We plan to bring eChai across 100 cities in India. It starts with eChai Startup Demo Day on 26 September, all in person. 11 cities confirmed, 151 founders registered. Any city that reaches 20 interested founders is on too. See your city
Scale, fund & exit

Building your D2C team

The first ten hires that make or break a brand.

What are the first 5-10 hires a D2C founder should make, and in what order? Don't hire ahead of a proven bottleneck: the earliest hires are almost always someone to own performance marketing/creative (because that's what's ... Beginner 4 resources → Should my first marketing hire be a generalist or a specialist - performance marketer vs brand marketer? At sub-₹1 crore scale, hire a versatile performance-and-content generalist who can run ads, write copy and brief a designer, not a narrow specialis... Intermediate 3 resources → When do I need to hire an operations or supply chain person instead of doing it myself? The signal isn't a revenue number, it's when order volume, SKU count or a second warehouse means founder-run ops starts causing customer-facing fai... Intermediate 3 resources → How do I hire well on a tight budget before I've raised real money? Trade cash for equity, flexibility or story - early hires who join a pre-funding D2C brand are usually betting on upside and mission, not comparing... Beginner 3 resources → Where do I actually find good D2C talent in India, and what should I pay? Wellfound and Michael Page both run D2C-specific listings, but the highest-signal hires in this space still come through founder networks, D2C-focu... Intermediate 3 resources → When should I hire a CEO or president to run the company so I can step back or focus on product? This is typically a post-₹50-100 crore or post-Series-B question, not an early one - and even then it's rare and needs real founder-board alignment... Advanced 4 resources →
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