Rob Walling

It was super exciting to be working on a project like that in the Central Valley of California.

And then even once we hired remotely, people were interested because they saw the traction we were getting.

And the product itself was beautifully designed, thanks mostly to Derek Reimer.

And the code quality when we went to hire engineers was beautiful and it was so well maintained.

And Derek had been an amazing gatekeeper of that code base and that helped us hire really picky engineers.

It was such a selling point to them.

And then when we went to hire customer success, I was like, you get to work directly with me.

Is that interesting?

Like I'm going to train you on everything I know about customer success, which isn't that much, but it's probably more than you know right now, you know, as we were hiring.

That was a selling point, right?

And then we went to hire the next one.

It was by that time we had built momentum.

There were five, six of us and the team was awesome.

And everyone who knew people on the team were like, I really want to be on that team.

Like we were the most desired employer, at least with kind of in the bootstrapped software space in our area.

And that doesn't happen by accident.

And if there were project or owner level thinkers that we could have afforded, which we couldn't, I think they would have come and worked with us.

But it's something to think about.

You have to recruit these people.

Even if you're in a conversation and they've applied to your job, folks who are great are going to get multiple job offers.