{"id":694,"date":"2018-08-21T07:00:34","date_gmt":"2018-08-21T11:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog3.canny.io\/wordpress\/?p=694"},"modified":"2023-12-08T16:32:14","modified_gmt":"2023-12-08T21:32:14","slug":"hire-fire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/canny.io\/blog\/hire-fire\/","title":{"rendered":"First hire to first fire"},"content":{"rendered":"

Let’s rewind back to February 2018:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Canny was almost officially one year old.<\/li>\n
  2. We were sitting at a cool $9k of MRR<\/li>\n
  3. The team was still two founders, Andrew and me<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    We were starting to feel stretched thin. From building product to doing marketing, we split founder time into many areas. Granted, that’s inevitable when you’re starting a company.<\/p>\n

    But since we were profitable, we started to ask ourselves:
    \nHow can we best spend our money to grow faster?<\/p>\n\"\"\n

    An obvious choice: hire.<\/p>\n

    Reliving this experience by sharing it with you has been tough (so you’re welcome!). We’re glad to have come out the other side with so much knowledge.<\/p>\n

    What follows is our whirlwind journey, from first hire\u00a0to first fire.<\/p>\n

    Deciding which role<\/h2>\n

    Our first instinct was to hire for outbound sales. Sales = revenue, right? Outbound sales seemed like a straightforward way to get more customers. It would be great to have someone working on acquisition while we continued to focus on product.<\/p>\n

    The important thing to note here is that, up until then, we had never done outbound sales.<\/p>\n

    Thankfully, we reached out to other, more seasoned, founders. We described our situation and they all asked us the same question: which acquisition channels were working for us today?<\/p>\n

    Not sales!<\/p>\n

    Their advice was that we should double down on the channels that were already working for us. Makes sense. Step on the gas instead of switch to a new car that may not even work.<\/p>\n\"\"\n

    The channel that stood out for us was content marketing. We’d written a few articles that people enjoyed. They always brought new eyeballs to our website. The thought of bringing in an expert to do more of it was very appealing.<\/p>\n

    \"blog-post-traffic\"
    Those spikes? Blog posts.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

    So, we threw together a job listing for a content marketer.<\/p>\n

    \n

    Takeaways:<\/p>\n