As someone running a bootstrapped business, who has hired a couple of engineers (both as long term employees and for short term contracts), and now went back to

As someone running a bootstrapped business, who has hired a couple of engineers (both as long term employees and for short term contracts), and now went back to doing everything alone, here are my thoughts: - Hiring people is hard - Managing people is hard - Getting more people on board does not automatically make you faster The best people won't line up to apply to your company. Most of the applications I got were from people who seemed desperate and applied to every ad they saw. Only a few people who seemed like good matches applied. They also cost me an insane amount of money. Consider the average salary of developers in your region. That salary will get you an AVERAGE developer. If you don't offer significantly more than that, you will end up with average developers who look for an average job to put in an average amount of work. Nothing wrong with that, but consider whether an average amount of work will make enough of a difference for your company. But even very good employees and contractors will put out a fraction of what you can put out. They will be less productive because they aren't as familiar with the project as you are. They are also less productive because they are less invested in the project. Every employee you hire takes away a significant chunk of your time. You will need to spend time talking about your vision and your ideas, you need to plan with them what they should do, how they should do it, follow up on progress, etc. You must be a good manager if you hire people (regardless if employee or contractor). If you are not a good manager, you can hire the best people and they will work on the wrong things and nothing will get done. --- So what happened in my case is that my employees took so much time to manage and added a lot of overhead that I barely had time to get my own work done, and since I sucked as a manager people always worked on stuff but we never managed to finish anything. In the end we did manage to build some things I probably wouldn't have managed to build on my own, but it cost me so much energy that I decided that I preferred to work on my own.