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The Playbook To Hiring Ai As Your First Employee
How to replace 3 hires with $1,065/mo & automate half your business before you bring on your first employee.
PATRICK FRANK
August 28, 2025
(Total read time: 4 minutes)
🤖 PLAYBOOK — AI as Your First Employee
Before you make your first hire, you’re probably already drowning in busywork. Outreach, follow-ups, reporting, content, customer support… it eats your time before you ever hit scale.
But here’s the unlock: your first “employee” doesn’t need a salary, benefits, or onboarding. It can be AI.
Founders are automating 50% of their workflows before they hire their first person. The result? More time to sell, build, and grow without burning cash on overhead.
Here’s how to set it up 👇
1. Automate Outreach & Lead Gen
AI handles the grunt work of finding and warming leads.
2. Customer Support on Auto-Pilot
First-line support doesn’t need a full-time hire.
3. Content & Marketing at Scale
Stop spending hours drafting and scheduling content.
4. Admin & Reporting Workflows
AI keeps the backend running smoothly.
Glean → answers “where’s that file” across docs, Slack, and email
ChatGPT + Sheets → generates reports, summaries, and weekly recaps automatically
5. Finance & Ops
Avoid hiring a part-time CFO or ops manager early.
Pilot → bookkeeping and tax done with AI + human oversight
QuickBooks + AI plugins → automates invoices, categorization, and cashflow reports
đź’° The Cost Breakdown
AI Stack = Your First “Employee”
A lean stack to automate lead gen, support, content, admin, and finance:
Total Monthly Cost → ~$1,065
Equivalent of having 3–4 part-time employees covering multiple departments.
Human Hire = Your First “Employee”
Part-Time Junior Hire (20 hrs/week):
$20/hr → ~$1,600/mo
Plus overhead → ~$2,000–$2,200/mo
Full-Time Junior Hire (40 hrs/week):
$3,500–$4,000/mo base
Plus ~25% overhead → ~$4,500–$5,000/mo
The Comparison
AI Stack (~$1,065/mo) = Handles outreach, support, content, reporting, and ops.
Part-Time Hire (~$2,000/mo) = One person covering 1–2 areas with a learning curve.
Full-Time Hire (~$5,000/mo) = One generalist trying to juggle everything.
👉 With AI, you’re essentially getting multi-department coverage at ~20% the cost of a full-time hire.
⚡ The Result
Instead of burning $5–10k a month on your first hire, you’ve got a stack of AI employees running 24/7.
The best part? Unlike junior hires, AI doesn’t forget, sleep, or quit. It just scales.
Final Thought:
Hiring too early kills cash. Hiring too late kills growth.
AI gives you breathing room. It lets you delay headcount until it’s truly strategic, not just reactionary.
So before you onboard your first human, onboard your first AI. It’s the employee that pays for itself on Day One.
👋 Got an idea you’re building and want a PMF gut check?
I’ll give you my honest take — no fluff, no pitch.
Let’s make sure you’re building the right thing, for the right market, in the right way.
– Patrick
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