| I'm going to disagree with a lot of the sentiment here. I think it's rare to find a business that really truly works and you may have found the beginnings of one. Be ambitious. Figure out how to scale this 100x. In terms of what you should do, it's hard to know without the specifics of what your business does, who you are, what you are good at, how your business will grow, etc. I think there are some general thoughts that may help: 1. Early on, overpivot on people you can trust who happen to be good, not people you can't trust but who are great. Also don't hire your friends. Most people want to hire the best people they can but I've found that loyalty, work ethic, and trust are more important for the first or second people you hire. But hiring friends or family can often blow up so avoid that. 2. Figuring out how to hire people is hard. Managing employees is hard. Keep the stakes low initially and then figure out how to hand off ownership of more core things after you feel like you have a good sense for how to hire and who to hire. Start with something you know really well that is not going to lead your business to fail if you hire the wrong person. Hiring someone to do work you know well lets evaluate the quality of someone's work. Putting them in a role where they aren't working on something critical minimizes your risk. For example, if you are doing all of your customer support right now hire an Android developer if you know Android really well to add a new feature to your app. Don't hire an engineer to work on your payment system if you don't know that part of your stack or if you can't afford for your payment system to go down. 3. There is no comprehensive resource because every business is different so you will have to spend a lot of time reading. Read through everything related to business, entrepreneurship, hiring, scaling a business, etc. on Quora. Ask questions there and see who responds. Find the courses similar to what you want to learn at top business or engineering management schools (Stanford, Harvard, MIT) and look at their curricula. Read everything in their curricula. Read this post I wrote several years ago about the dynamics in the education space in the US to make sure you don't fall in to the trap that many education entrepreneurs do around thinking that your business can actually scale far beyond where you are today: https://avichal.wordpress.com/2011/10/07/why-education-start... Google searching will get you quite far too: https://www.google.com/#q=hire+first+employee+startup 4. Find successful people who have built a business in your space that is 10x bigger than yours, 100x bigger than yours, and if possible 1000x bigger than yours. Email these people and ask for advice. See which of them you click with. Ask them all of the questions you have and see where a relationship develops. Ask them for the best resources thy know about related to your business or how to scale a business. For example, I tell a lot of entrepreneurs to read High Output Management by Andy Grove to see how an experienced manager and executive thinks about running a large organization. You are not yet running a large organization but you will learn a lot and can work backwards to lessons that are relevant for your business today. In general, you will be surprised at how often successful people will actually help out. It's entirely possible (and likely) the woman that has a $200M business today was in your shoes a just few years ago and is willing to help. 5. Find successful people that you respect outside of your space and do the same as in #4. Consider raising investment from experienced people who can help you. Applying to YCombinator is a good option if you don't even know where to start. 6. See if you can find people that want to learn what you've done and could help you. For example, there are probably people who want to learn what you've done to bootstrap your business but who are running a small part of a very large company. These middle managers could teach you how to build an org and you could teach them how to start their own business. |