Hiring guides
Every guide is written for founders hiring without an in-house recruiter: when the role is actually worth hiring, 2026 salary and equity bands, the interview loop, the red flags, and a free job description you can copy.
Hire a founding engineer once you have paying design partners and twelve months of runway at the target band. Expect £130k–£160k / $180k–$220k base plus 0.75%–2% equity at seed, a loop built around a paid work trial on a real backlog ticket, and an owner who ships from week one.
A founding account executive turns founder-led sales into a repeatable motion. Hire one only after you have closed roughly 10 deals yourself. Expect a 50/50 split around £90k–£120k / $140k–$200k OTE plus 0.25%–0.75% equity, a two-quarter ramp, and a loop built on a live discovery call against your real ICP.
A startup Head of Growth owns the whole loop — acquisition, activation, retention and monetisation — not just paid ads. Hire once one channel already works and a founder is the bottleneck on scaling it. Budget £100k–£140k / $160k–$210k plus 0.3%–0.8% equity, and test them on a teardown of your real funnel data.
Hire a Chief of Staff once you pass roughly twenty employees and cross-functional friction is the founder's top bottleneck. Expect £85k–£140k / $140k–$220k base plus 0.15%–0.75% equity, a loop built around a written memo on a real strategic question, and three real projects handed over on day one.
Hire a Head of Product once you have more than one product surface and a founder who can no longer sit in every customer call. Expect £120k–£160k / $180k–$230k base plus 0.4%–1.0% equity at seed, a four-stage loop built around a real roadmap teardown, and a 60-day expectation of one shipped bet — not a strategy deck.
To hire a product designer at a startup, screen for shipping cadence before portfolio polish: ask what shipped, what it moved, and what they cut. Pay £75k–£110k / $130k–$180k plus 0.3%–1.0% equity for a founding designer, and run a short paid trial on a live surface of your product instead of a take-home. Most founding designers are not applying to jobs, so sourcing beats posting.
Hire a Head of Sales once two or three ramped AEs are consistently hitting quota and the founder can't sit in every deal. Expect £130k–£200k / $180k–$270k base (double it for OTE) plus 0.25%–1% equity, and a loop built around a 90-day plan for your existing team — a player-coach, not an org-builder.
Your first marketing hire should match the motion that is already working, not the gaps you feel. If founder-led content drives pipeline, hire a content-led marketer; if the product self-serves, hire growth; if you sell enterprise, hire product marketing. Budget £70k–£110k / $110k–$160k plus 0.25%–0.75% equity, and judge them on one compounding channel inside 90 days.
Find a technical cofounder by committing full-time yourself first, then testing the partnership with a paid one-to-two-week build on a real product slice. Expect to give 20%–50% equity with vesting, and put the split, roles, vesting, and exit terms in a written agreement before anyone quits anything.
Hire a Head of Operations once you pass 15 employees and the founder is doing HR, finance, and legal admin at night. Expect £85k–£140k / $130k–$200k base plus 0.15%–0.75% equity, a loop built around a written 30-60-90 plan against your real gaps, and budget plus hire authority from day one.
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