How this founder decided on his first hires

Connor Lim started dancing as a child. As an adult, he looked at the road ahead in the industry and realized he should pick a different career.

“There wasn’t a lot of opportunity. It was either, ‘Hey, do you want to go be a backup dancer for Justin Bieber, or do you want to become a cheerleader? None of those were very exciting to me,” Lim told Founder Brew.

Lim entered marketing but started a blog on the side, Steezy, which offered advice to aspiring professional dancers. In 2014, along with co-founder Evan Zhou, he began building Steezy into an app and dance streaming library. Lim describes it as a “Netflix for dance classes.”

Today, the app has its own Los Angeles studio and has been downloaded 1 million times in over 100 countries.

Who to hire and when to bring on help can be a daunting task for a first-time founder, especially one who is protective of their idea and laser-focused on results. But the first two hires at Steezy, who ended up being consequential decade-long employees, were virtually an accident.

Lim and his co-founder didn’t have perfect hiring plans. They simply said yes to two strangers who raised their hands and liked the idea.

They were “literally just people who cared a lot about what we were doing that gravitated to us,” Lim explained.

Unexpected coworkers

After launching, Lim and his co-founder were contacted by Clay Boonthanakit, then a student at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. He loved the Steezy blog and wanted to make videos for them.

“The next thing you know he’s dropping out of Art Center, and he’s just coming to my house three days a week, making videos and helping us out,” Lim told Founder Brew.

Another cold inbound was from a writer named Jessie Ma, then a dancer and student at San Diego State University. Similar to Boonthanakit, she was passionate about the idea behind the blog.

Lim and his co-founder thought this might become a regular habit, expecting a deluge of people reaching out asking to write for them.

“Nobody ever reached out to be a contributor ever again,” Lim told Founder Brew. Soon, Ma was at the house, too, writing a posts three days a week.

At the time, the bootstrapped company was running off small dollar amounts. Lim told Founder Brew he would leave $50 for dance studios as a thank you for letting film the space, and monthly revenue, Lim said, hovered around $10,000 to $20,000. Lim said the Boonthanakit and Ma were also paid on a contracted basis for just a few hundred dollars per week.

The switch to salary

Eventually, startup stress caught up with Lim and his co-founder. In March 2016, the co-founders reached a breaking point.

“We were outside his car, just sitting there, freaking out,” he told Founder Brew. “We’re like, ‘Dude, we don’t have any money. We have like $4,000 in the bank account.’ I haven’t paid myself in 16 months and I was sleeping on my parent’s couch.”

As luck would have it, the team landed their first angel investor who wrote a $25,000 check. With that bump, Boonthanakit and Ma were moved up to four days a week.

Lim says this pattern repeated as the company grew incrementally. As revenue increased to the tens of thousands, Lim turned around and increased contract payments to Boonthanakit and Ma.

It wasn’t until Steezy’s first fundraising round—$224,000 through a 2017 friends and family round—that Boonthanakit and Ma became W-2 employees.

The transformation from contracted employees to full-time was quick, Lim recalled.

“I think we used Gusto,” he told Founder Brew. “I just fired it up, and then it was like, ‘Oh cool, everyone’s on W-2.’ It took like four seconds.”

The speed of setting up a company amazed him.

“It gets easier every year,” he said. “Now you can use Stripe Atlas and you can just start a company, and all your docs are set up right. All your stocks are set up right. You have employee equity pools.”

Discussions about benefits were easy, Lim explained, because they were all in their early 20s. There were no 401(k)s or other benefits.

Ma would stay on for a decade and become director of content. Boonthanakit would stay with Steezy until Lim founded competitive dance sports group the International Dance League (IDL) in 2025.

Lim said he learned his lesson from Steezy’s early days and took advantage of new tools to get IDL off the ground.

Another benefit of Lim’s experience was his ability to spot talent for IDL and bring them on immediately from the beginning. Boonthanakit joined Lim at IDL and the two are still working together.

“You’re not doing the first-time founder struggle of trying to do everything yourself,” Lim said.