What are the first 5-10 hires a D2C founder should make, and in what order?
The short answer
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.
A quick summary to orient you. The real value is below: the resources worth your time, from people who've actually done it, not us.
Here are the resources
Hand-picked from around the web, each with a note on why it earns your time. India-specific ones carry a badge.
4 resources1 India-specific4 link-checked
Read
📄 Article
✓ Link checkedFreeBeginner
Why we picked it
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.
Why we picked it
The companion introduction piece that frames why early hiring decisions matter disproportionately - useful context before diving into the tactical guide itself.
Why we picked it
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.
Why we picked it
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.
