Why Hiring One at a Time Cost Adam Fard Months of Growth

The Mistake

When your bootstrapped SaaS hits $30K MRR, the instinct is to protect what you have. You hire one person, wait a month, see if things improve, then maybe hire another.

It feels responsible. It feels safe. But it's actually one of the most expensive decisions you can make. Not because of the salary you pay, but because of the months of momentum you lose while you're stuck in a slow hiring loop.

Adam Fard learned this the hard way building UX Pilot.

Why Founders Make It

The uncertainty trap. At $30K MRR, you genuinely don't know if the product will keep growing. Adam put it bluntly: "You don't know. Is it like 30k, the maximum I can do with this product? Or can it go to 100k? You have all these questions."

Bootstrapping culture says don't hire. Adam was consuming content from founders who built solo products and warned that hiring would eat your profits. "There are many people who are alone growing their product and they say you should not hire, you should just keep the product because if you hire you will lose so much profit." That advice works for lifestyle businesses. It doesn't work if you're trying to scale.

The "what if it all stops" fear. Every bootstrapped founder runs this mental simulation. What happens if users disappear tomorrow? What if I've hired five people and revenue drops to zero? The fear of worst-case scenarios keeps you moving in slow motion while competitors move fast.

How Adam Lost Momentum

At $30K MRR, Adam and his team decided to start hiring. But instead of building the team they needed, they added one or two engineers at a time.

Then they'd wait. A month later, the same problems would surface. Things weren't moving fast enough. Features were taking too long to ship. So they'd hire one more.

"Wait, wait a minute. Why this thing doesn't move so fast? Why everything is so slowly? Oh, we need one more person for the back end."

Each hiring round meant another cycle of sourcing candidates, interviewing, assessing, and onboarding. Multiply that by four or five rounds instead of doing it once, and you've burned months on process instead of product.

Adam now believes he should have hired five people at once. Not because he knew the revenue would hold. But because the cost of moving slowly was higher than the risk of over-hiring.

Today UX Pilot has 30 people full-time and is at $5.3M ARR. The team got built eventually. It just took longer than it needed to.

The Fix (If You're Making It Now)

1. Set a hiring trigger, not a hiring debate. Decide in advance: "When we hit X MRR for three consecutive months, we hire Y roles." Remove the emotional decision-making from each individual hire.

1. Batch your hiring rounds. Hire two to three roles at once. You'll spend the same amount of time on process but get three times the output. The onboarding cost is nearly the same whether it's one person or three.

1. Calculate the cost of delay, not just the cost of salary. That feature you can't ship for three months because you don't have an engineer? What's that worth in growth you're not capturing?

The Signal to Watch

If you're hitting $30K+ MRR and you've said "we need to move faster" more than twice in the last month, you're probably already behind on hiring. Track your feature velocity. When it plateaus while demand keeps growing, that's your signal to hire in a batch, not one at a time.