[jadoint]

I'm almost in the same boat right now. I built a niche Adsense-supported social networking site around mid-2009 and my approximate revenue by year is something like: $100 (Y1), $13.5k (Y2), $90k (this year). Assuming no growth next year, it should be around $130k.

I hope you don't mind me asking these questions since I'm in the thick of it myself at the moment. I'm new here so I hope I'm not breaking etiquette.

At what point did you realize you needed help and then decide that you can actually afford it?

What made you decide to hire your 1st employee rather than a co-founder?

What role did your 1st employee have?

What kinds of employees did you end up hiring?

How did you find your employees?

Any insight would be appreciated!

[a5seo]

We hired someone to handle customer service in the 2nd year. We also had some manual processes that they handled for building out the site. Since we'd been doing those things ourselves for a while, we optimized the processes a lot and had a bunch of templates, so training someone else was pretty easy.

W/r to hiring vs. getting a co-founder... I strongly prefer hiring if at all possible. The rule of thumb I go by is that you should only use equity to get skills you can't rent/buy (e.g. a big network or personal brand).

The skills we hired for, in order, where:

Sales/account management as needed (wife) Accounting/bookeeping, part-time (wife) Customer service, part-time (stay at home mom; part-time) Sys admin, very part-time (did as much as possible myself) Project-specific Java developers, part-time/moonlighters All-around Java developer, first FTE (did everything including some light sys admin) Additional Java developers Additional customer service Product manager

Most of our employees we found via Craigslist, or via our personal network. Later we used a recruiter to find Java developers. But hiring for developers was always a big problem.

I think part of the reason recruiting is a unique challenge is that you'll (probably) never be the hot shiny new startup with pedigreed VC's vouching for you. It's lame, but employees rely on those signals to separate dead-end startups from something "real". Of course, the more likely scenario is that VC-backed company without revenue is far more at risk for being an elaborately doomed ponzi scheme than your profitable micro ISV. Whatever... You have to try harder with everything else you can control-- comp, office environment, developer-friendly culture, technology stack, profit-sharing if you're so inclined, etc.

Good luck. You'll be glad you took this route down the line.

[jadoint]

I've started to find that I'm reaching the limits of my time constraints what with holding down a full time corporate job. I've been trying to expand my network to get in touch with good developers that I can pay on a part-time basis for now since I can't afford anyone full-time. Even harder to find a decent part-time sys/db admin here in NJ! Thanks very much for the insight.

[a5seo]

No problem. I should have also mentioned that we didn't add our first FTE until revenue was about 3x my corp job, so close to $350 at the time. My theory was that even if revenue dropped by half overnight, it would be possible to keep our FTE employed and scrape by long enough on the remainder to either wait it out or decide to fold (and that's with a year's worth of cash on hand). But I'm super risk averse, and others probably could handle less buffer.