🗞 What's New: Is it time to grow your team?

How do you know when it's time to grow your team?

• This guide will walk you through when, and how, to grow your team when the time comes. From contractors, to cofounders, to employees, explore these options to find the best one for you!
• It can be easy to fall into the follower count trap. As comments and likes increase, some founders lose touch with authenticity, missing opportunities to build genuine relationships with their audiences. Below, Arvid Kahl offers tips to avoid this.
• Founder Connor Cameron hit 550 upvotes, 130 comments, and 2 newsletter features on Product Hunt when he launched Kinde, an all-in-one authentication platform. Here's his playbook for building pre-launch hype, and one key mistake to avoid.

Want to share something with nearly 115,000 indie hackers? Submit a section for us to include in a future newsletter. —Channing

🤝 When and How to Build a Team

by James Fleischmann

If your business does well, you may need to eventually grow your team. Along with that comes the decision of who to add: Contractors? Employees? Cofounders?

Let's dive into this further!

Is it time to grow?

Before adding someone to the team, ask yourself these questions:

• Do you have the cashflow to bring someone on?
• Do you have the time to onboard them?
• Have you taken the project as far as you could? You should, at a minimum, have a validated MVP before bringing people on board.
• How will adding someone push the needle for you and help the business grow?

Expanding your team

So, you've evaluated and decided that it's time to expand your team! Let’s dive into three options:

1. Contractors:

Contractors are lower risk, easy to find, and easy to scale up and down. They also:

• Are cheaper than hiring employees.
• Provide founders with existing infrastructure (tools, systems, etc.).
• Allow founders to access hyper-specialized talent.
• Allow for short-term work, as opposed to long-term hires.
• Put the task into the hands of an expert, meaning less errors and higher efficiency.

As for the downsides:

• They can be unreliable.
• They are less committed.
• There's often a slower turnaround.
• There's less accountability.

Pro tip: Contractors should not take on integral roles. They should not touch things that affect the DNA of your company. If you’ve got a software product, for example, it’s not a good idea to have contractors building your software. There’s one exception to this, which I’ll get into later.

There are tons of places to find contractors. I posted a long list of freelance marketplaces here!

Keep these things in mind when hiring a contractor:

• Consider looking within your own time zone, or within a few hours. Other time zones are manageable, but I find that it wastes a lot of time when you have to wait until the following day for responses.
• When looking for a developer, do a code audit before moving forward. Otherwise, review their portfolios, check references, etc.
• Pricing is a big deal, especially for bootstrapped founders. The more important the task, the more important it is to hire for experience over price.
• Start with a trial project, something small and relatively unimportant.
• Document objectives and requirements meticulously. Ask them to walk through the requirements with you so you know that they understand fully.
• Review their work regularly, and keep an open line of communication around how they're doing. The occasional code audit is helpful with technical resources; grab a friend or another freelancer to do it.
• Ask them for solid, but realistic, deadlines on everything, and hold them accountable for hitting them.
• Set a regular meeting to regroup.
• Once you know and trust the person, it's great to set up retainers for tasks, as they will ensure availability. For project contracts, get a fixed bid. Even better, try for time and materials, with a cap.
• You may want to avoid agencies. They cost way more.

2. Cofounders:

I’m a big fan of bringing on a cofounder, because it means you'll be working with someone who has as much of a reason to care about the product as you do. They’re pretty much the opposite of contractors, and they’re perfect for integral roles:

• They are fully invested in the success of the business.
• They are the cheapest upfront, which is when you need to spend the least.
• You'll feel less alone when you've got someone going through the same trials as you.
• They can have a major positive impact on your business, more than contractors and employees.

As for the downsides:

• They reduce your ownership and authority.
• They increase the risk of conflict.
• They can have a major negative impact on your business, more than contractors and employees.
• The partnership requires a lot of paperwork and negotiations.

I posted about where to find cofounders here!

When bringing on cofounders, keep these things in mind:

• Don't bring on a cofounder before you’ve got an MVP. Build something first. Use no-code, spreadsheets, or whatever it takes.
• Bring them on to fill in the skills that you don’t have. Don't double up.
• Never bring one on to fill short-term requirements. Make sure they’ve got ongoing work for the lifetime of the product.
• Never bring one on for a non-integral role.
• Vet them heavily. Check out their LinkedIn and socials. Have they worked for notable tech companies? Take a look at their previous projects. Do the products function well? Are they user-friendly? How is the design? How impressive are the technologies?
• Make sure they're someone you want to spend a significant amount of time with.

Pro tip: If you're a developer, bring on a marketer. If you're a marketer, bring on a developer. This depends a bit on your niche, but generally speaking, those are the two roles that I personally feel are important enough in the early stages to justify bringing on a cofounder.

Bringing on a cofounder is much more complicated than bringing on a contractor. I wrote about that in more detail here, but in short, settle on terms, update your operating agreement, update your articles of organization, update your entity type (single member LLC to multi-member, for example), decide on how to split equity, consider a vesting schedule, figure out how you'll pay out the profits, and draw up a founder's agreement.

3. Employees:

For the vast majority of us, employees are never going to be the answer. In my opinion, they're only a good option in one situation: If the role is integral, but it doesn’t make sense to bring on a cofounder (i.e. not enough work long-term). That said, here are some benefits:

• They are more long-term than contractors, but less so than cofounders.
• They are cheaper than contractors and cofounders in the long run.
• You maintain more control.

As for the downsides:

• There are lots of laws and regulations.
• You have to deal with payroll taxes.
• They are harder to scale up and down.

You can find employees by posting a job listing in niche communities, or on sites like Indeed.

When bringing on an employee, keep these things in mind:

• Hire for culture fit.
• Get to know the person.
• Trial them as a contractor first, if they're open to that.
• Consider looking within your own time zone, or within a few hours.

You'll also need to register with your state's unemployment insurance office, verify their eligibility to work, get worker's compensation insurance, report them to your state's registry, set up payroll and tax withholding, get a W-4 from them, and comply with OSHA. You can learn more here.

Find like-minded people

The people who really understand what you're doing are going to be other indie hackers. Folks on this site are scrappy. They get it. Many are looking for cofounders or cashflow to extend their runways. Consider working with them! Check out Indie Hacker's partnering up group to search for your perfect fit.

Have you started the process of growing a team? Share below!

Discuss this story.

📰 In the News

from the Growth Trends newsletter by Darko

💬 Google can now translate text from images on the web.

📹 Reddit's new features include a TikTok-style video feed.

📝 Six pay-per-click (PPC) marketing strategies to focus on now.

🏛 The US FBI chief says that TikTok "screams" of national security concerns.

🍪 Girl Scout cookies are in short supply, and people are upset.

Check out Growth Trends for more curated news items focused on user acquisition and new product ideas.

🪤 Don't Fall for the Follower Count Trap

by Arvid Kahl

"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." These are the famous words of economist Charles Goodhart, who introduced this concept in 1975. The idea is that, when a particular metric is used to describe progress toward some goal, people tend to optimize their behavior to meet that target. That itself is not the problem. The issue is that this optimization can turn counterproductive and lead to unintended consequences.

Today, we can see this law in action in the world of social media. On platforms like Instagram and Twitter, people dream of building sizable audiences of followers. But, when follower counts become the target, it can lead to undesirable outcomes.

The pitfalls of focusing on follower count

People tend to over-optimize for follower count, which can result in many low-quality followers. These followers may not actually be interested in the content being produced, but are merely following in the hopes of being followed back.

Optimizing for follower count alone does not create meaningful relationships. It makes for shallow ones at best, and they end up creating very few opportunities for growth down the road.

Here's why so many people still fall for it: While follower counts can be easily measured, the depth of a relationship cannot. But, the strength of your connection ends up being more important than your number of followers. It's the quality of each relationship that matters, not how many you have. Humans require meaningful connection, and they will put in the work to make these relationships valuable...if they are reciprocated. Don't gloss over the depth of the connections you forge, even if it is "just" on Twitter.

Another factor for over-focusing on follower counts is the loss-aversion bias, amplified by discrete data. The emotional impact of a dip in followers is very noticeable when you track them daily on some dashboard. If you see your numbers go down, it hurts. But when we look at IRL relationships, we don't have that same problem. The natural ebb and flow of relationships are much more subtle. Some days, people are in a good mood, and on other days, they're not. We expect that. But the moment we see that follower count dip by even one person, we freak out.

So, stay off the metrics. Or measure something that doesn't have discrete real-time numbers. It's better to use unmeasurable factors as the north star for your audience building. These include the quality of the relationships you build over time, the size of the opportunity surface that the relationships create eventually, and the perceived desire for reciprocation between you and your audience.

None of these are easy to measure, but they all contribute to a fulfilled audience building journey.

That highlights another problem of focusing on just the follower count: Other important measurements are often neglected. It's never just one number that can describe something as complex as a massive web of interpersonal connections.

This is also a recursive problem. Even when you look at other metrics, you might look into something way too general. For instance, you might focus on the frequency of engagement with your audience.

That's good, right? Well, yeah, but it also glosses over the actual value that a virtual relationship is supposed to produce for everyone involved. People on the internet yell at each other all the time, and that's a relationship, too, but not a very useful one, is it?

That's what you get when you're looking at the frequency of engagement rather than its quality. You end up optimizing for pointlessly overblown exchanges and content that creates outrage and dissent, which drives low-quality engagement.

The negative consequences

At its worst, this obsession with follower count can lead people to literally buy into the hype. They buy followers, which artificially inflates their numbers. A high follower count might signal credibility, but a real person can quickly tell if your audience is legit or not.

We've seen the long-term effects of such optimizations play out over the last few decades. This law is very evident in SEO. If you try to find a cooking recipe online, you will come across whole essays leading into what ends up being just a two step recipe. This is what happens when we optimize for the Google PageRank algorithm. The content becomes tailored to the algorithm, not the human reading it.

Prevention methods

So, how do we stay clear of this mistake when building an audience?

It starts with how well we can isolate our follower counts from our personal identity. Your worth doesn't rely on followers, and a big crowd around you doesn't make you more important. What matters is what you do with the people who care about you.

For this, frame your emotional reaction to follower counts, up or down, as something less important than having a good conversation every day. Make your interactions count qualitatively by ensuring one in depth daily exchange, instead of twenty shallow ones.

Don't keep follower numbers visible for the dopamine hit. Loss aversion will kick you in the face should this number ever drop. Don't check too much, and don't get displays like the LaMetric Time LCD screen that many Twitter users like. They are cool, a pleasant diversion, and might even be encouraging initially, but they will pull your focus towards the quantity, of your relationships, not the quality.

Measure more than just one thing. If you want to track your followers, also track how often you feel intellectually engaged daily. Measure something positive, practical, and empowering, something that you have agency over.

How to build a quality audience on social media

Focus on building a community of engaged, interested individuals around you. Introduce them to each other. Celebrate when they are kind and helpful to new followers of yours. This means creating content that is valuable, informative, and helps form relationships, rather than simply trying to game the system by posting controversial or sensational content. The relationships coming out of that are haters and trolls in your comments. Not much community there!

It's essential to be genuine and honest with your audience. Audience building is not a one-size-fits-all approach. Different tools require different strategies, and what works for one person may not work for another. That's why it's essential to experiment with different approaches to find what works best for you.

Take the time to respond to comments and messages, engage in conversations with your followers honestly and intentionally, and create content that encourages engagement and relationship building.

When it comes to engaging with people, I have one central rule. It's based on a lesser-known formulation of Immanuel Kant's Categorical Imperative from 1785 called the formula of humanity:

When it comes to making friends online, this rule requires me to always think of the other person's benefit in anything I do. I'll ensure that any comment I write doesn't just serve me; it has to help them, too.

Have you fallen for the follower count trap? Let's chat below!

Discuss this story.

🌐 Best Around the Web: Posts Submitted to Indie Hackers This Week

🍜 Seven best foods to boost your brain and memory. Posted by Cagdas Atakan.

🧐 How did you come up with your product's name and branding? Posted by Basharath.

🛠 Beautiful social media creation tools. Posted by Leo Askan.

💻 What is your hosting stack? Posted by Nirav.

💡 Ideas for micro-SaaS around video tools. Posted by Upen.

🤖 Eight AI-powered tools for sales. Posted by Mariam.

Want a shout-out in next week's Best of Indie Hackers? Submit an article or link post on Indie Hackers whenever you come across something you think other indie hackers will enjoy.

🚀 Connor Cameron Rocked His Product Hunt Launch

by Connor Cameron

Hi, indie hackers! I'm Connor Cameron, and last year, we launched Kinde on Product Hunt on one of the busiest days of the year. We ended up getting beaten out for the top spot by some of the top launches of the year, but had a couple of newsletter features that made up for it.

I'm going to focus on the three things that we did to drive upvotes. After all, getting people excited about an authentication startup can be difficult, even though we had feature flags, billing, and experimentation on the way.

Here's what worked for us!

Creating an army

We had a large team at launch (28 people), but this tip should work for any team size.

I spoke to the team a month out from the launch, and asked each of them to create a list of five people, including family, friends, and other people working in tech. Each of them would then go to those five people and ask them to create a Product Hunt account (if they didn't already have one) one month out from launch, so the accounts didn't look fake on the day of.

They gave their private armies the date of the launch, and told them to expect a message on that day with the launch link. Off the bat, we already had ~150 people ready to upvote and comment when launch day came.

Raid LinkedIn and Twitter

We decided that we would absolutely soak LinkedIn and Twitter, such that no one would miss our launch. Roughly 15 minutes after launch, every member of our team posted a prewritten post with a link to the Product Hunt page.

The best estimate is that, between everyone's posts, we garnered around 80K impressions across socials. For weeks afterward, I had people in the Australian tech community telling me that they couldn't get away from content about our launch on the day of!

Cross-posting

Get anyone and everyone who has any vested interest in your product to share it. For us, this was our early access users and our investors.

Our primary investor, Blackbird VC, is the largest firm in Australia. It has a huge LinkedIn following, so the fact that the company shared our launch was really big for us.

Hindsight is 20/20

We were sending people directly to our launch page. Huge mistake.

Product Hunt has got really good at detecting people that are gaming the system, and has given less value to upvotes from people that arrive directly on the launch page. It meant that we got de-ranked compared to launches that had far fewer upvotes and comments.

I think it would have been far more valuable to direct people to the Product Hunt home page, and ask them to navigate to our launch. This would have increased the value of each upvote we got. We'll be launching feature flags in the next few weeks, so I'm planning on trying this course of action for that.

Overall, it was a successful launch! We're planning on using a similar playbook for our next few. It's difficult to get people excited about certain products, including a Shopify for SaaS, but it doesn't mean you can't rank highly and get the attention of the Product Hunt writers for the newsletter.

Hope this helps someone. Also, use Kinde!

Discuss this story.

🐦 The Tweetmaster's Pick

by Tweetmaster Flex

I post the tweets indie hackers share the most. Here's today's pick:

🏁 Enjoy This Newsletter?

Forward it to a friend, and let them know they can subscribe here.

Also, you can submit a section for us to include in a future newsletter.

Special thanks to Jay Avery for editing this issue, to Gabriella Federico for the illustrations, and to James Fleischmann, Darko, Arvid Kahl, and Connor Cameron for contributing posts. —Channing