How do I find early startup employees with no budget?
Bootstrapped founders working full-time jobs have to handle everything from sales to coding alone while their time rapidly shrinks. Finding trustworthy, committed people to help is difficult because they do not know where to look or who to ask for reliable assistance.
What the numbers show
Counted from the threads quoted below. How we count
- It is not one crowd: 2 people on Reddit and 1 on Hacker News ran into the same thing.
What people tried
Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.
Found another way around this?
Share your steps and trade-offs so fellow engineers don't have to reinvent the wheel. No account required.
- 1trying to handle everything independently while working full-time jobsDid this help you?
- 2relying on organic content and ad campaigns for growth without additional staffDid this help you?
- 3Trying to do everything alone and working 18-20 hour daysDid this help you?
- 4Overworking until facing severe burnoutDid this help you?
In their words
Unedited, grouped by where they were said, most upvoted first within each place, each linked to the thread it came from.
“I have a business doing $500k-$1million a month in revenue, im in 2000 retail doors, but I’m doing everything myself.”source ↗
“I’m working 18–20 hours a day, no joke. I don’t have an hour to myself.”source ↗
“I know I need to hire people, but I honestly don’t know where to start.”source ↗
“I also work from home, so if I got an employee they would be working from home aswell, and im not sure how to keep them accountable or on task?”source ↗
“I'm a dev, I have startup web app ready to launch but I can't make it grow alone so i need someone trustworthy & committed i can cooperate with.”source ↗
“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.”source ↗
“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”source ↗
“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... and that's why we got so far but now we're not going to have as much time.”source ↗
Where this came up
People with this problem also raised
- 8How do I know if I can afford to hire my first employee?
- 12How to get local students for a new business?
- 4How do you find unlisted jobs at small businesses?
- 6How to find reliable staff for a food business
- 2Where do I even start when opening a small business?
- 24Why are job boards full of impossible roles and ghost listings?