Who do you need to hire?

Well, the thing to focus on is the bus factor, “How many people in the team can be hit by a bus and we still have someone who knows every part of the tech stack?” For large teams, it doesnt matter if you have 10 full stack or 5 backend 5 frontend, you're all good. For a team of two: you want two full stack devs, so that if one is away the other can fix things. This applies in the company I am at now (super small startup): everyone needs to be able to do a little bit of everything, because sometimes everything is on fire and all your other teammates have gone home. HOWEVER. In the very early stages you also dont have a lot of choice in your hiring, and you have to work with what you have. I.e. if your applicants are one rockstar frontender, one rockstar backender, and two mediocre fullstacks, pick the two rockstars. Re: I think small teams are the best thing for building. If everyone is super competent then they are as or more effective than a big team. But a team of 3 with one dimwit is operating at 2/3 capacity, bad.

“I think because even if you do only frontend or only backend, you have to understand both sides and someone with fullstack experience has a more fundamental understanding how everything works together, so in best case you want a fullstack-developer with product , ux experience and devops understanding, because software is complex and not isolated, different parts are working together and as a founding engineer you want someone who understand the whole picture, don't have to be perfect in one part, because at the beginning it gets often dirty, after you grow you can have different roles and specialize them. Also it's so much cheaper to have one role instead of 3-4. It's just hard to find people with this skillset haha. I work with my client together, he is like head of product, head of content and can also do coding and we are like a whole army together and so fast.

It really depends on the product, but initially, I would recommend hiring a full-stack or generalist role. The engineer should be able to handle themselves well and implement any functionality. Also, it is important to consider forming a small team that can operate as a high-performance with the goal of delivering small but frequent changes to make sure you are reducing risks and facilitating a rapid learning within the small team.Mauricio, Head of Engineering from Brazil.

“I'd say backend / frontend engineer. When folks say "full stack", they are rarely truly full stack and have a focus, so you will be limited there. The engineers you should be looking for (if focused) should be from smaller companies as well, and then you will likely have 2 engineers that can do both, but can get very deep in their area of expertise as well. (Also, those engineers are much easier to find / hire than the unicorn full stack that everyone is hoping to get 😉) Additionally, when building in isolation, you don't have that counterpart to bounce ideas off of and you will artificially limit yourself by not fostering that culture of learning from others, which can lead very quickly to scaling issues (on the frontend or the backend). Very dependant on the candidate they're looking at and the product as well! If what they're building already has a decent framework of things on the backend (i.e. I've seen places built almost solely on Zapier when I got there) you can sneak by with a more limited skill set, but will need to hire for that role soon after.