One Question Friday: Hiring Your First Employee

yeah i feel like i could rule word i know i could be what i want to put at all in in like a days on on a less travel never looking back what's be all sean here i'm gonna be doing the question of the week where we give you just the tips on what you need to be more successful entrepreneur so it's just me alone because i'm in hawaii right now and sam's gonna be traveling too and i'm in a hallway of my hotels so hopefully nobody walks out here while i'm doing this otherwise i might get all noisy but let's go ahead and listen to the question and then i'll answer alright here it goes hey it's ruby repeat from the uk obsessed with the my first million podcast so my question is i'm a non technical founder for an app the docs kitchen is sort of like a the heads space for healthy eating and my question is i'm about to make my first major hire in a product manager i was just wondering if you have any tips for how you hire for those big roles to sort of protect yourself do you put them on like a monthly running contract like for a couple of months fill them out before you give them like full time role with like vest shares and equity and all that good stuff or you just have to just go with your gut feeling and intuition and get as many advisers to sort of vet them for you so i wonder what your thoughts on that are anyway keep up with the great work love the podcast and thanks a lot okay so that's i think his name was rupee rupee from the uk and he's asking about making his first major hire great question because people are obviously the most important thing when it comes to building our company especially at the early days because they're the ones who build the product i'm gonna bring up a couple of things here i'm gonna do this rapid fire because i think it's a pretty easy easy answer here first things first you said your first hire is a pm that's not usually the case so i got a little bit of a red flag there for you you're you said you're the non technical founder so i think you should be the one essentially figuring out what the customers want this back and having your technical founder or build the thing so typically you don't hire a pm as your first major hire because you as the ceo or as the head of product or whatever you're the one doing it you don't you know product managers are are meant to manage larger fleets of engineers and it sounds like you're at a pretty early stage so i'm gonna assume for a second that you have less than ten engineers if you have less than ten engineers i personally do not believe you should be hiring a pm because you're basically del the most important thing which is figuring out what customers want building it testing it with those customers and then that feedback loop and no one's gonna care an gonna be as good at that as you are as the founder at the early stages that's my personal belief in ray dahlia book principles he talks about this he says you know imagine a company as like a big box with box sitting on top okay what's the big box the big box is where it's like the machine that makes the product it makes the thing that goes out to customers and so in that machine you have engineering you have customer support you have sales you have all these different functions and you might be working in one of those right so as the ceo you might be the head of sales right because you're the one picking up the phone trying to go get customers so you're working in the big box but then there's this little box sitting on top and that that he calls out i think like a level two person a level two player in your company is not making the thing for the customers it's making the big box it's basically making the machine that makes the thing and what does that mean that means a level two is like what you typically and as a a ceo or an executive of somebody like that where they're not day to day actually and making their product but they're hiring and firing and promoting and incentivizing and structuring the company in a way where it will it will produce things that the that customers want and so the way to think about this at early stages is it by day you're gonna be working you know at level one in the big box you're actually gonna be doing something maybe it's writing code maybe it's talking to customers maybe it's selling maybe it's customer support whatever you gotta do you're doing it and then at night you move up into the little box you say how can we make this machine more efficient maybe we should hire some customer support reps because i think i have figured out the customers kinda always have these same five issues and we just need somebody on the front lines answering them at this point that would let me go do these other other three really important things and usually and so basically your job as the ceo of a startup is to you know first figure out how to make a product that customers want and then fire yourself out of the process of making that thing right so you eventually fire you're you at level two fire yourself at level one right you the exec fires you the salesman so that's usually how this goes sounds like you're trying to do that where you the exec trying to fire you the product manager but my warning to you is this at an early stage before you have product market fit that's usually the wrong move and i'm assuming you don't have brought because never heard of your product and but i could be wrong and so we will answer what to do if you're post market fit and if you're if you can't hearing me say this phrase product market fit product market if fit what the fuck does that mean right what is what is the definition of that well there's no easy definition people have tried but honestly there's no easy way to measure it some great quotes on this are there's a tactical one the sean ellis question the sean ellis question is you survey all your users and you say if the you know you can no longer use this product would you feel you know not disappointed somewhat disappointed or very disappointed and he says if forty percent of people say very disappointed bang you got product market fit well it's a good indicator but it's not full foolproof mark has a quote something like part of market is like having sex if you don't know if you have it you're not having it it's something like that i love that one but the you know the the real one is the real feeling that you get i that i've the best of the one that best describes it to me is as a founder you often feel like you're pushing a boulder up a hill you're pushing your product under the market you're trying to find people that want it you're trying to convince them to give it a try and it really feels like you're pushing a boulder up a hill high effort then at some point when you actually things clicking i actually hit product per fit it no longer feels like you're pushing it uphill in fact it feels like the boulder is now going downhill it's going faster and faster and you're just running trying to keep up and that's usually when you have a lot of customer demand and now you you need hire more people just to fill it just to not disappoint them just to give you know fulfill all the promise you've made to them and that that idea of chasing the boat down that's when you wanna start hiring pms because you figured out what people want and now you're scaling up so that's my general advice now let's say you did to say you were there you're chasing the boulder down the hill you do wanna hire pm how do you know it's the right red hire how do you go about hiring them well i love to i say this my kind of personal belief is that interviews suck because interviews are like first dates it's just two people looking at each other in the face and lying to each other right you're both trying to pretend you're perfect and this is you know this is a great place to work and i'm you know i'm a great worker in in reality we both know that that's not true two imperfect people trying to make a match and so the best way to do that is actually to try to work together right the best way to find out if you want to work together is to try working together and it's going on a date and so you you actually you know wanna go do an activity not just sort of sit there at a table and ask each other questions and the activity is usually your project so i will often do a contract gig a consulting gig a trial period if i can try to hire somebody and i'll let them know hey look here's what we're gonna do here's what success looks like and look we're i would just say by default after two months let's consider this over unless we both before we even get there we're gonna know hey this is awesome i'm i'm loving working with you and you're doing a great job so i will often bake in a by default three months in this is over unless it's so awesome that we both wanna opt update and i found that that works better than the opposite where you hire somebody and the default is oh this is great i'm in forever and then when it's not so great you're like well it's not bad enough for me to fire them and that's how you get stuck with kinda of mediocrity inside your company so that's my preferred way of doing it i don't always do that because it's kind of a case by case candidate by candidate situation but if you ask me in a perfect process that's what i would do i would set up a project on a trial basis usually between one and one to three months and i would let them know hey i'm looking to find somebody full time but i it's gonna be really really hard for me to find somebody who i really trust because i think it's a big role and i have a high par but i would love i think i see that potential in you i would love to give this a try and look at the end of this three months if it's going great it's gonna be a no brainer for us to to make a full offer to you and if it's not look we're gonna have three months where we learned a bunch we got to know each you're gonna make some money it's fully paid and and hey we'll be you know we'll pull the plug on something before without having committed long term to something in this point age how does that sound and most people are pretty down for that they actually are are open to that and so that's my preferred way of doing things i don't like you said ask advisors to interview them i think that's a pretty big ask so you gotta get good at this right you wanna develop great gut judgment on people and the only way to do that is to go higher and fire and promote and you know like basically get a bunch of reps make a bunch of mistakes be really thoughtful each time you're hiring and each time you assess how it's going be honest with yourself and if you do that your feedback loop alone will help you get good at this thing right because in the long run it may not actually be this higher that's the important what it's the you getting good at hiring right and so you wanna develop that skill and you can't really delegate that out either right that's your primary job as as an executive company okay so best of luck ru thanks for calling in with that and thanks for everybody for listening to one question friday yeah i feel like i could rule the world i know i could be what i want to put at all in in like a days off on a road less travel never looking back