When you are building on the internet, you can almost always find help on the internet. StartGlobal today has people working from the United States, India, Nigeria, Canada, France, the Philippines and Israel, and a few I would struggle to point out on a map. We found almost all of them online, either directly or through someone we met online. You can build a real business with a team that has never once been in the same room. I have done it, and thousands of people are doing it right now while you read this.
But before we talk about where to find people, we need to talk about when to find them. Most first time founders get this backwards. They think hiring is the goal. They want a team, an office, a headcount they can put on a slide. That is ego, not business. Every person you bring on is a cost and a risk before they are ever an asset. The question is never “should I have a team.” The question is “what is the one thing slowing me down right now, and is a person the cheapest way to fix it.”
Do it yourself, give it to AI, or hire someone
Here is the order I think in, and the order you should think in too. Start at the top and only move down when the answer is clearly no.
Do it yourself when the work is the core of your product or when you are still figuring out what good even looks like. Talking to customers, the main thing your product does, your first sales calls, your pricing. Do not hand these away early. This is where you learn what your business actually is, and you cannot outsource learning.
Give it to AI when the task is well defined, repeatable, and low stakes if it comes out a little wrong. First drafts of copy, code scaffolding, research and summaries, support replies, simple images, cleaning up data. The cost of building and doing has collapsed. A founder in 2026 can do in a weekend what took a small team a month a few years ago. Use that before you spend money on a human.
Hire a contractor when the work is ongoing but it goes up and down, or it is specialized, and you want to test whether you even need it before you commit. A contractor is a variable cost. You can pay someone for twenty hours a week and scale them up or drop them without the weight of payroll.
Hire an employee only when the work is continuous, core, and someone needs to own it for the long run. An employee is a fixed cost and hard to reverse. That is fine when the role clearly deserves it. It is a trap when you hire one because you felt like a “real” company should.
Use an agency when you need a whole function handled and you do not want to manage individuals. A full website, a paid ads program, a video pipeline. You pay more and you control less, but you do not have to babysit it.
Your first three hires
When you do start, hire to remove your biggest limiter, not to build a team. For almost every solo internet business, the first three hires that actually move the needle look like this.
The first is a generalist. Call them an ops person or a virtual assistant, the title does not matter. They handle your inbox, scheduling, admin, simple research, the hundred small things that eat your day. The smartest first hire is rarely a specialist. It is someone who can do a little bit of everything and give you your hours back, because your hours are the only thing the whole business runs on.
The second is customer support. The moment you have paying customers, the support emails, the billing questions, the “it is not working” messages start piling up, and every one you answer slowly is revenue walking out the door. Often this is the same person as your first hire, until it gets big enough to split out.
The third is whoever removes your single biggest bottleneck. If you cannot build and the product is the thing holding you back, that is a developer. If you can build but nobody knows you exist, that is a marketer or a growth person. Look honestly at what is capping your growth and hire straight at it. Do not hire a developer because developers are what startups have. Hire the thing that is actually stopping you.
Where to find people
The internet is full of places to find help. Most of them are noise. Here is what each one is actually good for, with the honest version of the tradeoffs.
For one-off, defined tasks, Fiverr and Upwork are the workhorses. Fiverr is good for packaged deliverables like a logo, a video edit, a voiceover, or a simple script. Quality is a lottery, so you filter hard by reviews and you keep the stakes low. Upwork is the bigger general marketplace and better for finding an ongoing contractor, but you will wade through a lot of low quality bids to find the good one. On both, you pay a platform fee on top, so check the current numbers before you budget.
For vetted senior contractors, you pay a premium so someone else does the filtering. Toptal screens hard and reportedly accepts under three percent of applicants, which is great when you need a senior person fast and cannot afford to vet them yourself. The catch is cost, with rates often running sixty to two hundred dollars an hour plus their markup. Braintrust is an interesting alternative where the talent keeps one hundred percent and the client pays a flat fee instead, which usually works out cheaper than Toptal for similar quality. Contra is commission free and strong for designers, marketers, and creatives.
For your first full-time hire, Wellfound (the old AngelList Talent) is free to post and built for startup roles, with a large pool of people who actually want to work at something early. If you are in Y Combinator, Work at a Startup gives you a curated pool across a thousand-plus funded companies. LinkedIn is fine for clearer, more senior roles. And the one most founders sleep on: your own audience. A simple “I am hiring, here is the role” post to an engaged following on Twitter or X regularly beats every job board, because the people who already follow your work already get what you are building. Pieter Levels and plenty of others staff entire products this way.
Then there are communities. Indie Hackers, niche Discords and Slack groups, the right subreddit. There is no vetting infrastructure, so you do the work, but you can find someone who already lives inside your problem space and that is worth a lot.
The rule of thumb: one-off task goes to Fiverr or Upwork. Ongoing senior contractor goes to Braintrust, Toptal, Contra, or your own network. First full-time hire comes from Wellfound, your audience, or a referral.
How to write a post that gets good people
A good post filters before you ever read a reply. A bad one buries you in junk and the occasional desperate applicant.
Lead with the specific outcome, not a title. “Build a Stripe checkout flow for a Next.js app” pulls better people than “looking for a rockstar developer.” State the scope, the timeline, the budget range, and the tools up front. Vague posts attract vague applicants, and they attract people who are betting you do not know what you want.
Put a small filter in the post. Ask people to start their reply with a specific word, or to include a link to one similar thing they have built. The ones who skip it did not read carefully, and that tells you everything about how they will work. Finally, show that you are a real, paying, decisive client. Good freelancers pick their clients too, and they can smell someone who will haggle, ghost, and never decide.
How to vet: the paid test
The single best vetting tool is a small, real, paid test project. Scope a tiny piece of actual work, pay a fair rate for it, and watch what happens. You will learn more about communication speed, quality, and reliability from one paid day of real work than from any interview or portfolio.
Never ask for free spec work. Good people decline it, so all you do is select for the desperate and the inexperienced. Pay for the trial. It is the cheapest insurance you will buy.
Watch for the red flags. Cannot show relevant prior work. Vague, copy-paste proposals. Pushes for full payment upfront. Slow or unclear in the exact moment they are trying to win you, which only gets worse once they have. Overpromises timelines that sound too good. Resists a small paid trial. Quotes a rate that is wildly off in either direction without a reason.
How to pay people across borders
You will be paying people in countries you have never visited. This part is easier than it sounds.
For a single contractor, the cheap path is Wise or Payoneer for the transfer, paid out of your Mercury business account. Wise gives you the real exchange rate and pays out in dozens of currencies for a small fee. Payoneer is widely used in a lot of freelancer markets, so sometimes you use it simply because your contractor already does.
When you need more than a payment, when you need a proper contract, intellectual property assignment, or to turn a contractor abroad into a real compliant employee, that is when you reach for Deel. It handles compliant contracts and acts as an employer of record so you do not have to set up a company in their country. It costs more, so use it when the contract and compliance actually matter, not for paying one freelancer.
How tiny teams build huge things
The most encouraging thing about building on the internet is how much one person, or a handful of people, can now do. The pattern is always the same. Async first. Writing over meetings. Heavy documentation, so a global, part time, multi-timezone team can act without you in the room. A small tool stack, usually Slack or Discord for comms, Notion for docs and standard operating procedures, and Loom for recording a walkthrough instead of holding a meeting. You write everything down once so you do not have to explain it fifty times.
Look at the people doing it. Pieter Levels runs Nomad List, Remote OK, and Photo AI with no employees, no cofounders, and no investors, and has publicly reported pulling in a few million dollars a year across them. Sahil Lavingia runs Gumroad, which did over twenty million dollars in revenue, with what he describes as effectively zero full-time employees and a global network of contractors. David Holz built Midjourney to hundreds of millions in revenue with around a hundred people and no venture money at all, which works out to roughly three million dollars of revenue per employee. Jason Fried and DHH have run 37signals profitably for over twenty years without outside funding, and they wrote the book on calm, remote, async work.
Go back a little further and the lesson is even sharper. Markus Frind built Plenty of Fish largely by himself, ran it with around seventy five people doing roughly a hundred million dollars a year, and sold it for five hundred and seventy five million in cash. When Facebook bought WhatsApp for around nineteen billion dollars, the company had fifty five employees serving more than four hundred and fifty million users. That is the number to tattoo on your brain. Output per person is the game, not headcount. (Revenue figures here are what these founders have reported publicly and they move around, so treat them as the right order of magnitude, not gospel.)
Hiring in the AI era
The economics have flipped in the last couple of years. A solo founder now does the work of a small team with AI tools, and then hires selectively for the parts that AI cannot do. The share of startups with a single founder has been climbing for exactly this reason.
So sequence it. Validate the idea with AI and no-code first. Then hire a human when the work becomes too risky to ship from an unreviewed draft, too specialized for a general tool, or too important to get wrong. Do the defined, repeatable, low-stakes work yourself with AI: first-draft copy, code scaffolding, research, support macros, basic design, data cleanup.
Hire humans for the things AI genuinely cannot own. Judgment and architecture. Real customer relationships and sales. Brand and taste-level design. Security and anything load-bearing in production, where a confident but wrong AI answer can quietly cost you everything. Legal and financial decisions. AI makes a good developer faster, but it shifts the value to the human’s debugging, integration, and judgment, and those are the things you pay people for.
The one line to remember: AI does not kill hiring. It raises the bar for why you hire. Use AI for everything that is defined and repeatable. Hire humans for judgment, ownership, relationships, and risk.
You do not need a big team. You need the right two or three people, found anywhere on earth, pointed straight at your biggest bottleneck, and the discipline to not hire anyone else until the work truly demands it.