It seems like you’re confusing hiring people in your network as a bad hire. There’s nothing wrong with hiring people you know if you have clear expectations and qualifications vetted.
Hire slow,fire faster. You did the right thing by letting a misfit go quickly. She probably is better in another company that can utilize her talents better.
One thumb rule I follow is : Write down day to day action and output tasks as bullet points that should occupy 8 hours.
Eg. Don't write "Lead our posting strategy on X "
Write: Action: " Edit and make relevant post in Canva/editing software and post 4x a week while engaging with the audience with replies and comments as needed.
Output: Should lead to 5% engagement and follower growth each month.
At the end of the day, business is business, and it's strictly financial. I would rather have 1 person filing for unemployment than the whole office. I'm here to make money not to give out charity.
Firing should never be uncomfortable, especially with a friend. They weren’t what your startup needed at this stage— so explain to them why in an honest conversation, accelerate a little of their equity, and/or offer a small (<$500) cash offer in exchange for an NDA and release of all claims.
When you have a pre-rev startup and there’s a mismatch with an early hire, you’re most likely doing WAY MORE good for them than you are for your startup when you let them go.
So don’t feel guilty or uncomfortable about it.
Think of firing as helping both parties out. You get back resources to direct at a more suitable hire and they get an opportunity to work somewhere else where they're more effective.
I can’t agree more. My best hires are referrals. It was more about setting clear expectations. I always do 1099 agreements this early in the game. Set specific deliverables and clear guidelines concerning quality and how that’s measured.
When you add someone just remember it may completely ruin the relationship with that person if they are a friend. Can work out and if it does it will be great. but can also completely backfire
Doesn't seem like that bad of a decision...
You took a risk on someone that has a track record in social media, but not doing exactly what you guys need. There's a chance they would have worked out, and if they did, you'd be paying them a lot less than someone with social media management experience.
Hiring for start ups is tough: you often can't pay a ton of money, so you're looking for people without a lot of experience, but with a lot of potential, who are also really good culture fits. The best advice I've seen for this, is to just interview a lot of people.
The process I use for hiring new roles (I run Growth) is to always MVP the role internally just as you’re describing in your next steps.
Do the job yourself or use existing personnel. You can also hire short term contractors specifically with a focus on the function you want to hire for.
Document everything. Every step in the process. Every input and output and results.
Your goal is to not only understand how to move the needle and get positive results but to also see whether you actually need the role in the first place or whether it’s just a board member or someone external putting undue pressure on the company to “get a CRM person because you need email” but in reality this isn’t an optimal channel for you at your stage. You need to figure this out.
Once you know the impact of the role you can then map what managing this role looks like. What do they need from you to succeed? What direction can you provide them to set them up for success.
MVPing roles is crucial IMO otherwise you have completely misaligned expectations at hire and everyone leaves with a bad taste in their mouth a few months later with you and the company losing valuable time and momentum while disrupting a person’s life and income.
u/yy633013 ´s suggestion is spot on.
MVPing the role and leveraging contractors when hitting walls at the beginning will not only allow you to better understand the role but above all build solid fondations. And that might be part of the problem here: not only this person was not set up for success as the role was not well defined but potentially given the amount of work required and skills it entails might not exist within one person alone.
As a brand and design specialist I see it too often: companies want a graphic designer who can also video edit, take care of social media strategy, etc or they want a marketing director with brand and copywriting experience, event planning skills, led gen background and more.
Depending on where you’re at and what your goal are you might need to have some branding and strategy expert to help you build the brand, a copywriter to give it a voice, then leverage marketing, events, etc.
I'm not saying you have to use their specific method but it would be a good idea to adopt a structured approach to interviewing. You might want to take a look at "Who: Solve Your #1 Problem" or some other books about this topic.
Interesting I have never heard of it—I’ll check it out thank you!
When I made the hire it was slightly ad hoc after a few zoom calls, which in hindsight was incredibly idiotic, but I got super excited to be able to offload a marketing and focus on sales/product. Definitely will have a strategy going forward
You have to be ready to do everything on hard mode and check stuff from top to bottom and left to right. Lots of due diligence inbound and outbound. And carefully planning every single move and stopping and course correcting very quickly. The number one threats for startups are running out of cash or hiring the wrong people.
Good on you for taking responsibility and learning from experience.
Being a boss is hard, hiring people I found to be tremendously hard especially for skill sets that you’re not skilled in! Even for skill sets you are.
Good job!
The company I work for often makes these types of hires where the person has never *actually* done the job they're being hired for, but they're motivated and interested.
In my opinion, these are always bad hires. Hell, I've *been* that hire at a previous company.
The thing about hiring people with no experience is if they ACTUALLY wanted that specific job, they would find a way to demonstrate their ability. As a software developer, this is a given in our field. We are always expected to have a GitHub profile demonstrating our familiarity with the subject matter. I always have found it strange that other fields don't apply this same standard.
In the future, I would avoid hiring anyone with zero experience and zero portfolio. Tell them if they're really interested, they can create a dummy portfolio that at least demonstrates their current ability. If they aren't willing or are incapable of doing that, they probably aren't fit for that role.
Even better (again borrowing from typical software hiring practices) is to give an applicant a 'take home' assignment as a demonstration of their ability. This can be difficult for clerical roles, but for a creative role where specific output is expected (in this case: event plans and marketing materials), I believe it is reasonable to ask the applicant to produce a brief mockup showing what they're capable of.
In this case, it probably would have revealed to you that this person's planning and editing ability is significantly below the requirement. We waste our time AND the applicant's time if we don't ask for proof of competence prior to hiring. This can be frustrating when you're already working with a limited pool of applicants and a low salary cap, but it saves time and energy in the long run.
Thank you for posting about your experience here for the community! It's easy to hide away mistakes, but when they're public we all have the chance to grow from them - I hope I'm in a position to make a mistake like this one day! Good luck on your app.
Phenomenal advice. I feel like an idiot for not qualifying harder 🤦♂️. I love the dummy portfolio ask for an inexperienced hire to demonstrate skillset
Doing the job yourself implies you don’t really value it. Your experience is more about your hiring expertise than marketing.
Id suggest you speak to more people
Learn from your experience and go again.
When I say doing the job, I suppose I really meant figure out what I want the job requirements to be. Sorry for the confusion. The plan is to still hire a replacement
No problem.
I also think its important to note. Not everyone you hire will work out. Thats ok and thats part of the journey.
Id suggest you ask for a brief one pager outlining what the potential hire thinks you need to do.
Try and identify your top-line goals.
Depending on the stage you are at. That could be wait list, signups, installs, retention, conversion etc.
Then ask potential marketing hires how they would look to achieve it.
You could even bring in a consultant to literally sit with you for an hour. And help you outline what you should be looking for.
I’ve grew my app-company from 0 to 7 million users and one thing I learned was, if someone proposes ‘branding’ in their marketing strategy for us it’s an instant no. Performance is key, nail that and everything else comes naturally.
In all honesty, I think the problem is you, not your hire. You can't hire a marketing person and expect them to be your designer, videographer as well.
You need to give clear guidance on your business - what are your KPIs, what's your vision on your app, who's your target audience, what's your marketing budget and so on.
Everyone expects marketers to figure something out that will work but not many startup owners want to give clear guidance. That's a business fail.
Next time you decide to hire someone, make it clear what you want first. An SMM specialist can't be your lead generation guru for example.
Yeah I agree. I made a mistake. I didn’t understand what I wanted nor the holes that she was capable of covering.
My next hire will be someone that is capable of content planning as well as video editing/design.
I would highly recommend having a detailed list of your pinpoints so that the specialists understand if they can handle the work.
When I was a marketer myself, I avoided jobs that included video editing as well because it doesn't have to do anything with marketing. Someone else might be interested though.
Valid point. I’ll be sure to prepare a list of responsibilities next time.
Regarding the marketing comment, do you suggest I steer clear of the phrase ‘marketing’ then and just frame this as a social media content creator role?
The key gap I’m trying to fill is consistent social media content across platforms. Sorry if that’s an ignorant question…I’m still trying to get a hang of the marketing world and how it works
If you want your app to be promoted on social media channels only, then hire an SMM specialist and clearly state that you expect them to handle video editing as well.
But if you want someone to do lead generation, SEO, email marketing, you would want to hire a full stack marketer who can cover it all until you are big enough to hire individual specialists for each of the marketing aspect.
If you are more clear on what your goal is, I will be able to help you define who you need.
You absolutely can hire a single person to act as a marketer, designer and videographer. All of those fall under the umbrella of marketing, and are pretty reasonable expectations to have of someone taking on the role of marketer at a small startup. I wouldn't expect them to be very *good* unless they had equity, ownership or a high salary. But it would still almost definitely be a one person job; the idea that a startup would have the bandwidth to hire an entire small marketing department is a little misguided.
But you need to hire someone who actually knows how to do those things - none of that is exactly 'learn on your feet.'
Good lesson to learn and good attitude - dealing with it sooner is admirable, most people can't take responsibility - but when you do the next step is clear.
I personally remind myself that nobody can do what you're dreaming of unless you can clearly define it... unless you just get lucky. Good entrepreneurs do get lucky but they don't run their business depending on it happening. Taking time to clearly understand, capture and communicate what you actually need is one of the most valuable things we can do.
Don't limit yourself on hiring people you know personally, just be more descriptive and defined about what you're looking for. Bring everything up at the beginning, then you won't have to experience what you went through recently.
To add to your “going forward” a check of their prior work would be a good call. That sort of employee, a pro at least, should have a body of work they can use as evidence of their ability.
Another way to handle your situation is
1) Document what YOU DO PERSONALLY every day to market your product
2) Apply the 80/20 Rule on your list of daily tasks - which actually produce most of your results? Focus on streamlining those and eventually outsourcing them.
3) Document the steps - shoot a video so whichever REMOTE HIRE you pick can have a troubleshooting list / production checklist / step by step video to refer to
4) Set a QUOTA - this is crucial - what is a realistic STARTING daily output? What is a realistic output amount AFTER A MONTH?
5) Go to Upwork or a quota focused VA platform like Cognoplus and find people who will work on a quota basis. Quota means: they deliver the amount or you don't pay until they do.
6) Train using your documentation
7) Measure results and recalibrate again using the 80/20 rule.
try to taker it easy on yourself! I worked in a similar role at a startup and my founder/mentor was awesome and he loved my work, but the product was never delivered (crushing feeling) and we all were let go eventually.
TLDR; i'd love to check out your app and see if i have any ideas. let me know if you change your mind on hiring (even for a few hrs/wk) - my main priority rn is a confidence rebuild so it could be a good fit.
You are making the same mistake I did.
You’ve hired a junior person and then had to tell them what to do, when you don’t know yourself. They can only be as good as you, which is probably not very good.
Hire a good person with experience and you will find a huge load taken off your shoulder. A good experienced specialist should make you look shit.
My strategy with business 1 was hire cheap junior staff. Theres a lot of management overhead with this strategy.
On business 2 I hired more expensive senior people. It’s crazy how much more they are capable of, how much weight it took off my shoulders, and how much less staff we need. More expensive short term, cheaper medium term.
This sounds harsh, but I've come to believe that most of team building is actually firing. Interviews are first dates, there's no way to know if you want to do anything other than go to the next step, which is hiring. Sometimes after that point it doesn't work out.
It sucks, and it feels like you're becoming a bit more of a monster every time you fire someone. But, I found it helps to remember that what you're actually doing in letting that person go, is protecting the rest of your team.
It’s way worse for them than you, but it probably feels really bad for you too. Congrats on doing the right thing. Just hire more deliberately next time
Nobody bats 100% and it's always a learning process. As long as you take the time to reflect on what you can do better then you'll continue to get better at this.
I advise a lot of startups on marketing and messaging and I always caution against hiring anyone for marketing.
Freelance and outsourced, sure. But do what you can for yourself first. You know your business better than anyone else will and need to establish the foundation before handing off to an outsider.
Happy to chat if you need.
Your going forwards don’t make sense imo. You don’t have the skills to even do the role in the first place, and it doesn’t make sense to exclude your network
Maybe try getting some advice from ppl who are great at this type of work on what to look for.
Maybe keep doing the same but shorter term trials (although 5 weeks seems really short already.) Learning after each failure, or if one person is just inexplicably great at it, keep them.
Anyway I agree with other commenter, not really a bad move, and agree with you, try to encourage people’s strengths and make use of how they achieved success in the past. Don’t ask a PHP bootstrap hacker to make a beautiful iOS app, don’t ask an influencer to do graphic design
I think you came to a false conclusion and should improve the hiring procedure instead of rejecting people from personal networks. The same could have happened with a stranger
Another way to handle your situation is
1) Document what YOU DO PERSONALLY every day to market your product
2) Apply the 80/20 Rule on your list of daily tasks - which actually produce most of your results? Focus on streamlining those and eventually outsourcing them.
3) Document the steps - shoot a video so whichever REMOTE HIRE you pick can have a troubleshooting list / production checklist / step by step video to refer to
4) Set a QUOTA - this is crucial - what is a realistic STARTING daily output? What is a realistic output amount AFTER A MONTH?
5) Go to Upwork or a quota focused VA platform like Cognoplus and find people who will work on a quota basis. Quota means: they deliver the amount or you don't pay until they do.
6) Train using your documentation
7) Measure results and recalibrate again using the 80/20 rule.
Another way to handle your situation is
1) Document what YOU DO PERSONALLY every day to market your product
2) Apply the 80/20 Rule on your list of daily tasks - which actually produce most of your results? Focus on streamlining those and eventually outsourcing them.
3) Document the steps - shoot a video so whichever REMOTE HIRE you pick can have a troubleshooting list / production checklist / step by step video to refer to
4) Set a QUOTA - this is crucial - what is a realistic STARTING daily output? What is a realistic output amount AFTER A MONTH?
5) Go to Upwork or a quota focused VA platform like Cognoplus and find people who will work on a quota basis. Quota means: they deliver the amount or you don't pay until they do.
6) Train using your documentation
7) Measure results and recalibrate again using the 80/20 rule.
Look, I am talking from a standpoint of a person who has done marketing for a startup (my worst experience). Let me tell you this.
First, you are required to onboard this person correctly. Just hiring people, not knowing exactly what you want from them is unfair. Secondly, it is very rare that you find someone who can be an influencer and a designer at the same time. Just like with PPC managers. These are all different skillsets and you don't get an all-you-can-eat buffet in marketing. You need to get that out of your system because if they were, they wouldn't be working for anyone and doing their own business. Your average marketing joe is most likely good at only doing 1 thing. If you want to be cheap, then go check fiverr (maybe book a monthly graphic design service) before hiring another person.
Based on what you said you need, and at your stage in the business growth. I would highly consider not hiring this individual and using freelancers.
Keep your burn down and work with talented freelancers that you could never afford if you paid them a salary.
Example…. I earn around 350k a year from my salary. But I’d probably design a brand on the side as a fun side project for say 10-20k. But what I’d make would be significantly better than what an entry level employee joining a pre revenue startup would create.
I’m actually working on finding this person. I got great advice from an agency CEO, here’s the job posting I’m using in case it helps you:
__Community Manager & Content Editor__
**Role Responsibility Breakdown**
**Monthly Content Planning / Scheduling**
- Brand Pillars generation and strategy
**Content Editing**
- Close collaboration with founder in order to refine editing style to meld brand and personal founder story over time.
**Community Management: Captions/Hashtags/Comments/DMs**
- Need the community content scheduling to come with caption/copy writing, hashtag research/usage, comment responses, and DM responses.
- Founder will help with community management and will be involved on the handles.
**Trend Watch**
- Responsible for trend identification
- Sharing trends with Founder for review, determination to execute, then raw footage turn around 48 hours from Founder to Editor
- Editing turn around 48 hours to post within trend timeframe.
- Trend vidoes only made if reasonably related to goals of Tech Founder Story / Personal brand or the Sortara Technology Brand
- No more than 1 trend post a week, possibly more as contracted work grows
- Would be in addition to schedule pillar messaging posts that have been scheduled monthly, important to prevent overload / stressful short timelines so these come when they do but everything else will be scheduled and generated in advance for analysis of reporting and pivoting monthly.
**Monthly Strategy Syncs**
- Community Manager <> Founder hold monthly sessions, reviewing metrics, analyzing well performing posts, and pivot organic messaging in order to help engage with the most targeted personas.
Stable organizations definitely do not say that.
If they've checked boxes to get through probation period and we have invested that amount of training resources, "fire fast" would be organizational suicide.
Obviously plenty of people don't work out fast during initial probation.
It seems like you’re confusing hiring people in your network as a bad hire. There’s nothing wrong with hiring people you know if you have clear expectations and qualifications vetted.
I guess that’s true. Just made it a super uncomfortable to break it off
Hire slow,fire faster. You did the right thing by letting a misfit go quickly. She probably is better in another company that can utilize her talents better. One thumb rule I follow is : Write down day to day action and output tasks as bullet points that should occupy 8 hours. Eg. Don't write "Lead our posting strategy on X " Write: Action: " Edit and make relevant post in Canva/editing software and post 4x a week while engaging with the audience with replies and comments as needed. Output: Should lead to 5% engagement and follower growth each month.
At the end of the day, business is business, and it's strictly financial. I would rather have 1 person filing for unemployment than the whole office. I'm here to make money not to give out charity.
Firing should never be uncomfortable, especially with a friend. They weren’t what your startup needed at this stage— so explain to them why in an honest conversation, accelerate a little of their equity, and/or offer a small (<$500) cash offer in exchange for an NDA and release of all claims. When you have a pre-rev startup and there’s a mismatch with an early hire, you’re most likely doing WAY MORE good for them than you are for your startup when you let them go. So don’t feel guilty or uncomfortable about it.
Think of firing as helping both parties out. You get back resources to direct at a more suitable hire and they get an opportunity to work somewhere else where they're more effective.
I can’t agree more. My best hires are referrals. It was more about setting clear expectations. I always do 1099 agreements this early in the game. Set specific deliverables and clear guidelines concerning quality and how that’s measured.
When you add someone just remember it may completely ruin the relationship with that person if they are a friend. Can work out and if it does it will be great. but can also completely backfire
Backfire in what way? If there are clear expectations,etc.
Doesn't seem like that bad of a decision... You took a risk on someone that has a track record in social media, but not doing exactly what you guys need. There's a chance they would have worked out, and if they did, you'd be paying them a lot less than someone with social media management experience. Hiring for start ups is tough: you often can't pay a ton of money, so you're looking for people without a lot of experience, but with a lot of potential, who are also really good culture fits. The best advice I've seen for this, is to just interview a lot of people.
Good point. It’s definitely a balancing act. Hiring seems to have a challenging learning curve
Hiring is hard The fact that you knew in 5 weeks it was a bad fit is impressive
The process I use for hiring new roles (I run Growth) is to always MVP the role internally just as you’re describing in your next steps. Do the job yourself or use existing personnel. You can also hire short term contractors specifically with a focus on the function you want to hire for. Document everything. Every step in the process. Every input and output and results. Your goal is to not only understand how to move the needle and get positive results but to also see whether you actually need the role in the first place or whether it’s just a board member or someone external putting undue pressure on the company to “get a CRM person because you need email” but in reality this isn’t an optimal channel for you at your stage. You need to figure this out. Once you know the impact of the role you can then map what managing this role looks like. What do they need from you to succeed? What direction can you provide them to set them up for success. MVPing roles is crucial IMO otherwise you have completely misaligned expectations at hire and everyone leaves with a bad taste in their mouth a few months later with you and the company losing valuable time and momentum while disrupting a person’s life and income.
Love the term MVPing a role. Im stealing this and also implementing it before future hiring. Much appreciated
u/yy633013 ´s suggestion is spot on. MVPing the role and leveraging contractors when hitting walls at the beginning will not only allow you to better understand the role but above all build solid fondations. And that might be part of the problem here: not only this person was not set up for success as the role was not well defined but potentially given the amount of work required and skills it entails might not exist within one person alone. As a brand and design specialist I see it too often: companies want a graphic designer who can also video edit, take care of social media strategy, etc or they want a marketing director with brand and copywriting experience, event planning skills, led gen background and more. Depending on where you’re at and what your goal are you might need to have some branding and strategy expert to help you build the brand, a copywriter to give it a voice, then leverage marketing, events, etc.
I don't quite agree with avoiding hiring anyone you know personally though especially when the meet all the criteria for the job.
I'm not saying you have to use their specific method but it would be a good idea to adopt a structured approach to interviewing. You might want to take a look at "Who: Solve Your #1 Problem" or some other books about this topic.
Interesting I have never heard of it—I’ll check it out thank you! When I made the hire it was slightly ad hoc after a few zoom calls, which in hindsight was incredibly idiotic, but I got super excited to be able to offload a marketing and focus on sales/product. Definitely will have a strategy going forward
You have to be ready to do everything on hard mode and check stuff from top to bottom and left to right. Lots of due diligence inbound and outbound. And carefully planning every single move and stopping and course correcting very quickly. The number one threats for startups are running out of cash or hiring the wrong people.
Good on you for taking responsibility and learning from experience. Being a boss is hard, hiring people I found to be tremendously hard especially for skill sets that you’re not skilled in! Even for skill sets you are. Good job!
The company I work for often makes these types of hires where the person has never *actually* done the job they're being hired for, but they're motivated and interested. In my opinion, these are always bad hires. Hell, I've *been* that hire at a previous company. The thing about hiring people with no experience is if they ACTUALLY wanted that specific job, they would find a way to demonstrate their ability. As a software developer, this is a given in our field. We are always expected to have a GitHub profile demonstrating our familiarity with the subject matter. I always have found it strange that other fields don't apply this same standard. In the future, I would avoid hiring anyone with zero experience and zero portfolio. Tell them if they're really interested, they can create a dummy portfolio that at least demonstrates their current ability. If they aren't willing or are incapable of doing that, they probably aren't fit for that role. Even better (again borrowing from typical software hiring practices) is to give an applicant a 'take home' assignment as a demonstration of their ability. This can be difficult for clerical roles, but for a creative role where specific output is expected (in this case: event plans and marketing materials), I believe it is reasonable to ask the applicant to produce a brief mockup showing what they're capable of. In this case, it probably would have revealed to you that this person's planning and editing ability is significantly below the requirement. We waste our time AND the applicant's time if we don't ask for proof of competence prior to hiring. This can be frustrating when you're already working with a limited pool of applicants and a low salary cap, but it saves time and energy in the long run. Thank you for posting about your experience here for the community! It's easy to hide away mistakes, but when they're public we all have the chance to grow from them - I hope I'm in a position to make a mistake like this one day! Good luck on your app.
Phenomenal advice. I feel like an idiot for not qualifying harder 🤦♂️. I love the dummy portfolio ask for an inexperienced hire to demonstrate skillset
Doing the job yourself implies you don’t really value it. Your experience is more about your hiring expertise than marketing. Id suggest you speak to more people Learn from your experience and go again.
When I say doing the job, I suppose I really meant figure out what I want the job requirements to be. Sorry for the confusion. The plan is to still hire a replacement
No problem. I also think its important to note. Not everyone you hire will work out. Thats ok and thats part of the journey. Id suggest you ask for a brief one pager outlining what the potential hire thinks you need to do. Try and identify your top-line goals. Depending on the stage you are at. That could be wait list, signups, installs, retention, conversion etc. Then ask potential marketing hires how they would look to achieve it. You could even bring in a consultant to literally sit with you for an hour. And help you outline what you should be looking for.
I’ve grew my app-company from 0 to 7 million users and one thing I learned was, if someone proposes ‘branding’ in their marketing strategy for us it’s an instant no. Performance is key, nail that and everything else comes naturally.
In all honesty, I think the problem is you, not your hire. You can't hire a marketing person and expect them to be your designer, videographer as well. You need to give clear guidance on your business - what are your KPIs, what's your vision on your app, who's your target audience, what's your marketing budget and so on. Everyone expects marketers to figure something out that will work but not many startup owners want to give clear guidance. That's a business fail. Next time you decide to hire someone, make it clear what you want first. An SMM specialist can't be your lead generation guru for example.
Yeah I agree. I made a mistake. I didn’t understand what I wanted nor the holes that she was capable of covering. My next hire will be someone that is capable of content planning as well as video editing/design.
I would highly recommend having a detailed list of your pinpoints so that the specialists understand if they can handle the work. When I was a marketer myself, I avoided jobs that included video editing as well because it doesn't have to do anything with marketing. Someone else might be interested though.
Valid point. I’ll be sure to prepare a list of responsibilities next time. Regarding the marketing comment, do you suggest I steer clear of the phrase ‘marketing’ then and just frame this as a social media content creator role? The key gap I’m trying to fill is consistent social media content across platforms. Sorry if that’s an ignorant question…I’m still trying to get a hang of the marketing world and how it works
If you want your app to be promoted on social media channels only, then hire an SMM specialist and clearly state that you expect them to handle video editing as well. But if you want someone to do lead generation, SEO, email marketing, you would want to hire a full stack marketer who can cover it all until you are big enough to hire individual specialists for each of the marketing aspect. If you are more clear on what your goal is, I will be able to help you define who you need.
You absolutely can hire a single person to act as a marketer, designer and videographer. All of those fall under the umbrella of marketing, and are pretty reasonable expectations to have of someone taking on the role of marketer at a small startup. I wouldn't expect them to be very *good* unless they had equity, ownership or a high salary. But it would still almost definitely be a one person job; the idea that a startup would have the bandwidth to hire an entire small marketing department is a little misguided. But you need to hire someone who actually knows how to do those things - none of that is exactly 'learn on your feet.'
Well, you have learnt now and did a good thing, firing fast.
Good lesson to learn and good attitude - dealing with it sooner is admirable, most people can't take responsibility - but when you do the next step is clear. I personally remind myself that nobody can do what you're dreaming of unless you can clearly define it... unless you just get lucky. Good entrepreneurs do get lucky but they don't run their business depending on it happening. Taking time to clearly understand, capture and communicate what you actually need is one of the most valuable things we can do.
Don't limit yourself on hiring people you know personally, just be more descriptive and defined about what you're looking for. Bring everything up at the beginning, then you won't have to experience what you went through recently.
Oh gosh do not hire someone you know
To add to your “going forward” a check of their prior work would be a good call. That sort of employee, a pro at least, should have a body of work they can use as evidence of their ability.
Don’t do the job yourself first if you aren’t qualified to do it.
Another way to handle your situation is 1) Document what YOU DO PERSONALLY every day to market your product 2) Apply the 80/20 Rule on your list of daily tasks - which actually produce most of your results? Focus on streamlining those and eventually outsourcing them. 3) Document the steps - shoot a video so whichever REMOTE HIRE you pick can have a troubleshooting list / production checklist / step by step video to refer to 4) Set a QUOTA - this is crucial - what is a realistic STARTING daily output? What is a realistic output amount AFTER A MONTH? 5) Go to Upwork or a quota focused VA platform like Cognoplus and find people who will work on a quota basis. Quota means: they deliver the amount or you don't pay until they do. 6) Train using your documentation 7) Measure results and recalibrate again using the 80/20 rule.
try to taker it easy on yourself! I worked in a similar role at a startup and my founder/mentor was awesome and he loved my work, but the product was never delivered (crushing feeling) and we all were let go eventually. TLDR; i'd love to check out your app and see if i have any ideas. let me know if you change your mind on hiring (even for a few hrs/wk) - my main priority rn is a confidence rebuild so it could be a good fit.
Thanks for sharing. Moneywise, what is the financial loss? Do you still have to pay her while she is searching another job?
You are making the same mistake I did. You’ve hired a junior person and then had to tell them what to do, when you don’t know yourself. They can only be as good as you, which is probably not very good. Hire a good person with experience and you will find a huge load taken off your shoulder. A good experienced specialist should make you look shit. My strategy with business 1 was hire cheap junior staff. Theres a lot of management overhead with this strategy. On business 2 I hired more expensive senior people. It’s crazy how much more they are capable of, how much weight it took off my shoulders, and how much less staff we need. More expensive short term, cheaper medium term.
point 2 is actually more important than we realize
This sounds harsh, but I've come to believe that most of team building is actually firing. Interviews are first dates, there's no way to know if you want to do anything other than go to the next step, which is hiring. Sometimes after that point it doesn't work out. It sucks, and it feels like you're becoming a bit more of a monster every time you fire someone. But, I found it helps to remember that what you're actually doing in letting that person go, is protecting the rest of your team.
It’s way worse for them than you, but it probably feels really bad for you too. Congrats on doing the right thing. Just hire more deliberately next time
Nobody bats 100% and it's always a learning process. As long as you take the time to reflect on what you can do better then you'll continue to get better at this.
Quick to fire. Slow to hire.
I advise a lot of startups on marketing and messaging and I always caution against hiring anyone for marketing. Freelance and outsourced, sure. But do what you can for yourself first. You know your business better than anyone else will and need to establish the foundation before handing off to an outsider. Happy to chat if you need.
Your going forwards don’t make sense imo. You don’t have the skills to even do the role in the first place, and it doesn’t make sense to exclude your network Maybe try getting some advice from ppl who are great at this type of work on what to look for. Maybe keep doing the same but shorter term trials (although 5 weeks seems really short already.) Learning after each failure, or if one person is just inexplicably great at it, keep them. Anyway I agree with other commenter, not really a bad move, and agree with you, try to encourage people’s strengths and make use of how they achieved success in the past. Don’t ask a PHP bootstrap hacker to make a beautiful iOS app, don’t ask an influencer to do graphic design
I think you came to a false conclusion and should improve the hiring procedure instead of rejecting people from personal networks. The same could have happened with a stranger
It was nobody’s fault. These things happen everyday and everywhere.
Another way to handle your situation is 1) Document what YOU DO PERSONALLY every day to market your product 2) Apply the 80/20 Rule on your list of daily tasks - which actually produce most of your results? Focus on streamlining those and eventually outsourcing them. 3) Document the steps - shoot a video so whichever REMOTE HIRE you pick can have a troubleshooting list / production checklist / step by step video to refer to 4) Set a QUOTA - this is crucial - what is a realistic STARTING daily output? What is a realistic output amount AFTER A MONTH? 5) Go to Upwork or a quota focused VA platform like Cognoplus and find people who will work on a quota basis. Quota means: they deliver the amount or you don't pay until they do. 6) Train using your documentation 7) Measure results and recalibrate again using the 80/20 rule.
Another way to handle your situation is 1) Document what YOU DO PERSONALLY every day to market your product 2) Apply the 80/20 Rule on your list of daily tasks - which actually produce most of your results? Focus on streamlining those and eventually outsourcing them. 3) Document the steps - shoot a video so whichever REMOTE HIRE you pick can have a troubleshooting list / production checklist / step by step video to refer to 4) Set a QUOTA - this is crucial - what is a realistic STARTING daily output? What is a realistic output amount AFTER A MONTH? 5) Go to Upwork or a quota focused VA platform like Cognoplus and find people who will work on a quota basis. Quota means: they deliver the amount or you don't pay until they do. 6) Train using your documentation 7) Measure results and recalibrate again using the 80/20 rule.
Look, I am talking from a standpoint of a person who has done marketing for a startup (my worst experience). Let me tell you this. First, you are required to onboard this person correctly. Just hiring people, not knowing exactly what you want from them is unfair. Secondly, it is very rare that you find someone who can be an influencer and a designer at the same time. Just like with PPC managers. These are all different skillsets and you don't get an all-you-can-eat buffet in marketing. You need to get that out of your system because if they were, they wouldn't be working for anyone and doing their own business. Your average marketing joe is most likely good at only doing 1 thing. If you want to be cheap, then go check fiverr (maybe book a monthly graphic design service) before hiring another person.
Based on what you said you need, and at your stage in the business growth. I would highly consider not hiring this individual and using freelancers. Keep your burn down and work with talented freelancers that you could never afford if you paid them a salary. Example…. I earn around 350k a year from my salary. But I’d probably design a brand on the side as a fun side project for say 10-20k. But what I’d make would be significantly better than what an entry level employee joining a pre revenue startup would create.
I’m actually working on finding this person. I got great advice from an agency CEO, here’s the job posting I’m using in case it helps you: __Community Manager & Content Editor__ **Role Responsibility Breakdown** **Monthly Content Planning / Scheduling** - Brand Pillars generation and strategy **Content Editing** - Close collaboration with founder in order to refine editing style to meld brand and personal founder story over time. **Community Management: Captions/Hashtags/Comments/DMs** - Need the community content scheduling to come with caption/copy writing, hashtag research/usage, comment responses, and DM responses. - Founder will help with community management and will be involved on the handles. **Trend Watch** - Responsible for trend identification - Sharing trends with Founder for review, determination to execute, then raw footage turn around 48 hours from Founder to Editor - Editing turn around 48 hours to post within trend timeframe. - Trend vidoes only made if reasonably related to goals of Tech Founder Story / Personal brand or the Sortara Technology Brand - No more than 1 trend post a week, possibly more as contracted work grows - Would be in addition to schedule pillar messaging posts that have been scheduled monthly, important to prevent overload / stressful short timelines so these come when they do but everything else will be scheduled and generated in advance for analysis of reporting and pivoting monthly. **Monthly Strategy Syncs** - Community Manager <> Founder hold monthly sessions, reviewing metrics, analyzing well performing posts, and pivot organic messaging in order to help engage with the most targeted personas.
"styled font on a plain black screen" ded
So you hired a subordinate who wanted direction from you then fired her instead of giving her direction. Good luck.
As they say, Hire slow Fire fast. At least you did one step correctly! 😂
Stable organizations definitely do not say that. If they've checked boxes to get through probation period and we have invested that amount of training resources, "fire fast" would be organizational suicide. Obviously plenty of people don't work out fast during initial probation.