The First Ten Hires

You open your laptop at six in the morning and close it at midnight. The work is not getting done. Support tickets pile up while you debug the billing integration. Customer calls interrupt the feature you promised three weeks ago. You skip lunch to write a job description, then delete it because you are not sure what you need. Something has to give.

The question is not whether you feel overwhelmed. You do. The question is whether hiring will solve it.

## The composite scenario: Maya and the support queue

Maya runs a SaaS platform for physical therapists. She has two hundred paying customers, decent retention, and a growing problem. Support requests arrive faster than she can answer them. She spends two hours every morning in the inbox, another hour in the afternoon, and still closes the day with twenty unanswered tickets. The feature roadmap is frozen. She has not shipped anything meaningful in six weeks.

Her first instinct is to hire someone for support. She drafts a job post for a part-time customer success associate. Before she sends it, she looks at the tickets. Half of them ask the same five questions: how to export reports, how to add a second user, why the invoice did not arrive, how to cancel a subscription, how to reset a password. She realizes she is paying herself to answer the same question forty times.