My two co-founders and I started the company 5 years ago and have grown a handful of products into sizable businesses. We operate in the word game vertical with a few exceptions. Users find us mainly through organic search and we monetize through display ads.
We serve more than 20M users and 200M page views monthly and generate a yearly revenue of ~$5M. We had several opportunities to sell the business but so far we are confident that we can grow the business beyond the current valuation.
Hence, we are looking to hire a leadership team who can execute the growth vision of the company together with us. Specifically, we think that we need to first hire a Product Owner (PM), a Tech Lead (CTO) and a Data Analyst (Data Lead) in the first batch that will make the three of us replaceable and can continue the expansion of the team.
We have a few talented people in our team already (developers, SEOs, COO) and a couple of incredible partnerships with third parties, but we are clearly in need of tech minded leaders who can tie everything together.
I have no experience with hiring at this calibre so my question is how to best approach this? Are there agencies who can help put together a team to help us run the company? Where and how do I find the right type of individuals who are up for the task?
I should clarify the stack we run on: Vue/Nuxt and RoR, heavy lifting done by GoLang, Tailwind and Bootstrap for styling. Hosting on Fly.io, Heroku, AWS, Elastic. We also use Github, Jira, Figma and GCP (Bigquery) for our data needs. Lots and lots of SEO tools and scripts to stay relevant.
We are willing to reinvest significantly in salaries and growth but I find that hiring requires a lot of time which I currently don't have. Any leads or suggestions would be very helpful.
I also started a company 3 years ago where I just finished hiring a management team including a new CEO. It was hard to do, but the company was going well and I needed more personal time. If your goal is to extract yourself for more personal time, you need to be mentally ready to let the company become the new management team’s company as much as it is yours. Your stress won’t go away unless you give them enough room to make it their stress.
Executive headhunters can help save a ton of time if you don’t have existing relationships — be ready to pay $90k retainers for each role.
Hire someone who you think is smarter and more experienced than you. They’ll do things differently than you. They might fail just as you might flounder due to a number of unforeseen future events. Hire someone you’re comfortable saying, “if they fail, I probably would have failed too” and let them do their thing.
As with any role, there’s a decent chance you hire the wrong leader. Go with your gut and fix it sooner rather than later.
I can introduce you to some good executive headhunters I’ve used in the past if you message me.
Lastly, if you haven’t done so, now would be the time to get the company in an annual planning cycle with board meetings, a model that’s basically designed for large shareholders to not have to be involved day to day.
Perhaps partnering with a private-equity investment firm will allow you to offload the management part (that’s what they specialize on) and also extract the value or rather allow you and your cofounders to take something off the table.
What will you and your co-founder do once the roles are filled?