0-1 Series

If you missed it, a couple weeks ago I kicked off a series on all the firsts of Habits. Consider things like our first sale, how I found my co-founder, our first investor, and happy to dive into our first few employees.

HUGE NEWS!

Alright, so it’s not public yet, but Habits was selected as the “presenting startup” for let’s-just-call-it a massive f**king FinTech conference this summer.

I’ll be sharing our story in front of thousands and I need your help!

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How We Attracted Our First Few Employees (Despite Having Nothing to Offer)

Let’s be real—early-stage startups are a joke when it comes to recruiting. You’re basically begging people to take a bet on your wild idea, except there’s no money, no product, and no reason for them to believe in you. That was me at the start of Habits. Just me, myself, and I, manually helping people find financial advisors while cold DM-ing everyone on LinkedIn with a god-awful pitch deck. I got rejected. A lot. And yet, I needed people to join me—people who didn’t need me at all.

Then came Veera (my co-founder, see last week’s post). And along the way, we met UK Matt.

UK Matt → The “Research Intern”

UK Matt wasn’t just some random guy—we call him UK Matt because, well, he’s from the UK. He started with us as a research intern. He was a referral from a buddy of mine who was co-founding a healthtech company before pivoting to an AI sales agent startup. Matt happened to be his ex-housemate.

So I figured, why not? I threw him into the deep end—jumping on calls, taking notes, doing whatever I told him to do, including building our website (which, in hindsight, was probably a terrible assignment for an intern with zero experience).

But here’s the thing—Matt wasn’t just some college kid. He was the British bench press champion of 2023, putting up nearly 500 lbs at 175 lbs body weight. That told me everything I needed to know. He had grit. He understood the grind. He knew what it was like to get .001% better every single day with zero promise of instant results. That’s exactly the kind of crazy we needed at Habits. So we kept him around.

Of course, paying people was a problem. Back then, we were pulling in less than $1,000 per week. Not exactly an attractive job offer. So we had to get creative—we gave out lucrative equity packages. Matt was our first guinea pig.

Manan “The Machine”

Then we found Manan.

Manan was a byproduct of LinkedIn desperation. We went through 500+ applicants during the tech layoff wave. Tons of engineers were looking for high-paying jobs or title bumps. We hit Manan with the ultimate startup proposition: We can’t pay you for six months, but we’ll give you a title you’ve never had and an equity package that’ll make it worth it. By X date, we’d start paying. No guarantees, no security, just a bet on us.

First Hire Formula

That’s the thing—there’s no formula to attracting your first employees. They have to believe in your vision and your leadership. And once they’re in, they become everything.

Manan built the entire foundation of our product. Matt built our entire website, HubSpot automations, and has personally talked to nearly every advisor and user on our platform. These guys didn’t just work for us—they started bringing their own ideas, their own solutions, and their own drive to make Habits better. That’s when you know you’ve built something real.

Since then, we’ve continue to hire within and onboarded a few engineers—each of whom has a direct connection to Manan, Veera, Matt, or me. That’s how we do it. Build the right culture, bring in people who are bought in, and let them help shape the company.

Present Day

And now? We don’t even have to go looking for people.

We entirely source people who follow us and engage. We probably get 5-10 applicants a week through our careers page for roles that don’t even exist. And that’s the best part—because now we have a benchmark of who is interested, who engages with us, and who keeps on our radar. Meanwhile, we also work with 3-4 agencies who constantly send applicants our way. But even with all that, hiring is still a challenge.

Why Work At A Startup

Here’s the reality: We will never pay the highest salaries. We will never offer the best work/life balance. We will never have good structure.

But we will always be able to guarantee impact. As one of the first 10 employees at a company, you are creating the first for everything. And I promise you, there is nothing cooler than looking back and being able to say, "holy f**king shit, look where we are today vs. then."

What’s Coming Next?

Next week I’ll tackle a topic that may surprise you. Because we are coming close to the conclusion of this 0-1 series and it’s impossible to tell the Habits story without addressing how friends & family play/played such a huge role.

I bet you next week will be my best newsletter yet.

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