# Your First Three Hires The pro stack has nineteen employees. You need three. Each one covers a job you cannot skip: building the thing, owning the thing, and getting paid for the thing. ## Hire 1: Lovable (the builder) **Job:** turns your description into a working app, in the browser, no code editor, no terminal (the text window developers type commands into; you will not need one). You describe what you want, it builds it, you point at what's wrong, it fixes it. This replaces the entire Builders department for now: Zed, Claude Code, the whole desk. When your app outgrows Lovable, your code comes with you (see hire 2). ## Hire 2: GitHub (the filing cabinet) **Job:** stores your code with full history, outside of Lovable, under your name. This is rule number two of the pro stack: own your code and data from day one. GitHub is free for what you need, and Lovable connects to it with a built-in sync. If Lovable disappeared tomorrow, or you simply outgrow it, your app is still yours. Set it up the slow, explained way with the [GitHub for Normal People kit](https://robotsonpayroll.com/resources/github-for-normal-people). That is the deep dive; do it once and you are done. ## Hire 3: Stripe Payment Link (the cashier) **Job:** a checkout page Stripe hosts for you. You paste a link, people pay you. No code. Stripe has no monthly fee: it takes 2.9% + $0.30 per US transaction, so it costs nothing until you earn something. A Payment Link is the no-code version of Stripe: create a product, get a URL, put the URL behind your buy button. The full walkthrough, including what to do when a payment fails, is the [Get Paid kit](https://robotsonpayroll.com/resources/get-paid-kit). ## Hire 3.5: your first analytics (the counter) Not a full hire, more of a part-timer, but do it in week one: you need to know if anyone is showing up. - **PostHog:** free for 1M events/mo, shows what users do inside your app. The pro stack's pick. - **GA4 (Google Analytics):** free, counts website visitors, the standard for marketing traffic. Pick one. PostHog if you care most about what users do in the app, GA4 if you care most about where visitors come from. You can add the other later; both are free. ## When to hire robot #4 and #5 Do not hire ahead of the pain. Signals that it is time: **Hire #4, error tracking (Sentry, free for 5K errors/mo),** when real strangers use your app. The moment a user says "it broke" and you cannot see what broke, you needed Sentry yesterday. **Hire #5, email (Resend, free for 3K emails/mo),** when you need to talk to your users: receipts, launch announcements, "we fixed it" notes. Watch the 100-per-day cap on the free tier; it bites before the monthly limit does. After that you are choosing from the full payroll: hosting you control, background jobs, ad APIs. That map is `stack-map.md` in this kit, and the concierge prompt in `concierge-setup-prompt.md` will interview you and set up whichever hires you are ready for. The only mistake available here is hiring nineteen robots before robot one has shipped anything. Three hires, one afternoon, then build.