Introduction

You’ve validated your startup idea and started building a product. But once you prepare to launch, you’ll quickly realize that running a company is a lot of work for one person. That means it’s time to start building your startup team.

Your company is only as successful as the team you build around it, and issues among the founding team are one of the top startup mistakes. In fact, research has found that around 23% of startups fail due to problems with the team, including misaligned visions among team members or a lack of skills or experience.

As a startup, you’ll need to learn how to build a strong team even when resources are limited. Fortunately, these hiring strategies, team-building tips, and AI tools can help you create a solid foundation of experienced, aligned team members to turn an idea and vision into a success.

TL;DR: Building a winning startup team from the ground up

• Leverage creative hiring strategies: Use remote/hybrid teams, cross-functional roles, equity compensation, and freelance/fractional workers to build strong teams without breaking the bank.
• Prioritize founding team alignment and key early hires: Focus on the founding team (CEO, CTO, COO, CFO) first, then hire essential roles like product managers, developers, salespeople, and customer support to establish your foundation.
• Tap existing networks and startup-specific job boards: Find talent through personal connections, accelerator programs, startup communities like HubSpot for Startups, and specialized platforms (Wellfound, Built In, Crunchboard) rather than general job boards.
• Combine AI tools with human talent for maximum efficiency: Use AI for customer support, data analysis, and productivity enhancement while preserving human roles in empathy, creativity, leadership, and strategic decision-making.
• Avoid common startup hiring pitfalls: Don't hire for titles over skills, ensure clear role definitions even for generalists, maintain transparent communication about company vision, and balance AI automation with human oversight.

Rethinking how startups build teams

Maybe you’ve been an executive in charge of hiring at another company before, or perhaps this is your first experience in building a team. Either way, the startup industry is a unique environment where hiring practices are different from recruitment for conventional businesses.

Startups often come with rapid growth, bigger risks, and high uncertainty, which can make hiring and retaining top talent a challenge. Plus, budgets are often lean, so you’ll need to understand how to best compensate employees, balance remote and on-site work, and incorporate AI.

Consider the following tips and insights for building a team on a lean budget while balancing the unique needs of a startup.

How can you build a startup team with little money?

To build a team with little money in a high-pressure startup environment, you’ll need to be creative. You may want to incorporate multiple strategies, like having a team of hybrid or remote full-time employees and filling any gaps with freelance workers or AI tools.

These methods can help you find and hire top talent, even on a tight budget.

Find potential employees

First: how do you find the right employees for your strong startup team without spending a fortune to post on dozens of different job boards?

Start by tapping your existing network. Do you have former colleagues looking for a unique opportunity or career transition? Did you participate in an accelerator program? Check with people you already know who may be interested in joining your team (or who know other people who may fit your hiring needs).

Join startup communities such as the HubSpot for Startups community to find like-minded founders who can help you source talent and expand your network. (As a bonus, joining HubSpot for Startups grants founders major savings on the tools and products that will help you hire and scale rapidly.)

You can also use startup-specific job boards, such as Wellfound, Built In, Crunchboard, and TrueUp, to find candidates interested in participating in a startup environment, rather than using generalized job boards and receiving candidates looking for a more traditional office.

Consider remote and hybrid teams

When you’re starting, you may not have the thousands of dollars to pay to rent out an office space every month for your first five to 10 employees. Not only that, but if you see explosive growth, you could be caught in a position where you’d need to break a lease to expand to a larger space.

Offering remote or hybrid roles can reduce overhead costs for renting office space, paying for utilities, and purchasing office equipment and technology.

But fully or partially remote work has some drawbacks. When building a product, working across time zones or even just in different places can limit communication, increase cybersecurity risks, and stifle creativity and collaboration. If you decide to offer remote or hybrid roles, establish clear, thorough rules and expectations around cybersecurity and communication for the team.

Hire for cross-functional roles

Another way to stick to the lean budget while building a startup team is to create a culture of cross-functional roles, where instead of having teams designated to one specific task, like customer support or marketing, team members can collaborate company-wide. For instance, your customer support team can collect feedback and pass it along to the product developers to inform new features or improvements, and product developers can collaborate with the marketing team to decide how to highlight these features best.

Establish unique payment structures

Another sticking point for building a startup team is payment. You want highly skilled employees who are willing to work toward your vision, but you may not have as much money for compensating high-quality team members as you wish.

As a startup, you may need to find alternative payment options to ensure employees feel adequately compensated and valued for their time and contributions. 

Research the average salary ranges for the roles you’re hiring. If you need to pay on the lower end of the range, look for ways to sweeten the deal, such as through healthcare benefits, retirement savings plans, generous vacation offerings, and/or equity compensation.

Startup equity compensation is when a startup offers a candidate a lower salary along with company stocks or shares. Equity can offer the chance of larger returns in the long term, while also allowing employees to become literally invested in the company’s success.

If you opt for equity compensation, make sure to stick to a budget and establish an equity pool, which is how much of the total company you are willing to distribute among all early hires (typically between 10% and 20%). Also, consult with a financial advisor and a lawyer to establish your policies regarding vesting, taxes, and other legalities to avoid any miscommunications or penalties.

Add fractional and freelance support

You may not have the budget to hire several full-time employees when you’re just getting started. That’s where fractional roles or freelance and contract workers can come in handy.

Rather than bringing an employee in-house and full-time for a salary and benefits, you can pay a rate per project or hour for specific tasks or shorter periods per week. For instance, your startup could hire a freelance graphic designer on a short-term contract to develop your brand logo, or hire a writer for a flat fee to write individual product descriptions or blogs.

Instead of hiring a full-time PR pro right away, you could outsource your PR, marketing, or advertising to an agency for fractional support.

If you choose to outsource tasks through freelance, contract, or fractional work, ensure that both parties sign a contract. Be thorough in your vision and goal for each task you hire out, and establish communication expectations to ensure the outsourced work will align with your brand and mission.

Supplement the team with AI 

In today’s market, companies of all sizes and industries are utilizing AI for better productivity. 

For example, you could set up an AI chatbot to handle customer inquiries 24/7, and your human customer service reps can focus on more complex issues. Agentic AI, or AI agents, is a growing trend for startups, so this is a good place to get started in incorporating AI into your team.

AI can also support market research for product development, content generation for marketing, data analysis and forecasting to prepare for investor meetings, and much more. Just keep in mind that AI isn’t a total replacement for human employees; you’ll need humans to oversee and iterate the AI for the best results.

What core roles should you hire first?

The first roles you’ll hire are the founding team members, including yourself and any partners who will bring the idea to life. These are the co-founders, and co-founders are one of the primary factors investors will consider when doing due diligence before financing your venture. These founding members often include the chief executive officer (CEO), chief operating officer (COO), chief technology officer (CTO), and chief financial officer (CFO).

After the founding team, you’ll hire the first key hires. The roles you hire first may vary based on your goals and the skillset of the founding team, but some of the first key hires may include:

• Product manager
• Developer
• Salesperson
• Accountant
• Bookkeeper
• Customer support agent
• Marketer
• Assistant

These roles will be essential in getting the business off the ground. For instance, you need a developer and product manager to build and fine-tune your product before you can start making sales. A salesperson can start selling products and generating revenue, which an accountant and/or bookkeeper will need to track. A customer support agent should be available to handle any questions or concerns from a growing client base and ensure customer satisfaction.

Early on, you may consider hiring generalists who have the skills to tackle a wide range of tasks. For example, if you’re hiring a marketing pro, consider someone skilled at a multichannel approach through email, social media, and TV. Or, when hiring an assistant, consider someone who can handle scheduling, basic data entry, research, and simple customer support until you have a larger budget to hire specialists.

“I think early on you want to think about and build your team of different knowledge sets that are sort of going to enrich the whole,” Greg Holmes, CRO of Zoom, shared with The Science of Scaling podcast host Mark Roberge. “But for that early situation, I think you want to arm yourself with a little bit of that variety that feeds into what your company's going to be all about.”

A strong approach is to find employees with wide skillsets, even if that means you don’t conform to specific roles.

Varun Anand, COO of Clay, followed this model after realizing traditional salespeople weren’t fitting the bill for selling Clay. 

“What I realized was what we need instead is more of a sales-engineer type,” Anand told HubSpot for Startups. “We kind of invented this role called GTM engineer, and it's basically people who look like our customers. They're like ops-y or growth-y, and they're tactical. They are really good at Clay, and they're really good at helping people with Clay. We teach them some of the sales stuff to help them win big deals. The core skillset is more about how good you are at Clay and being able to explain it to people and distill that down versus how good you are at sales.”

How to structure an efficient hiring process

The hiring process needs to be quick for a scaling startup, but efficient hiring also ensures you secure top talent before a competitor hires them.

According to BrightHire, the average number of interview rounds is 2.4. However, Truffle found that higher-level positions (such as executives joining the founding team or department leaders) may have up to five interviews. After five interviews, though, candidates can feel frustrated, so prioritizing an efficient hiring process with a focus on quality over quantity is essential.

Keep these tips in mind when developing your startup’s hiring process.

Establish clear roles

Even if you’re hiring generalists or anticipate cross-functional roles, each position should have clear, outlined expectations before you ever post the job listing. Why so early? Outlining expectations from the jump can help weed out any potential candidates who may expect a more traditional role or less overlap of responsibilities.

Whether hiring a full-time employee or a freelancer, it’s important to have a clear understanding of all expectations and responsibilities. This aligns all parties and makes it easier for the employee to meet targets and for leaders to track performance.

Prioritize needs vs. wants

As you start hiring, you may start to think about how great it would be to have an in-house videographer with extensive editing skills for content creation or an app developer to make your product compatible with smartphones. 

However, focus first on the milestones you need to hit now and hire employees with the skills to achieve those goals. If you plan to pursue VC funding in the near future, you may need sales experts who can convert more leads and a marketing pro to reach a wider audience.

Establish an efficient, founder-led interview loop

You’re probably already aware of how valuable a founder-led sales strategy can be in the early stages of a business. But incorporating the founder(s) in the interview process is also crucial in ensuring that all team members are aligned with the vision.

Have as many members of the founding team join in on the interview process (while being mindful of the number of rounds you’re putting a candidate through), and have a strategy to ensure each person isn’t repeating the same questions. 

Make onboarding easy

What you don’t want to happen is to hire an excellent candidate, only to have them quit because of a complicated onboarding process. Efficient onboarding not only gets a new hire up to speed faster, but it also helps improve retention rates by instilling confidence in your newest team member.

Create documentation that employees can reference whenever they feel stuck, and foster a warm, helpful culture where employees aren’t afraid to ask for support as needed.

HubSpot tools can help in making the hiring process more efficient, engaging, and welcoming for your team and the candidates. For instance, the CRM can keep track of candidates throughout the process, while AI can automate candidate outreach, interview scheduling, and follow-ups after each interview. Or, tap the Breeze Knowledge Base Agent to make onboarding more efficient, leading to first days on the job that feel exciting, not overwhelming.

Where AI fits in: Agents vs. humans

Artificial intelligence is making scaling on a lean budget easier than ever before for startups. As you’re getting started, you may consider ways to incorporate AI to keep costs low.

Keep in mind that AI isn’t perfect, and it won’t replace human connectivity and creativity. You still need to budget for hiring human agents, creators, developers, and other roles.

However, you can utilize AI to complement each human employee, allowing them to do more with less time and fewer resources. A recent study from the MIT Sloan School of Management determined that AI will complement human work, not replace it, especially for five core human capability groups, including:

• Empathy and emotional intelligence
• Presence, networking, and connectedness
• Opinion, judgment, and ethics
• Creativity and imagination
• Hope, vision, and leadership

For instance, you can tap AI to help your executive assistant schedule more investor meetings and client calls, input and organize data, respond to client inquiries, and create and post social content in far less time. 

When AI tools are integrated into your CRM, such as with Breeze AI and HubSpot, and managed by your employees, your team can seamlessly improve productivity, reaching more users and increasing lead generation and revenue. But again, this can only work if you allow humans and AI to collaborate, not compete.

Masterworks Investor Services is just one successful example of AI/human collaboration. The company was able to speed up the new hire onboarding and ramp-up process using Breeze Customer Agent, so employees could interact confidently with customers while learning the company’s knowledge base at the same time.

In another successful case study, the company Aunt Flow has been able to leverage Breeze AI-powered forecasting to develop data-driven sales targets. For Aunt Flow, AI is capable of organizing and analyzing data, which humans then use for strategizing. This has ultimately helped team members hit sales targets.

Startups that follow this lead in combining AI power with human compassion and talent have a greater shot at success, so keep this in mind when deciding how to utilize AI in your own team.

Common startup hiring mistakes to avoid

Every hiring process comes with its challenges, but cash-strapped startups can feel these obstacles even more deeply.

Here are some of the top hiring mistakes startups make, plus tips for avoiding these issues.

Final thoughts: Build smart, grow lean

At the start of your startup journey, it can be tempting to hire a bunch of employees as quickly as possible so you can start selling to more clients. 

But rushing the process can cost you more in the long run, leading to higher turnover and increased costs of rehiring for existing roles over expanding with new roles.

Instead, focus on a hiring strategy that emphasizes finding the right team members with diverse experiences and skillsets. Get creative in your compensation offerings to attract top candidates, and weave in freelance, contract, and fractional workers as well as AI tools to maintain a lean budget without sacrificing a strong foundational team.

With these tips and tricks in mind, you’re ready to start scouting. Check out the HubSpot for Startups program for access to AI tools and a vast network to help scale your startup.

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