Even though I’m the CTO of Distru, I can proudly call myself the worst engineer on my team! In fact, did you know that at the time of writing this, Distru is the leading Cannabis ERP and generates $6.5M ARR off of 4 engineers! All of which I consider to be 10x engineers.
Distru is an ERP (enterprise resource planner) for the Cannabis industry. If you've ever built ERPs before, you’ll know they’re very feature rich, nuanced and hard to build.
Here's my guide on how to attract 10x engineers as a startup, who can’t afford to compete on salary alone:
1. Avoid extreme salary seekers
There’s a false belief that money is the end all for attracting talent. Simply not true, otherwise everyone would work on Wall Street.
Inversely, if you find an engineer that you love, but they’re asking for a 500k comp package because that’s what Meta offered them — run, run and don’t look back.
These engineers are almost never worth what they’re paid, and will leave you as the first sign of trouble (of which there will be many during your startup journey).
2. Choose a relatively niche tech stack
In 2017, most talent Rails engineers were moving onto a new language called Elixir. We purposely chose this as our backend language because:
- The best of the best engineers from the Rails community wanted to work in Elixir.
- It was new enough that not many companies offered the opportunity to work on it at a production level.
- Great engineers are willing to sacrifice salary (to an extent) to work on interesting things.
3. Be remote, don’t do timezones
At the time of this writing, Distru's engineers live in Vancouver, New Orleans, Barcelona and Taipei 🤯 — that’s about as distributed as it gets!
Benefits:
- You don’t talent lock yourself to a specific region (why would you sabotage yourself like this?).
- You don’t need to pay office rent.
- Great engineers have choice, and the choice to be at home where-ever in the world is an enticing one.
- Once you go remote & timezone free, it’s hard to go back. Employee retention.
You could argue that its much harder to collaborate when your timezones are not as aligned. However, in my experience, great engineers don't need to collaborate nearly as much.
4. Career title growth
Being a startup you can a much more impressive career growth trajectory for that engineer than a big company ever could. Use that to your advantage!
5. Offer them the chance to build a company
If an engineer is not interested in this, it's not the best sign. You want engineers that actively want to be involved in learning and seeing first hand how to build a company. Maybe they want to start their own one day? Maybe they’re tired of being told what to do by dumb people?
6. Give generous equity
Once you’re certain this person is committed to the cause, give them generous amounts of equity. This not only makes up for salary, but also incentivizes them to think and behave like owners (and owners don’t give up when times get tough).
7. You.
No other company has you. You’re the ultimate sauce in attracting great engineers. Other companies have HR managers or hired guns that interview people, they will never give off the enthusiasm and infectious energy that you will.
That energy will attract people to you far more than you realize.