[ooshma]

I told people about my idea at various events and I actually first started out with three volunteers. It was the summertime, so we had one student who interned with me and helped me with marketing/business. The other two folks were engineers at big tech companies who wanted to moonlight with me to (1) have an excuse to learn RoR and (2) see what it's like to work at a startup.

It was just the four of us until I raised the seed round. I was the only one working on Gobble full time, and the investors (to my surprise) were not deterred by this fact.

I started hiring more senior people full time after our seed financing. The best hires, and I cannot emphasize this enough, came by referral. It's a 10X difference. I recruited them by paying a salary to cover their expenses, but mostly like every founder, by sharing the mission and selling the dream.

Recruiting goes back to the entire message of my Startup School talk. I looked for people who aligned with Gobble's mission and they feel more purpose working at Gobble than at any other company.