Source from everywhere – Twitter – Linkedin – AngelList – Friends – Co-workers – Investors – HackerNews – Product Hunt – Your users – etc The list goes on… Keep a simple spreadsheet of all your qualified leads. Don’t worry about which software to use. Just build a list.
Shahed Khan, Founder of Loom
How we hired a world-class team at @loom (as a pre-seed company):
This will be a multi-part Twitter thread on all-the-things we did to bring on exceptional people when the company had:
– No brand
– a pre-seed round
– & a product w/ early users (pre PM-fit)
In this thread we’ll focus on our “process”.
Some context:
Loom launched on @producthunt in June 2016.
We had a few thousand people sign up on the first day.
And a few thousand every few days after that.
After the launch @yoyo_thomas, @vhmth, and I spent time thinking about 2 things:
1 – “What does our immediate product roadmap look like”
2 – “How can we ship as quickly & as often”
As a software product, engineering was our bottleneck.
There were only so many lines of code a single engineer can write in a given day.
We knew our 1st hire needed to be an engineer.
With that, we kicked off the process of our first hire.
Here are the things we learned:
#1: Source from everywhere
– Twitter
– Linkedin
– AngelList
– Friends
– Co-workers
– Investors
– HackerNews
– Product Hunt
– Your users
– etc
The list goes on… Keep a simple spreadsheet of all your qualified leads.
Don’t worry about which software to use.
Just build a list.
#2 Don’t be afraid to cold email / DM
Tips for a great cold email:
• Keep it succinct
• Personalize it (send a Loom!)
• Bullet out your traction, progress, etc
#3: Continuously be iterating & experimenting
• We worked with recruiters
• Experimented with including Looms in each outreach.
• Blocked out time after lunch each day for sourcing.
• Leveraged early investors’ networks & sent them blurbs
Find things that work for you.
#4: We hired for People Operations early
Typically companies would hire their 1st People Ops/HR person at 20 people.
We intentionally hired early (9th employee).
It allowed us to build processes around sourcing, vetting, interviewing, offers, onboarding, etc. much earlier.
Next week, I’ll cover who we hired, how we found them, and what our interview process looked like.
Follow me so you don’t miss out on the next part of this series!
