Episode #239: Adam Spector – Why startups should automate or outsource before they hire
How to decide whether a task needs a new hire, AI, or an outside vendor.
For founders of early-stage, venture-backed companies with 5 to 75 employees who are about to add headcount.
Adam Spector is the founder and CEO of Chore, which runs the back office (HR and fractional chief of staff work) for early-stage, venture-backed tech companies with 5 to 75 employees. Chore came out of a company that raised about $10 million but couldn’t raise its next round; Adam split it in two, took the services team, and set out to make it profitable. We cover why he now asks “How can we solve this with AI?” before every hire, what happened when he gave each go-to-market team member a monthly qualified-lead target after his head of go-to-market left, and why he thinks founders should outsource admin instead of building an internal team for it. One detail: Chore averages 2-3% of a customer’s total monthly expenses, against about 10% at the average company.
WHAT YOU’LL HEAR
– The question Adam asks before hiring, and the Claude project tied to Chore’s CRM that now pulls the weekly sales metrics his former head of go-to-market used to compile
– How Adam reset his go-to-market team: one metric per person, a set number of qualified leads per month in each channel
– Why the team pushed back on that target, and why Adam decided it was not going to be a fit long term
– The objection Chore hears most (“that seems expensive”), and Adam’s math on a roughly $1,500-a-month service versus 10 to 20 hours of a founder’s time
– Growth by subtraction: why managers shouldn’t be a crutch, and Adam’s view that managers may be irrelevant at fast-moving companies within a year or two
