Solopreneur Here. Has Anyone Hired 2 To 3 Strong Founding Early Engineers And Turned One Of Them Later As Co-founder? (“i Will Not Promote”)

(“I will not promote”)

I’m a backend software engineer with 10 years experience worked across startups and big enterprise customers.

I have built 4 MVPs on the side for different ideas and shut them later.

I have built the product of current one and onboarding customers.

Earlier(while building those 4 MVPs) I used to think I don’t need co-founder because those ideas don’t need in person selling or atleast meeting people via zoom.

But current business needs lot of in person meetings etc. I want someone else to focus on the tech work other than me. Also I feel burnout from my current software engineer job(yes quitting this week).

I feel meeting random people at hackathons and making them co-founders is bit risky as I don’t know them as a person. I rather prefer to hire them as founding engineers(but in the plan to make them as co-founder/CTO) and see their progress for 3 to 6 months (I will be paying them for their work) and later chose them as co-founder.

Has anyone done that? Any pointers, advice ??