Your real bottleneck is hours. A search is a loop that needs continuous attention, and everyone on your team already has a full-time job that is not this one.
Ask a founder how hiring is going and you hear about the pipeline. Ask to see the pipeline and you find twelve browser tabs, a spreadsheet last touched nine days ago, and four half-written outreach messages. The cause is arithmetic, not character.
Sourcing, outreach, replies, screening, scheduling. None of the stages is hard alone. What is hard is that they arrive continuously, and the person doing them is also closing a customer, fixing a deploy, and raising a round.
The candidate who replied with interest on Tuesday is not frozen while you ship a launch. They are talking to companies that have someone whose whole job is keeping that conversation moving. By the time you circle back, the reply is cold and the list is stale.
A sourcing seat makes the finding stage faster for whoever operates it. It does nothing about outreach, screening, scheduling, or the follow-through between them. If the operator is "the founder, in the gaps," the tool changed nothing.
The design question behind Mira was never how to make a founder faster at recruiting. It was which parts of a search genuinely require the employer, and whether everything else can run without you. The published system report documents the five sub-agents that carry the middle.
There is a fourth option, a recruiting agency, and for senior searches it is often right; our fee analysis covers when. These are the three a founder actually weighs for most roles.
Drawn from the roles run for our early enterprise customers. Your numbers move with the role and the market, and we will tell you honestly what to expect for yours.
A retained search wants a five-figure engagement before any candidate exists. An annual seat wants twelve months of conviction about a tool nobody has hours to operate. The entry plan here is $49 a month: 3 interview-ready candidates against 1 active role, and a credit moves only when a qualified, interested candidate is booked. A month that delivers nobody worth meeting takes neither your money nor your attention. The outcome-pricing page walks the mechanics, including the boundary cases.
Every credit is a candidate who cleared your bar, confirmed interest, and is booked for a first interview. No retainers. No seat you forget to cancel.
See pricing → Starting at $49/moSomeone on the team genuinely runs the search, keeps it moving, and needs better reach. Buy them a tool they operate; we keep a current shortlist, and most of it is not us.
Some roles fill from your own network in a week. Paying for pipeline you already have is waste, and we would rather say so here than read it in a churn survey.
A human who takes the mandate end to end, manages the offer, and carries a placement guarantee is a different product at a different price. Our fee analysis lays out when it is worth it.
What remains is the situation this page is named for: real hiring need, no owner, no continuous hours, and a bar you are not willing to lower. That is the case we built for. The difference between a tool and this, spelled out mechanically, is in the sourcing-tool versus AI-recruiter comparison.
Every pause in a search has a cost that never appears on any invoice. During the week you spend on a product launch, three things happen to the search.
The warm replies cool. A response that sits for days signals exactly what it is: this company does not have its act together on hiring. The candidates you most wanted, the ones with options, are the first to read that signal and act on it.
Your own context evaporates. Which of the nine replies had the visa question? Who asked for the salary band? Rebuilding that state costs an hour before any new work starts, which raises the activation energy for the next session, which lengthens the next pause.
And the top of the funnel goes stale. Sourcing lists age; people change jobs and change their minds. Work done three weeks ago quietly stops being work you can use.
This is the founder hiring trap in one sentence: the search needs a continuous operator, the company has none, and every substitute for continuity, more tabs, better lists, a nicer tracker, fixes something other than the actual problem.
The candidate feels the fragmentation before you do. From their side of the table, a company that takes six days to answer an interested reply is indistinguishable from a company that is not serious about the role, and they calibrate their own risk accordingly. The smaller your company, the more the process itself is the pitch: it is the only evidence about how you operate that a stranger can see from outside.
Look back at the split table and notice what the four employer-side items share. None of them decays when your week explodes.
A brief written once stays written. An outreach approval takes minutes, not sessions, and it is a real checkpoint rather than a formality: every message goes out under your company's name, and the approval is the mechanism that keeps tone and claims in your control. The bar moves only because you moved it, as you learn the market. And the interviews land as scheduled blocks, which is how founders already work.
The continuous part, the part that was killing the search, is exactly the part that left your desk. That is the design criterion the system report is organized around: keep the employer where the judgment lives, and nowhere else.
The limit of the argument: we have not yet published stage-level measurements of where founder-run searches stall. When that data ships, it will appear here with its methodology, the same way every number on this site arrives.
The standard advice for a founder in this situation is to buy software: a sourcing tool, a seat on a professional network, an outreach platform with sequences. All of these are levers. None of them is an arm.
The mechanics are written up in the sourcing-tool versus AI-recruiter comparison, and they reduce to one question: after the tool does its part, who does the rest?
If that answer is the founder, the seat is a cost line with no operator attached, and the situation is unchanged. If the answer is a real person who owns the search, buy them the tool and skip us; that case is on the shortlist page, argued in the other direction.
The same test disposes of the agency question for most early roles. An agency gives you an arm, a very good one, priced for searches where the placement fee is small next to the cost of a wrong hire. For a founding team making its fifth hire, that price usually buys more certainty than the role needs, which is why the fee analysis, not this page, should make that call.
Pick the search your calendar keeps killing. Write the brief once. Approve the outreach. Then let fourteen days decide it: either interviews land while you build, or they do not, and either way you will know at zero dollars, without lowering the bar to find out.
The employer-side work is four items: write and approve the role brief, approve the outreach that goes out under your name, keep the hiring bar current when Mira asks for a decision, and take the interviews. Everything between those points, sourcing, outreach, screening and scheduling, runs inside the loop. The interviews themselves remain the largest block, which is the point: the hours you spend are the hours only you can spend.
The entry plan is $49 a month: 3 interview-ready candidates against 1 active role. A credit is spent when a qualified, interested candidate is booked, not when a profile is found or a message is sent. There is also a free 14-day trial with 3 New Roles and 12 Credits, no card required.
No. Candidates arrive as booked first interviews with the screening evidence attached, so a calendar and an inbox are enough at the start. Teams that already run an ATS keep it; Metix AI is not an ATS and does not replace the system where you track applications, scorecards and offers.
Nothing is spent. Credits are only consumed when a candidate who clears your approved bar and confirms interest is booked. A delivery lead reviews every candidate before handoff, and a month with zero qualified candidates is a month with zero credits used.
Write the brief once. Fourteen days, zero dollars, and the bar stays where you set it.