hiring for the former, but the latter is a multiplier in a startup environment. A huge number of candidates will be in the 0-1 range compared to a more structured company. You need the >1 folks.
You’re a charlatan if you I think that after a month you’re an expert. As long as you’re honest with yourself it can’t hurt to have some direct experience for the role you’re hiring for. A lot of people applying for the job won’t even have that month.
Agree - I think the whole point of the exercise is so one learns the most basic macro understanding of what the business needs from that point (marketing, sales, product, finance, etc) so when it comes to hiring the right people, you at least know the right initial questions to ask.
When I started my business (non-tech), i knew very little about sales processes or relationship building from a sales perspective. One of my first consistent customers (disclosure: he is also a close friend) is a sales professional. I learned the very basics of sales, and came to him, asking what were probably dumb or basic questions, but he was more than happy to answer them and also point out where, as the company grew (and hopefully grows!), what to look for in sales people and relationship managers. While I still know little in comparison to him, I know some of the right questions to ask, what to expect from those questions, and what sorts of answers I should be looking for. He also knows that I can call him with deeper questions and to help me evaluate a sales-related situation as it arises, and he'll give me a no bullshit honest answer.
Comments
Can't speak from experience, but my recommendation would be to never hire someone to do work you've not done yourself. (I believe Joel Spolsky mentions this.)
So for instance try doing marketing yourself for a month. One benefit: you may discover you're good at it and don't need to hire someone, or hire someone freelance or part-time. The more important benefit: when you're interviewing a candidate, you know what you're looking for and can explain what you need from experience.
People who try coding for a month and based on that try to hire a programmer make terrible clients/managers. I am not sure this advice would apply to anything that has even a little depth/nuance.
Fair enough, let's add some nuance. Learn about the subject, but stay humble — with a month of trying (failures & success) you're equipped with very modest experience, there is far more you don't know, obviously.
Imagining you will know anywhere near enough about a completely new (to you) highly complex field to hire well after only a month of effort is very, very far from humble.
I dunno man, the 80/20 rule definitely applies here (and it's cousin Dunning-Kruger does as well, so yes, stay humble). Most software engineers are paid for their expertise in rapidly acquiring and mentally modeling complex domains...
Believing that spending a month of high-effort learning will teach you enough of the basics of just about any field that you can flush out terrible choices isn't _that_ ridiculous...
As a relatively successful founder of multiple companies over decades, I cannot say I would like to do this. It feels like this will make you waste time on things that potentially take a very long time to learn and it might put you in a situation where a little knowledge is a dangerous thing when trying to interview/hire.
You have a point with "would be to never hire someone to do work you've not done yourself", but I can't agree with your specific suggestion on how to handle that - instead, my recommendation would be to rely on someone you trust who has done that thing, and use their help to judge expertise and validity of candidates.
It may well be that you're not qualified to hire marketers or developers, but while there's nothing wrong with getting qualified for things, that probably isn't your priority right now, so you should spend that month on doing things that matter and "simply" get someone already qualified to do that task.
And while there are many reasons why you couldn't or wouldn't hire a friend for that role, using your personal contacts to fill gaps in expertise will be very, very important; because you can't simply buy a combination of expertise and trust anywhere.
Anybody happen to know the link?
Do you have a good guide on how to "try doing marketing yourself for a month"? To me this shit is so alien, I can't imagine I'll even scratch the surface in a month.
That's probably the whole point of the exercise. :-)
How will you be able to discern a charlatan from a good fit to your company, if what they're supposed to be at at is totally alien to you?!
Go to the library, ask around, google. Even if you completely fail at marketing, you've learned something about the skills you're missing. Which your company is missing.
But doesn't doing X for 1 month make you a charlatan? For example, consider you only did frontend/ui/ux for one month. How much rubbish you would pick up over that time by googling for tutorials or watching youtube videos to get you started; and how alien a real front-end veteran would look to you.
Yeah, the whole quote is one of those things that sounds like sage wisdom until you consider it for 30 seconds.
Even if startup founders had time to spare spending a month learning how to doing each and every task they needed to hire for (and trading money they have for time they don't is the whole point of hiring) they'd (i) have no time left to focus on the core business (ii) do a really bad job and (iii) having barely understood the basics, run exactly the same risk of hiring good interviewees with the right credentials that were actually bad at their jobs. Maybe they'd even be more sympathetic to the bad hire because well, he's better than I was
It’s all so situational. In an early stage startup you really have to focus on the most critical things. I would question doing a lot of marketing early when it may be more important to do sales or just low scale, high touch customer testing/research. If it’s not worth your time to do it personally there is a huge risk in trying to hire someone to do it. The reason is that most people with the credentials to “run a function” in a successful business will be used to way more resources than a startup has. ICs with experience in the role will likely have only worked in structured environments where they will have all kinds of assumed constraints that are not relevant to this brand new startup.
That’s not to say I disagree with your points in general, but just that hiring is every bit as much of a minefield as doing things yourself. In either case you have to understand what is most crucial for the next stage of growth and prune everything else obsessively.
I agree it's situational (there's also a good argument that e.g. being a pretty mediocre customer-facing guy is an extremely useful learning curve about customer needs for a very early stage technical CEO despite what they don't learn about enterprise sales). The general nature of the advice was part of the objection to the original comment.
If you're really motivated to participate in x you should try, if you're a bootstrapping solopreneur you may have no choice, but if you're looking at mitigating hiring risk, a month trying to code/sell/design outside your comfort zone doesn't really move the needle on figuring out how to evaluate programmers or whether your startup actually needs a sales team. (If anything, you're more likely to get the wrong answers from the DIY approach because maybe the sales function actually would be beneficial if it was carried out by someone who could sell...).
That's where you get more insight in less time from leaning on people in your network who actually are marketers or salespeople or product people to get a view, especially if they're not financially incentivised to propose a particular route.
If you want to mitigate the risk that ICs need structure and resources, you focus your hiring on candidates that have worked without structure and resources. But even having a codebase written by someone learning not to rely on Scrum meetings and JIRA tickets to prioritise is still better than having one written by someone learning to code.
100% agree to all of this. There's an interesting balance of domain knowledge/skills/experience and potential/learning speed/adaptability. You are ostensibly hiring for the former, but the latter is a multiplier in a startup environment. A huge number of candidates will be in the 0-1 range compared to a more structured company. You need the >1 folks.
You’re a charlatan if you I think that after a month you’re an expert. As long as you’re honest with yourself it can’t hurt to have some direct experience for the role you’re hiring for. A lot of people applying for the job won’t even have that month.
Agree - I think the whole point of the exercise is so one learns the most basic macro understanding of what the business needs from that point (marketing, sales, product, finance, etc) so when it comes to hiring the right people, you at least know the right initial questions to ask.
When I started my business (non-tech), i knew very little about sales processes or relationship building from a sales perspective. One of my first consistent customers (disclosure: he is also a close friend) is a sales professional. I learned the very basics of sales, and came to him, asking what were probably dumb or basic questions, but he was more than happy to answer them and also point out where, as the company grew (and hopefully grows!), what to look for in sales people and relationship managers. While I still know little in comparison to him, I know some of the right questions to ask, what to expect from those questions, and what sorts of answers I should be looking for. He also knows that I can call him with deeper questions and to help me evaluate a sales-related situation as it arises, and he'll give me a no bullshit honest answer.
Find people like that.
That's the point. You can at least filter out the rif-raf because you'll recognize yourself in those people quickly.
Yes, powered by sheer hubris and imagined experience, your knowing gaze will pierce all deception.
1. Write a blog post on the topic your startup is related to.
2. Try to get people to read that blog post.
3. Try to get it ranked top 10 in Google for a very specific keyword (doesn’t matter how unpopular it is)
4. Reach out to 10 people and tell them about said blog post
That’s just one example