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 consuming your cash daily) and someone to own operations/fulfilment (because a founder personally packing orders doesn't scale past a few hundred a month). Customer support, a second creative/content hand, and a bookkeeper or fractional finance person typically follow once volume makes founder-DIY genuinely painful, not before. Resist hiring a 'head of growth' before you've proven one channel works - that role is for scaling what's already working, not finding it.
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4 resources, 1 India-specific, 4 link-checked.
📄 Article
✓ Link checkedFreeBeginner
A step-by-step, structured founder's guide to hiring from zero - covers sequencing, sourcing and closing without assuming you already have a recruiting function. The right first stop before you write a job description.
The companion introduction piece that frames why early hiring decisions matter disproportionately - useful context before diving into the tactical guide itself.
An investor's view of seed-stage team-building, which tends to be more disciplined about sequencing hires against milestones than founder-written advice usually is.
An Indian HR firm writing specifically about D2C hiring, not generic startup hiring - it names the multi-skill, adaptable profile (digital marketing plus content plus customer service) that actually fits an early Indian D2C team.
