Co-founders, team & legal

Should I hire full-time employees, contractors, or an agency first?

For core product and anything that IS your business, hire people who own it, contractors and agencies are great for well-scoped, non-core work but rarely build lasting capability or culture. Use freelancers to test a function or fill a temporary gap, then convert what's essential to full-time. Don't outsource the thing that makes you special.

Go deeper

2 resources, 2 link-checked.

📄 Article
✓ Link checked Free Intermediate

YC's full curated body of hiring wisdom, from when to hire to how to close and evaluate early employees. The best free, high-signal resource for founders hiring for the first time.

Hiring & Recruiting (YC Startup Library collection)

From YC Startup Library by Y Combinator Curated essays + talks

  • Wait longer than feels comfortable to make your first hires
  • Hire generalists with high slope, low ego, and comfort with ambiguity
  • Use paid work samples and honest reference checks over trivia interviews
Open ycombinator.com →
📄 Article
✓ Link checked Free Intermediate

Battle-tested YC advice on landing your critical first engineering hire, from founders who've done it at scale. It reframes hiring as a founder-led sales and persistence problem.

How to hire your first engineer (YC Startup Library)

From YC Startup Library by Y Combinator (Greg Brockman, Harj Taggar) Essay

  • Treat hiring like fundraising: personalized outreach and relentless follow-up
  • Leverage your personal network before generic job posts
  • Generate inbound with content and a crisp mission
Open ycombinator.com →

People also ask

When should I make my first hire? 2 → How do I hire my first engineer when nobody's heard of my startup? 2 → What kind of people should my first ten hires be? 3 → How do I compensate early employees with salary and equity in India? 3 → How do I interview and evaluate candidates when I've never hired before? 3 → How do I write a job description that actually gets good people to apply to an unknown startup? 2 →

Also in D2C

The same ground, over in Get legal & compliant, our D2C track.

Do I actually need product liability insurance as a small D2C brand, or am I overthinking it? 3 → I'm just starting out, should I register as a proprietorship, LLP, or private limited company? 4 →

Also in How Founders Use AI

How founders actually use AI for this, over in Legal & Contracts.

Why review contracts with AI before paying a lawyer? 19 → How do founders handle NDAs, ESOPs, term sheets, and compliance questions with AI? 19 →

Also in GTM

The same ground, over in Build the team, our GTM track.

When do I stop selling myself and hire my first salesperson? 5 → I have been handed a comp plan. How do I work out what I will actually earn? 5 →
eChai Partner Brands The partnership →