You are ready for your first sales hire when you have closed enough deals yourself to describe, in writing, who buys, why they buy, what they object to, and roughly how long it takes. Not before.
That is usually somewhere between ten and twenty closed deals. If you cannot write that document, a salesperson cannot sell your product, and hiring one is the most expensive way to discover you were not ready.
Why early is worse than late
Hiring too early fails in a specific and avoidable way.
You bring someone in. They have no playbook, because none exists. They have no proof the thing sells, because you have three deals and two were friends. They spend four months building a pipeline against the wrong profile, miss a number nobody had grounds to set, and leave.
You have then lost somewhere around a hundred thousand in salary and opportunity cost, six months, and your own confidence in the motion. Worse, you have learned nothing, because you cannot tell whether the problem was the hire, the product, the message or the market.
Hiring late is uncomfortable but recoverable. The founder stays overloaded for another quarter. That is a bad quarter, not a bad year.
The real signal
Ignore revenue thresholds. People will tell you to hire at a million in ARR and the number is arbitrary.
The signal is repeatability. Have you closed deals you could not have closed on relationships? Could you explain to someone at dinner why the last five customers bought, without using the word synergies? Do you know what the second meeting needs to contain?
If yes to all three, you have something a person can be handed. If no, you have a market you still need to learn, and that learning is not delegable.
The profile, which is not what you think
The instinct is to hire someone senior from a company you admire. This is usually wrong.
A VP from a company at fifty million in revenue is good at running a function that already works. They know how to manage a team, forecast a quarter, and operate inside a process somebody else built. At your stage none of those things exist, and the skill of building them from nothing is a different skill entirely.
What you want is someone two or three years into their career who has carried a number at a small company, is comfortable with no process, and will do their own research and prospecting without a team around them. Hungry, curious, and able to sit with ambiguity without needing permission.
You also want someone who can write. More early sales is written than spoken now, and it is the easiest thing to test before you hire.
How to screen for it
Do not ask about past quota attainment. Everybody beat quota at their last job, by their own account.
Give them an account and an hour and ask them to come back with a point of view: who to contact, why, and what they would say. You will learn more from that than from any interview question. Most candidates produce something generic. The ones who produce something specific are the ones worth hiring.
Then have them sell you something in the room, badly, under pressure, and see how they handle being told no.
The thing to do instead, maybe
If you are not ready but you are drowning, the answer is usually not a salesperson. It is help with the parts of selling that are not selling: research, list building, follow-up, the systems underneath.
That work is now largely automatable, and automating it buys a founder back most of a day a week without the risk of a wrong hire. It also produces the documentation you will need when you do hire.
The first sales hire is a bet on a motion you have proven. If you have not proven it, you are not hiring. You are hoping.
Deciding on that first hire? It comes up often in advisory. Need the motion built first? See embedded go-to-market lead.