Your first 20 hires, without an agency retainer
Hiring early is the highest return work you do and the easiest thing to postpone. I run the part that eats your calendar and hand back finished work.
$100 of credits on us. No card required.
We need a founding designer. I have no time and no idea where to look.
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Give me the two people whose taste you admire and I will work backwards from their orbit: portfolios, side projects, who ships work like theirs.
11 candidates with real product work, not case study decks. Drafts ready to send under your name.
Ask for approvalSend them. Book anyone who replies for Thursday.
Nobody delays a hire on purpose. It slips because the first two hours are the boring ones: building the list, writing the notes, chasing the reply.
I take those two hours out of your week and put a shortlist in front of you instead.
Three founders, three different problems
MarcinFounder · Seed-stage SaaSFirst engineering hire, no recruiter, no time, and a role he had never hired for.
Built the brief from his own product context, then sourced on trajectory instead of titles.
Signed offer in 19 days, with three other candidates he kept warm for the next round.
AliceCo-founder · Marketplace startupKept losing candidates in the gap between a good call and a slow follow up.
Took over the whole loop: drafts, reminders, scheduling and the weekly pipeline nudge.
No candidate went more than 24 hours without a reply, without her touching a calendar.
DaveTechnical founder · Developer toolsHiring against companies with recruiters, brands and much larger budgets.
Sourced from the open web, so his shortlist was people nobody else had messaged that week.
Reply rates went up because the outreach referenced work, not a job title.
Ideas to steal on your first day
Paste any of these into Slack. No setup, no config screens.
Written the way you would type it@laidbackhere is the JD link for our first backend hire. Find me 20 people.
A shortlist with reasoning per person, sourced from code, writing and work history, not just titles.
@laidbackevery Monday, send me 5 new people for this role.
A standing job that runs while you build. You only see the five that clear the bar.
@laidbackdraft outreach for these 5 in my voice, I'll approve before sending.
Drafts in your channel with the context that made each person interesting. You hit send.
@laidbackwho in my network already knows any of these people?
Warm paths first, cold outreach second, so your intros do the heavy lifting.
@laidbackconnect to Notion and pull the role brief from our hiring doc.
Context comes from where you already work, so you never rewrite the brief twice.
@laidbackwhen someone replies, book time on my calendar and post the notes here.
Coordination runs itself. You show up to the conversation, not the scheduling.
The sourcing engine underneath is measured in public
PSB-Recruiting is the public recruiting category of PeopleSearchBench. I score 97.80 overall against 89.64 for the strongest published baseline. Same engine behind every search you ask for in Slack.
See the full benchmarkClient data stays in its own channel
Every mandate runs in its own context. Nothing leaks between clients, and nothing is used to train shared models.
You keep control of what is shared
I draft. I suggest. I do not send messages to candidates or hiring managers until you approve the next step.
A hiring function before you have a hiring team
No agency retainer
You keep the relationships and the candidate experience. I do the searching, writing and chasing behind them.
Taste, not volume
Early hires are about judgment. I search on what people actually shipped so you meet builders, not applicants.
Zero setup weeks
Add me to Slack and describe the role in a sentence. There is no implementation project.
You stay the face
Every message goes out from you, after you read it. Founders close founders.
Start with $100 of credits on us
Self-serve runs on credits. If you need us to build workflows and run them with you, we do that too.
Fair questions
That is exactly where I am useful. I explain why each person is on the list, what evidence backs it, and what I could not verify. You end up learning the market while you hire in it.
No. I draft. You send. That rule does not have an override, and it applies to follow ups too.
You do not set me up. You add me to a channel and describe the role in a sentence. Everything else I learn from working with you.
What to read next
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Get $100 of credits and try it on the roles you have open today.
$100 of credits on us. No card required.