How to hire a mythical coding beast

“Being an entrepreneur is like chewing glass and staring into the abyss”

• a friend of Elon musk

building a new product is hard enough. Making the wrong decisions in regards to co-founders or your first hires can multiply that pain so much that it may kill your great idea before it ever gets off the ground.
I wasted over a year and a half on LingoSpace.io because I chose the wrong co-founder. Luckily I was able to buy back his equity and find someone else to fill his shoes, but I can never buy back the time I wasted. This was a good case. There are plenty of others that get an office, start hiring, and the company hits bedrock in a burning fire fueled by co-founder disputes and employees that didn’t add any value to the product.

"As a CEO or founder, hiring is the most important thing you will ever do."

Three years on from my starting LingoSpace, I now have a much more ambitious project with higher potential for revenue growth. Oktopus.io is a product that let’s anyone turn their simple website into a ‘web platform’ IE: it adds platform features to any website like login, profiles, file uploads/downloads, user messaging, and 3rd party plugin integration in a single click, all without needing to know code.

If that sounds complicated, it’s because it is. I know a little bit about coding, but I’m a kindergartener in the learning tree of code knowledge. I knew that it was technically feasible to develop the product looking at bits and pieces of other products already on the market, but with a million different ways to build something, some scalable and most not, it was absolutely imperative for me to find someone who could confidently tell me the best way to build my idea. With better efficiency at the start, overall you’ll end up saving money and, the unrecoverable resource, time.
My goal was to find the most bad-ass, professional, talented, technical web architect available on the market…and I didn’t even have a massive budget available to pay this mythical coding beast.
I knew if I was going to attract someone at the level I was seeking, I would have to convince this person in other ways besides just money. After all, if they were as good as I wanted, they could get a job at some silicon valley startup with better pay and benefits than I could ever offer.

So, I broke down what I could offer to someone that may be more important to them than merely a big paycheck.

• Clear vision
This is the most important thing you can provide. No one wants to be part of something they don’t see a strong future in. I also would need to know what I wanted in the product ahead of time and have a good idea regarding potential market fit to prevent paying for things to be developed twice later. For this, I spent nearly 6 months running the idea through my mind, researching, designing and redesigning the product until I knew I had a strong foundation for my product.

• Remote work

(live anywhere, work anywhere)
As long as communication is clear and prompt, there is no reason people have to be in the same location to achieve strong collaboration.

• Focused, short development sprints, NOT 40 hour weeks

I only had 25k to get my MVP (minimum viable product) off the ground in order to get investment to go forward. If I stretched that out over a longer period with shorter bursts of work from my mythical coding beast, perhaps I could manage each stage better, and build a better product with less money…even if it took twice the time.
*Another quick point on this... Giving some air between working sessions also lets people process their work and the task subconsciously when not directly working on it, often leading to better insights and solutions to problems that would have been missed if forced into a 40 hour work week.

• Competitive pay
Sure, you can go to UpWork.com, Freelancer.com, Remote.com, or any other number of sites and hire developers who will presell you the world on a silver plate for anywhere from $15 ~ $50 an hour, but will they end up being good or cheaper in the long run? If you find a truly mythical coding beast, they might cost you $80 ~ $100 per hour, but their knowledge and experience will save you way more in the end, both in terms of time and money. A good beast will know their worth, and will demand it. That is part of their professionalism. PAY THE BEAST THEIR VALUE!
I found my beast. I found him on Remote.com, and he was pricey ($80 per hour, about 3 times what I was making at my job at the time).

After discussing the idea over multiple emails and a final Skype call to seal the deal, I felt extremely comfortable with my choice for the following reasons:

• Spelling
True professionalism shows itself in all aspects of a person’s behavior. My coding beast wrote long, extensively technical emails evaluating how aspects of the product problem could be solved. Over 20 emails in total and NOT A SINGLE TYPO OR GRAMMATICAL ERROR. If you haven’t worked in the B2B space before, believe me when I say that this is extremely rare.

• He understood the vision succinctly
Post a job on a freelance development site like UpWork and you will quickly get 30 responses from individuals or agencies with canned emails that say “I have read your job post and understand exactly what you need and already have ideas on how to help you”. If they had actually read my job post, they would realize that I very lightly explained the concept without details, and that it would be impossible for them to already have ‘ideas’ that would help me. My beast waited till we had ample time to discuss the concept in detail, then after 15 or so emails he stated that he ‘understood what I am trying to achieve.’

• Contributed to open source technology that you want to use
I originally sought to hire someone I had previously worked with who was himself a beast, but due to multiple other projects was regrettably unavailable to work on Oktopus. However, he left me with a great piece of advice when I asked him about what to look for when hiring a beast.
He said:
“whoever you hire, make sure they have have worked as a contributor to whatever open source technology you want to use”.

Working for free on an open source project proves a few things:

1. They know that specific technology through and through, enough to improve it in places where it lacks.
2. They like programming enough to work for free to help a larger community, of which they will likely never meet. This shows an inner
   drive and work ethic that you simply can’t teach.
   My beast happened to have built a framework for a quite new technology, GraphQL. He had just launched his framework, and many people where already starting to utilize it as a means to build web apps faster. When given the advantage of utilizing all the pre-built logic and systems for web apps that he created within that framework, that $80 an hour was starting to look like a better and better value by the minute.

When it comes to hiring, I got really lucky. A truly mythical coding beast is about 1 in 100,000. They are incredibly hard to find, but sometimes don’t always want to be part of a major corporation that gobbles up their time and creative freedom. If you can offer an open-minded, creative, and trust-based environment, then that beast can really dig his claws in and make a huge impact in your product’s future. Who doesn’t want a beast in your corner when faced with the incredibly fierce and ever-increasing competition of startups?

The process I went through to find my beast can be applied to the hiring of any position. A single wrong hire can bring down a product, lower morale, and be a thorn in the side of progress and true startup innovation. In my case, this applied to the hiring of our lead developer AKA the ‘technical architect’ who is able to play a CTO-type, non-full time role. I’m already planning to give him a generous chunk of my company to incentivize him to stick around for the long haul once we get funding, and to build a long term relationship for all future projects. Once you get a beast, don’t let them go.

If I had any advice to give founders to help during the hiring process, it would be to reiterate the following points:

1. Plan your product slowly and know exactly what you want to build before even thinking about hiring.
2. Make sure you know what kind of technologies you need to build your startup, and if you don’t, start with finding a ‘technical architect’ who can decide those things for you.
3. After you are sure that you’ve found a beast, pay them what their real long-term value is to the company right up front and save yourself time and money later.
4. Give them freedom to run, but ensure your vision for your company is always being maintained.
5. Last, but certainly just as important; Provide them with the same professionalism, fast communication, and work ethic that you expect from them.

Now, go out there and meet your very own mythical coding beast!