Building your inhouse D2C growth & performance team. When, why & how?

I love hiring good people. It’s like shopping. Except, you can write it off as an investment. WOW.

Love someone’s energy a lot? You can buy your way to spending 50 hours a week with them.

Want to learn a superskill in a short amount of time? Just hire an expert and have them teach you full-time.

So now that it’s established that I REALLY enjoy the process of hiring, you should also know that we’ve done this at the highest levels possible. From building Myglamm’s entire growth team and system which scaled them 10x in less than 12 months, to finding some absolute hidden gems for Lenskart’s growth analytics team, we’ve had a fair bit of success in hiring growth ninjas for some of India’s top brands.

We recently started offering this as a service to some younger brands too, and we’ve seen a fair but of success here as well. 

Over the next few sections, I will walk alongside you to establish where you are in your journey as an entrepreneur, and we’ll try to deduce if you are emotionally, financially, and spiritually ready to undertake the challenge of building your own, in-house growth & performance team.

This will be a solid 12-15 minute read and could literally 100x your business or save lakhs of rupees in wrong hires and missteps (if not crores), so I’d recommend that you turn off all distractions for a bit and zone in completely.

I’d like you to jot down the answers to some very simple questions I’m going to ask:

1. What is your understanding of a growth and performance team and how much should it cost?

2. Are you a solo founder or do you have a co-founder?

3. How big is your current marketing team?

4. How good is your design team on a scale of 1-10?

5. Do you have GA4 100% setup and do you use it to make data-driven decisions on a weekly basis?

6. What is your monthly revenue? 

7. Can one of the co-founders manage data and navigate excel like a pro?

8. Which of the following best describes your reason for wanting an in-house growth team?
   - Have had bad experience with agencies.
   - You are happy with you agency but feel that hiring inhouse will be cheaper.
   - You need more control and speed.

9. Who is the most expensive resource in your team currently? Write their salary.

10. Will you be engaged in an active fundraise in the next 1-2 years?

Answer Key

Now I’m going to share the answer key with you. Unlike typical answer keys though, there could very well be more than one right answer.

1. A growth team needs to consist of all the verticals required to acquire more customers, and retain them. It typically consists of 6-8 people ranging from

   • 2 killer media buyers. One for google and for meta. And no, you cannot combine them. They speak different languages. And add another media buyer if your spends are greater than 50L a month.

   • a real full-time copywriter

   • a wizard designer 

   • (optional, but recommended) A UI/UX specialist (Especially if you are in the wellness niche)

   • A retention specialist

   • A brand manager cum social media savant who can create and maintain relationships with content creators

   • A content creator who can make reels in their sleep

   • And one head of growth who can tie up everything together. 

You will be spending anything between 3-4 lacs per month on this, excluding a head of growth. 

Also, did I mention that you’re not allowed to hire average folks. Only A-listers. And yes, you won’t find seasoned A-listers in your budget but that’s okay. An A+ grade media buyer with 2 years of experience is > than a B+ media buyer with 6 years of experience even though they will be at the same salary. 

After a certain baseline skill level and experience, aptitude and attitude are far more important. 

2. If you’re a solo founder, my first question is…how do you do it? No really. It takes so much emotionally and I have massive respect for your risk-taking appetite by walking this path alone.
   Next, I’d like to tell you that you’re better off with an agency/external partner. At least until you have crossed 2-3Cr in monthly revenue, because after that stage, you have the cashflow for hiring a CEO/ head of growth.
   Here are 5 biggest reasons why solo founders should be wary of jumping into this team-building project.

   • Entrepreneurship is lonely. Sometimes a bit too much. And we find ourselves filling the void of intellectual company by hiring employees. Be sure that’s not what you’re doing.

   • Who will manage your team when you’re unwell or on vacation? 

   • Do you spend your time growing your business or managing the team? In cases of multiple founders, it’s easy to split the load.

   • You are the good cop and you are the bad cop. You need both to efficiently manage a team of superstars. 

   • You will need to hire a head of growth separately and that’s gonna cost $$$

And if your company has multiple founders, this process is going to be a whole lotta easier for you. Let’s continue below to see how much sense it actually makes to hire inhouse.

3. Your current in-house marketing team must at least have 2-3 members excluding designers and content writers before you can even THINK of hiring a full-fledged growth and performance team.
   Expectations from design and content team is not to make money. So there is less pressure on you, and on them. If you can manage this small team well, only then will you be ready to take on 10x the responsibility.
   

4. A good growth team is only as good as their design and copy team. And as explained above, these are the easy verticals to own inhouse. So if you answered anything less than 8 over here, you’re not ready.
   

5. Setting these up is not your growth team’s job. These tools must already be setup to their 100% so that once the growth team is hired, they have at least 6-12 month’s of accurate data to base their insights on. If this has not been a priority for you yet, then you’re too early in thinking about building this team. Remember, the new growth team is not a substitute for your current setup’s lack of skills; they are supposed to amplify it.
   

6. If your revenue is anything less than 1Cr, don’t even think about it. You don’t have enough time or money to be able to invest here.
   Exception: One of the co-founders can play the role of head of growth.
   For solo founders, best to wait until you reach 2Cr in MRR.
   

7. Pretty basic right? Not really. How are you going to keep track of what this team is doing if you cannot read basic data and charts. Especially if it’s a new team.
   The exception here is that of a company which makes enough money to hire an insanely high quality and trustworthy head of growth (18L+). If you’re a founder who is not familiar with basics of data analysis, you absolutely need a core team member/ founder’s office associate who can fill that gap for you.
   

8. (a) Have had bad experience with agencies.

Yes there are many bad agencies out there. But there are many good ones as well.
It’s like dating. Imagine if everybody who failed at dating started getting arranged married…oops well…

The point being, if you cannot manage a to find success in a relationship that has next to 0 emotional and time investment required from your side, how will you manage one where the stakes are manyfold. Remember, you are not talking about hiring 1 person here. You need to hire at least 3-4 people, and while you’ll be doing it step by step i’m sure, you still need an agency to support your team members until the team matures to its full potential.

Learn to work with agencies. It will be a game changer as you scale.

8 (b) You are happy with you agency but feel that hiring inhouse will be cheaper.

Unlikely. Hiring inhouse is not done to save costs but to speed up output and revenue growth.
If your sole reason of hiring inhouse is to save money, then you will end up with a sorry ass team which won’t nearly be as effective as a team built for growth.

8 (c) You need more control and speed.

Right answer. Having a bunch of A-listers work on a common goal day in and day out, with a founder/growth lead who excels at the art of balancing control and freedom, is what makes good companies grow fast.

9. Paying high salaries can be pretty daunting in the beginning.
   Suppose you don’t come from a corporate background where you’ve seen and learnt how high earners generate exponential ROI for their companies. In that case, this will likely be a somewhat intimidating experience for you. If you’re a founder who relates to this, you should ideally have at least 1 employee who gets paid more than Rs.1L per month and has been with you for over 8-10 months already, before you decide to build your inhouse growth team. Else, you risk either cheaping out, or getting impatient and anxious too soon, adding unnecessary pressure on your new hire, which more often than not leads to a drop in productivity.
   

10. If the answer to this is yes, then you ABSOLUTELY need another co-founder. Fundraising is a fulltime job so if you’re a solo founder who wants to do a fundraise while building your growth team, you won’t be able to do either. 

So there you have it, a 101 on creating an inhouse growth & performance team for your D2C brand. Feel free to reach out to me personally at [email protected] if you’d like to bounce some ideas around this.