Early hiring decisions can determine your company's trajectory for years to come, as a founder, these first ten hires are arguably the most critical decisions you'll make in terms of team growth and culture  – and the people you bring on are not going to be just employees, they're the foundation that will architect and build the companies future.

Having worked with hundreds of early-stage startups, I've seen how the right (or wrong) early hires can dramatically impact a company's chances of success. As a founder myself, I’ve also made mistakes that cost me money, and more importantly time.

In this comprehensive guide, I'll walk you through the strategic approach to building your founding team, including when to hire each role, what to look for, and how to avoid common pitfalls. And why 7 people? Because afterwards, the strategy behind your people begins to diverge, and will be much more need based than formulaic. 

The Three Stages of Early-Stage Hiring

Before diving into specific roles, it's crucial to understand that early-stage hiring typically follows three distinct stages: Core Product Development, Growth Foundation, and Scaling Operations. Each stage has its own priorities and challenges.

Stage 1: Core Product Development (Hires 1-3)

In this stage you’re building product and gunning for product market fit (PMF), your property is to move fast, and stay light. Your first three hires in this stage will form the backbone of your product development team. These are the people who will turn your vision into reality.

Ideally your founder is technical and can run an engineering team and jump into the trenches, if they can’t it’s not optimal and capital will be harder to get, but it’s not the end of the world. Either way, your first hire should be a lead engineer, or one that can double as a technical co-founder/CTO. 

Strategic Focus: MVP completion 

Hire #1: Technical Co-founder/Lead Engineer

Your first hire might be the most crucial decision you'll make. The Technical Co-founder or Lead Engineer will be responsible for laying the technical foundation of your entire product.

Why this role first? A common mistake founders make is trying to outsource their initial development or relying too heavily on contractors. Your technical leader needs to be fully invested in your vision and available to make crucial architectural decisions that will impact your product for years to come. You can start with a fCTO, and in certain cases it will work, but you will need a partner who can navigate the tech field first and foremost, if you don’t have this person with you from the get go, look for them, if you have the capital to hire them, do it. 

What to look for:

• Extensive full-stack development experience

• Proven ability to architect scalable systems

• Strong technical leadership background

• Experience with MVP development and iteration

• Excellent communication skills (often overlooked but crucial)

Red flags to watch for:

• Resistance to hands-on coding

• Poor communication skills

• Lack of experience with early-stage products

• Unwillingness to wear multiple hats

Hire #2: Senior Full-Stack Engineer

Once your technical foundation is established, you'll need another skilled engineer to accelerate development velocity, this full stack engineer, should be senior enough to work with your lead and problem solve, and help troubleshoot potential issues. 

Why this role second? With your technical leadership in place, you need to start building development momentum. Your second engineer should complement your first hire's skills while being capable of working independently.

Key qualities:

• Strong full-stack capabilities

• Experience with modern tech stacks

• DevOps knowledge

• Self-directed work ethic

• Collaborative mindset

Hire #3: Product Designer

With your core technical team in place, it's time to focus on user experience. A great product designer will ensure you're building something users actually want to use. The good news is that you can get this person on a fractional or part time basis at the beginning, and scale up work load as is needed.

Why this role third? Many startups underestimate the importance of design in their early stages. A strong product designer will help you avoid costly rebuilds by getting the user experience right from the start.

Essential capabilities:

• End-to-end product design experience

• User research expertise

• Rapid prototyping skills

• Understanding of technical constraints

• Data-driven design decisions

Stage 2: Growth Foundation (Hires 4-6)

The Growth Foundation stage is where your startup transitions from product development to market penetration. These three hires will form the core of your go-to-market team and significantly influence your company's growth trajectory With a solid product foundation, you're ready to focus on growth and customer success.

Strategic Focus : Product-market fit validation

Hire #4: Product Manager

As your product gains traction, you need someone focused on strategic direction and feature prioritization, to date this should have been you. But once you have PMF, you’ll want to hand the ropes to someone who can focus on product management full time. 

Key responsibilities:

• Developing and maintaining the product roadmap

• Gathering and analyzing user feedback

• Prioritizing feature development

• Conducting market research

• Managing stakeholder expectations

Why this role is crucial: Your Product Manager will be the bridge between technical capabilities and market needs, ensuring you're building the right things in the right order.If you are building an API based product, a blockchain based product with a SKD, etc… you will still need a Product Manager, I would advise going to a technical one however, one who can lead the technical aspects of product development. TPMs are more expensive than regular PMs, and in my experience getting one who understands the business requirements, the user requirements and technical requirements can be pretty tough. 

Hire #5: Growth Marketing Lead

With a solid product in place, you need someone focused on getting it in front of the right people. This person should have a mix of marketing and sales, and ideally also know the pain points in the industry.

Critical skills:

• Experience with startup growth strategies

• Strong analytical capabilities

• Channel expertise relevant to your market

• A/B testing and optimization experience

• Content strategy development

// Note - Stay away from AI based cold outbound, no one wants it. The competitive advantage it had is almost done and the rep risk is real. 

Hire #6: Customer Success Lead

Customer success is your moat and edge. As barriers to entry decrease across the board the quality of your customer experience is going to set you apart, and as you acquire customers, retaining them becomes crucial for sustainable growth.You may be able to in certain cased get this skill form your growth marketing lead, but its gonna be pretty tough, not impossible but tough, and as you scale the role will be needed anyways as more customers get onboarded. Either way plan for it. 

Focus areas:

• Customer onboarding optimization

• Retention strategy development

• Feedback collection and analysis

• Support system implementation

• Customer advocacy program development

Stage 3: Scaling Operations (Hire #7)

This is the final stage of early startup hiring, and here your paths are going to diverge a little bit, some companies may need more SRDs (Sales Development Reps and Customer Success People) others will need more engineering firepower. Either way, the one role you will need to start sourcing for is DevOps. 

Strategic Focus: Increasing feature complexity

Hire #7: DevOps Engineer

Focus: Infrastructure automation and reliability. The first Dev Ops engineer is responsible for building and maintaining the technical operations infrastructure. They'll work directly with the engineering team to establish best practices, automate processes, and ensure system reliability as the project scales. 

Common Pitfalls to Avoid

Before we wrap, I do want to cover a couple of common pitfalls, these are the most common, and by no means is this supposed to be a comprehensive list, just things I see happen time and time again. 

Premature hiring. This happens ALL the time, especially after companies raise, they load up on people, but can’t justify the workload, hires idle, get bored, discontent, and things go south. Make sure you’re bringing in people for projected needs, not current ones, if you have current needs that are not going to be long term, look for fractional talent or freelance talent instead, and don’t bring in specialists too early, they’re expensive and will unnecessarily drain your war chest. 

Delayed Hiring. This is the flip side. Here the company wants to get more and more out of its people, or is assigning tasks that don't line up with skill sets. Both have negative repercussions, like missing market opportunities due to capacity constraints, and demoralizing your team. 

Role misalignment. Finally, hiring for non critical functions first. Loading up on customer success people before you have any clients, getting an engineering team that’s too big, or hiring a marketer because you think they’re really good and you don’t want to lose them. These can be extensions of the other two or exist on their own, either way, they are bad for your bank account and bad for team morale, so be mindful of hiring for the tight roles at the right times. 

And hopefully with this strategic approach to early hiring, you'll build a stronger foundation for your startup's growth and increase your chances of long-term success, just remember to alos build out an assessment strategy, onboarding plan, and an integration framework, and if you have any questions, feel free to ping me.