Help Me Build This: An Open Call for the Founding Team

I am hiring. This essay is the pitch.

If you have been following the rest of this series, you already know most of the backstory, and I will not repeat it here. The short version for anyone jumping in cold: I have been building a suite of AI agents for small businesses. The first one, Clerk, is an AI accountant, and it is live and running real companies. The second, Pulse, is an AI customer support agent, and it is live at pulse.faxter.com. A British ERP company just signed on to resell Clerk in the UK. The long-term product is a Business Operating System — a team of AI co-workers that together do the work of a real company. The company is called Faxter. Yes, the same name as the cloud business I shut down two years ago; I wrote about why I kept it.

I have built most of what exists today alone, with a lot of help from AI coding agents and with my co-founder Jim on the business side. That was the right arrangement for zero-to-one. It is not the right arrangement for one-to-many, which is where we are now, which is why I am writing this.

I need a founding team to run and grow the Nigerian operation. Specifically, I am looking for four people to start: a Sales Lead, a Customer Success and Onboarding Specialist, an Accounting Advisor, and a small number of senior engineers. Let me tell you about each of them, and then let me tell you what it is like to join a company like this one at this stage, because I think the second part is more important than the first.

The Sales Lead

I want to start here because this is the hardest hire and the most misunderstood one. I need someone who can sell, and I mean actual selling — walking into a co-working space, a market, or a small accounting firm, showing a business owner what Clerk does on their own bank statement, and walking out with a signed-up paying customer. I do not mean running ads. I do not mean posting on LinkedIn. I do not mean writing blog posts. If your last three roles were in digital marketing, content, or SEO, this is not the role for you, and I am saying that now to save us both the time of finding out later.

The person I am looking for has sold to Nigerian small business owners before. You know what they are afraid of, what makes them say yes, and how to tell the difference between a real objection and a polite brush-off. You have hit sales targets before, and you want to hit them here. The compensation has a meaningful performance-linked component because I believe a sales role where the pay is not weighted toward closed deals is not a serious sales role. If that makes you nervous, this is not the job. If that makes you lean forward, we should talk.

There is one channel I am especially interested in, and I want to flag it because the right sales lead will recognize the opportunity immediately: small accounting firms. Each three-to-ten-person practice has a book of small business clients, and each one of those practices is quietly dissatisfied with the tools their clients are using. Clerk is built to respect the accountant — the AI does the first draft, the accountant reviews it, and the accountant’s job gets easier rather than threatened. A good sales lead will figure out how to win those firms and, through them, their clients. One firm can be worth many direct sales.

You do not need to know accounting. You need to respect it, learn its vocabulary, and be willing to sit across from an accountant without pretending. The product handles the accounting. You handle the trust.

The question I want you to answer in your application: tell me about a deal you closed where the customer initially said no. What did they say no to, and what changed their mind?

The Customer Success and Onboarding Specialist

This is the second hire and in some ways the most consequential, because it is the difference between a sign-up number and a retention number, and retention is the only number that matters in the long run.

The person in this role is the first human our customers meet after signing up. Their job is to make sure every new user gets to the moment where Clerk has clearly saved them time — the moment the first bank statement is uploaded, the first month’s reports appear, the first confusing transaction gets explained. Until a user reaches that moment, they are a sign-up. After it, they are a customer. Getting them across that gap is what this role does, every day, for every new user, patiently.

I am looking for someone patient in a specific way. The users will not be technical. Many will not have used accounting software before. Many will send voice notes and blurry photos of receipts and questions written in a mix of English and Pidgin, and they will expect replies the same day, over WhatsApp, in the tone of a real human who understands them. If you have done support over WhatsApp before, you know exactly what I am describing. If you have not, you will need to be the kind of person who can learn it fast.

There is one piece of this role I want to call out because it matters more to me than the ticket-handling part. The person in customer success hears, every day, what confuses users, what excites them, what they ask for, and what they leave for. That information is the single most valuable signal the company produces, and I need someone who will not just handle the conversations but will collect the patterns, organize them, and tell me what the product needs to do next. The customer success person at an early-stage company is, in effect, the most senior product manager in the building. I want someone who wants that responsibility, not someone who wants to be left alone with a queue.

The question I want you to answer: a small business owner signed up for Clerk three days ago and has done nothing since. Walk me through what you do, step by step, and why.

The Accounting Advisor

The AI does most of the bookkeeping. It does it well. But there is a long tail of questions it cannot confidently answer, and a second, harder tail where it is confident and wrong, and a qualified human needs to be the last line of defense for both.

I need a qualified accountant — ICAN, ACCA, or equivalent — with real experience in Nigerian accounting and tax. PAYE, pension, NHF, VAT, CIT, the statutory filings, the weird edge cases. You know them in your bones. You can explain them to a small business owner in plain language. You have opinions about how accounting should be done and you are willing to argue with the AI when it is wrong.

The role is part-time. I do not need a full-time advisor because the AI is handling most of the volume, and the role exists to handle the exceptions, to keep the knowledge base current, and to be the person I call when I want a second opinion on a tax edge case or a new accounting standard.

Here is the screening question that matters most for this role, and I want to be explicit about it. There is a version of the accounting profession that sees AI as a threat, and a version that sees it as a force multiplier. I need the second version. If you believe that an AI accountant, properly supervised, can make the best human accountants more valuable rather than less — because it takes the grinding work off their plates and lets them focus on the judgment calls where their expertise actually matters — then we are in alignment. If you believe AI has no business touching a ledger, I respect the view, but you and I are not going to be happy working together.

The question I want you to answer: what is the single most common accounting mistake you see Nigerian small business owners make, and how would you help them fix it?

The Engineers

I want to be honest about engineering hiring because the answer is going to sound unusual.

I have been shipping Clerk and Pulse largely alone, with AI agents doing most of the typing and me doing most of the directing. I am not hiring a large engineering team. I need a small number of exceptional senior engineers, and “exceptional” here does not mean what most job postings mean by the word.

I need engineers who are good at working with AI, not engineers who are good at doing the AI’s job for it. The bottleneck in our engineering process is taste — deciding what to build, reading diffs, refusing wrong abstractions. A senior engineer here spends most of their day directing agents, reviewing their work, redirecting when they drift, and making the architectural calls the agents should not make on their own. If you love writing code by hand and feel diminished when a tool writes it for you, this will be uncomfortable. If you love shipping software and do not care whose fingers are on the keyboard at the moment the code appears, you will fit in.

I need engineers who have shipped production systems that real users depended on. Python, FastAPI, LangGraph, Next.js, or adjacent stacks are a plus, but what matters more is that you have been on the hook at 2 AM when something broke, and you know what that teaches you. Hobbyists and new graduates can be wonderful, and I will hire them eventually. The first engineering hires need to be people who have already earned their scars.

And I need engineers who understand that this is an AI-native product, not a CRUD app with an AI bolted on. The best test I can give you of whether you will fit is the technical companion essay earlier in this series, The Five Architectures I Threw Away Before Clerk Worked. If you read it and nod along at the anti-patterns — especially “just one more layer” and “smart framework” — you probably get it. If you read it and think the tiered planner was actually a reasonable idea you would have kept, you probably don’t, and I would rather we both know that now.

The question I want you to answer: read the five-architectures essay. Tell me which of the anti-patterns in it you have personally committed, in what project, and what you learned from committing it.

What it is actually like to join

I want to say something about the trade you would be making, because I think most recruitment pitches skip this part and I respect you more than that.

The company is early. The capital is enough to make these hires and run for a meaningful period, and real commercial deals are starting to close, but it is not the money a large corporate would pay for the same role. I am going to be upfront about that instead of hiding it behind vague language.

What I can offer in exchange is three things.

Real equity. You will own a real slice of a real company, and the slice will be larger than it would be at a later stage, because early employees get the benefit of joining before the dilution that follows. I do not over-allocate equity, which means the slices I do hand out are worth thinking about.

Real work. You will be building, selling, or supporting a product that is genuinely novel, in a market that is genuinely underserved, at a moment when the capability that makes the product possible is genuinely new. Most jobs available at any given moment are jobs where the category is settled and the work is execution on someone else’s vision. This is not one of those jobs. This is one of the rare moments in a career where the thing you are working on might actually matter, not because I am telling you it will but because the conditions for it to matter are unusually present.

Real autonomy. I am trying to build the company I wish I had joined earlier in my career. I trust the people I hire to make decisions. I do not micromanage, I do not insist on process for its own sake, I do not require you to be in an office eight hours a day to prove you are working. I will ask you to own a number, a problem, or a domain, and to tell me the truth about where you are on it. In exchange, I will give you more room than most companies will give you to do the work your way.

If that trade — lower-than-corporate cash, real equity, real work, real autonomy — sounds bad, this company is not for you, and I would rather you know that now. If it sounds like the trade you have been waiting for someone to offer, keep reading.

How to apply

One message, to jobs@faxter.com. Role in the subject line. Attach whatever CV or portfolio you have. In the body of the email, answer the specific question for your role — the ones I listed in each section above — honestly and specifically. Do not use a template. Do not use a boilerplate cover letter. Please do not use an AI-generated application; the irony of sending an LLM-written cover letter to an AI-native company is one I am not in the mood to enjoy, and I can tell.

Tell me which role you are applying for and why this particular company is the right next step for you. Tell me what you have built, sold, supported, or advised before that makes you confident you can do this. Tell me what you want out of the next few years of your career and whether this looks like it.

I read every application for the founding team myself. You will hear back.

Why this essay exists

I am writing this as an essay rather than as a set of job postings for one reason: the people I most want to hire are the kind of people who read essays. They are curious about the companies they join. They would rather read ten thousand honest words about the actual work than two hundred words of bullet points about responsibilities and qualifications. If you have read the rest of this series, you already know what you are signing up for. If you have not, I would rather you read it before you apply than after.

The founding team of a company is the single most important decision a founder makes in the early years. I am trying to make that decision well, which means I am trying to find people who have already self-selected into caring about the kind of thing I care about. The best way to do that is to write honestly, in public, about what I care about and what I am trying to build, and see who shows up.

If that is you — if you have read this far, if one of the roles above felt like it was describing you, if the trade I described sounds like the one you have been waiting for — send me the email.

I am looking forward to hearing from you.