I think you've really answered your question pretty well! The common options are:

1) Deferred compensation. Find someone that will agree to take a note in lieu of payment, with an enticing arrangement to pay them for their work when you get revenue.

2) Partial cash, partial equity. Equity doesn't have to mean a share in the company today. It could take the form of options (with vesting over time), or vesting that is dependent on certain milestones (perhaps revenue) being met.

3) All equity - Again with the vesting possibilities in #2 above.

Unless you have no other choice, you might want to avoid anything related to equity due to complexity, legal expense, and other reasons.

A good option might be to see if you can find a good but inexperienced UX designer who needs to build a portfolio, and would see this as an opportunity to get a case study and build credibility, in exchange for a reduced compensation rate.

Lastly, consider hiring a UX designer on a site like Odesk. Many offer services at low hourly rates, and some of them are probably really good.

Personally, when I am cash-poor and time rich, my preference is to dig in and learn the basics of whatever it is that I normally would hire somebody else to do.

That's especially true with user research and user testing. Those are skills that any founder should have. As a founder, your number one job is to understand your customers, their problems, and exactly what it is about your product that works and doesn't work for them.

So I'd suggest you buy Krug's "Don't Make Me Think" and Kuniavsky and Goodman's, "Observing the User Experience". Read the first, and use the second as a resource. Then start doing that deep research yourself.

At some point you may reach the limits of your design skills, especially for thinks like interface or visual design. At that point, you can look at bringing someone in to help. But early-adopter audiences are frequently insensitive to design, so you should be able to get a fair way toward product/market fit before that happens.

I can answer this from the perspective of a UX designer who is working on a couple startups.

First of all, your second hypothesis doesn't sound feasible. You aren't going to attract top talent if you can't afford to pay them. And you don't want to be worrying about spending your savings at the same time you're trying to get this off the ground.

I'm a bit intrigued by why you absolutely need a top UX designer. As a designer myself, I think that only another designer could be so certain that their specific design is going to be the ultimate differentiator - so good that it could turn into a profitable business.

Generally, a non-designer (most people, like yourself) have a business problem that they are trying to solve. Good design certainly helps, but not nearly as much as actually solving the problem. Your design only needs to be good enough to get customers. Normally it should be treated like any other part of the business else that improves over time (or not) with each future investment.

If you want to recruit someone by offering them equity, you have to sell them on your vision. Attend local events and talk to everyone you can. Tell them your idea and what kind of person you are looking for. (Tip: If you don't want to tell them your whole idea, tell them part of it in such a way that it comes across as the full idea.) If you believe in your vision strongly enough, you will find a UX designer out there who might see your project as the perfect opportunity to make it into a profitable business by leveraging their skillset.

Personally, when I see a great business plan and product that had a lot of potential, and recognize that UX is the bottleneck, I can't help myself but want to make it better.

I hope that helps. If I knew more about your business and product, I could offer more specific advice - even about the interface itself. Feel free to set up a call :)

I'm answering this from both a founder and a product UX design perspective. It would be helpful to have an idea as to what you're actually building to answer this question properly as many times, people think they need something when they don't necessarily need it.

You're saying you need a *top* UX designer, which would imply you're building something totally new, something where there is no known best practice for the UX of this kind of solution. Assuming that's the case, then you should be able to get a top UX designer to want to work on it based on that very challenge alone. If you explain it in this way to at least one skilled UX person, then the challenge alone should make them want to share it with their network, even if that person is not interested or unavailable or has requirements outside of what you're capable of offering.

Assuming you're not inventing something totally new, I would go onto a site like Behance or LinkedIn or Dribbble and speak with people who understand UX enough to point you in the direction of best practices for that type of solution, and then I would find perhaps a more affordable UX designer and work from there with your budget or as an equity-split/hybrid comp. If the person is not a *top* UX designer/developer, then they're likely more willing to get involved in a risk/reward scenario.

Figure out if you really need top, because that's difficult if the challenge is not there. Someone skilled can get you very far along and will be more open to working with you in an affordable way.

To recruit top UX designer keep the following points in minds:
1. He must be good at explaining what he does and how something works.
Ask a simple question like “What does your company do?” and see how he structures the answer. In my experience, a great UX designer knows how to transfer information in the most efficient way, no matter if the medium is a website, an app or spoken language. So, he should structure his answer applying a certain hierarchy: first the macro, then the middle level and at the end the details.
2. Sketch files: they tell a lot about his attitude.
Although those things might seem too specific, I never met a great UX designer that is not obsessed with that kind of details. The reason is that they show a clear attitude to execute tasks in clear, scalable, and rigorous way.
3. He must be curious about your company’s product.
The thing is: as a UX designer you basically work every day on the product. And it is not just about the product, in my experience a good UX designer should understand the whole context in which the company is operating to deliver the best solutions. That means that his questions should also regard your target clients, the business model, the main KPIs and many other aspects.
4. Portfolio: tell me what you did
It happens many times to see impressive portfolios. For sure this is a good sign that reveals aesthetic taste. For a UX designer I prefer to go deeper into the “reality” of the projects shown in the portfolio.
5. Tools and workflow
This point is obvious, but it is better to ask which tools the candidate is using and what is his workflow.
6. An outstanding interaction he found in a digital product
Here the key is to go super specific. The question should be something like “Can you tell me a great interaction you found in a digital product?”.
7. A product that has an overall beautiful experience (even not digital)
Asking to talk about the experience of an entire product will unveil if he knows what makes a product great starting from the high level.
8. Hobbies and passions: tell me what you love
Asking about hobbies and passions might sound trivial but in my opinion it is not. In some cases, passions and hobbies are good predictors of the candidate’s attitude. In my experience a great UX designer is belonging to the “maker” type of persons. He loves to create amazing experiences and products and want to go deep into it.
Besides if you do have any questions give me a call: https://clarity.fm/joy-brotonath