Interested in building your own SaaS company? Follow the journey of Transistor.fm as they bootstrap a podcast hosting startup.

&lt;p&gt;How do founders of small bootstrapped companies hire new employees? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Adam Wathan got over 1600 people who applied for &lt;a href=&quot;https://tailwindcss.com/blog/hiring-a-design-engineer-and-staff-engineer&quot;&gt;two new roles&lt;/a&gt; at &lt;a href=&quot;https://tailwindcss.com/&quot;&gt;Tailwind Labs&lt;/a&gt; (a small team of six people). They ended up hiring two people, but neither of them actually applied. This wasn&#039;t how Adam expected (or hoped) this process would go. There were lots of surprising takeaways and lessons learned from the whole experience.&lt;/p&gt;&quot;If you figure we spend 5 minutes on every single application, that was like 133 hours straight reading applications. Processing these job applications was basically my full time job for 2 months.&quot; – Adam Wathan&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Links:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;ul&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://hackersincorporated.com/&quot;&gt;Hackers Inc podcast&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://tailwindcss.com/blog/hiring-a-design-engineer-and-staff-engineer&quot;&gt;Tailwind job opening announcement&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://tailwindcss.com/careers/design-engineer&quot;&gt;Design Engineer job posting&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://tailwindcss.com/careers/staff-software-engineer&quot;&gt;Staff Software Engineer job posting&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;Reddit: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/15f01pb/oc_11_months_of_job_searching/&quot;&gt;11 months of job searching visualized&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Have feedback on this episode?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;ul&gt;&lt;li&gt;👉 &lt;a href=&quot;https://podline.fm/build-your-saas&quot;&gt;​Leave a voicemail here​&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;🐦 &lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/adamwathan/status/1795520375729574174&quot;&gt;Reply on Twitter&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Timestamps:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;ul&gt;&lt;li&gt;(03:40) - What&#039;s the size of Transistor and when did you last hire?&lt;/li&gt; 
&lt;li&gt;(05:29) - How did you meet or find your employees?&lt;/li&gt; 
&lt;li&gt;(07:17) - Adam&#039;s process for hiring&lt;/li&gt; 
&lt;li&gt;(12:49) - The energy required to process applications&lt;/li&gt; 
&lt;li&gt;(17:37) - What got people in to the 100 list?&lt;/li&gt; 
&lt;li&gt;(21:08) - Did Adam get any videos in applications?&lt;/li&gt; 
&lt;li&gt;(24:54) - Previous employment was a good indicator&lt;/li&gt; 
&lt;li&gt;(30:21) - Painting a picture of what the position looks like&lt;/li&gt; 
&lt;li&gt;(32:07) - The kinds of people who applied&lt;/li&gt; 
&lt;li&gt;(34:57) - How did the application process work out?&lt;/li&gt; 
&lt;li&gt;(38:57) - The kinds of questions we asked applicants&lt;/li&gt; 
&lt;li&gt;(42:30) - Does a great conversation impact a hiring decision or not?&lt;/li&gt; 
&lt;li&gt;(49:29) - Does having the position open in public help?&lt;/li&gt; 
&lt;li&gt;(51:41) - How Adam was connected to the people they hired&lt;/li&gt; 
&lt;li&gt;(59:36) - The importance of conference conversations&lt;/li&gt; 
&lt;li&gt;(01:02:25) - Finding ways to share your work in public&lt;/li&gt; 
&lt;li&gt;(01:06:16) - The process does work... just not this time&lt;/li&gt; 
&lt;li&gt;(01:12:35) - Could I ever get comfortable with a 70% success rate?&lt;/li&gt; 
&lt;li&gt;(01:20:58) - Bringing in someone you knew vs a fan&lt;/li&gt; 
&lt;li&gt;(01:26:50) - Keeping a tab in different areas to pull from&lt;/li&gt; 
&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Thanks to our monthly supporters&lt;/strong&gt; 
&lt;/p&gt;&lt;ul&gt; 
 &lt;li&gt;Pascal from sharpen.page&lt;/li&gt; 
 &lt;li&gt;Rewardful.com&lt;/li&gt; 
 &lt;li&gt;Greg Park&lt;/li&gt; 
 &lt;li&gt;Mitchell Davis from RecruitKit.com.au&lt;/li&gt; 
 &lt;li&gt;Marcel Fahle, wearebold.af&lt;/li&gt; 
 &lt;li&gt;Bill Condo (@mavrck)&lt;/li&gt; 
 &lt;li&gt;Ward from MemberSpace.com&lt;/li&gt; 
 &lt;li&gt;Evandro Sasse&lt;/li&gt; 
 &lt;li&gt;Austin Loveless&lt;/li&gt; 
 &lt;li&gt;Michael Sitver&lt;/li&gt; 
 &lt;li&gt;Dan Buda&lt;/li&gt; 
 &lt;li&gt;Colin Gray&lt;/li&gt; 
 &lt;li&gt;Dave Giunta&lt;/li&gt; 
&lt;/ul&gt; 
&lt;br&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Want to start a podcast on Transistor? Justin has a special coupon for you: get 15% off your first year of hosting: &lt;/em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://transistor.fm/justin&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;transistor.fm/justin&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt; 
&lt;strong&gt; 
 &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.patreon.com/jonjustin&quot; rel=&quot;payment&quot; title=&quot;★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★&quot;&gt;★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★&lt;/a&gt; 
&lt;/strong&gt;

Build Your SaaS

The Data