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Ask HN: First tech hire, please help decide

1 pointsby yogeschover 4 years ago
So I do both tech and business, and I am okay at either - up to a certain level. This has allowed me to build the mvp and start demo&#x27;ing it to customers.<p>The product itself doesn&#x27;t involve building fundamentally new tech, but mostly leverages&#x2F;repackages existing opensource tools. So most of the technical skills involved are more devops type than pure dev.<p>To get to product market fit, I need to bring in other people. I already have a couple of folks to help with business development. Now I also need an engineer to supplement&#x2F;replace me.<p>I have a couple of good choices - people with both devops and dev skills that I need. However one of them is purely technical and very good at it. The other also has a devops background but additionally, owned a webdev shop in the past, so they have some skills&#x2F;sense on the business side as well.<p>Which sort of profile should I choose? How should I decide? Any pointers will be very appreciated.<p>Add&#x2F;edit: all the business dev folks are on commission-only. The new tech person will also be equity-only (might translate to % of revenue as payout). No salary for anyone right now.

2 comments

brudgersover 4 years ago
If you&#x27;re not paying people, then you&#x27;re not hiring them. I guess that might be ok in some situations, but one of them where it isn&#x27;t is if you imagine that not paying someone is still hiring them. And the reason it&#x27;s not ok to pretend to yourself is that the inability to pay people means that the company isn&#x27;t operationally viable on a day to day basis by virtue of being grossly under-capitalized.<p>Good luck.
duiker101over 4 years ago
Sounds like you already have a lot of business people and so maybe a purely technical person would benefit you more