People & HR

How to onboard a new hire as DTC Brand Founders

People & HRFor DTC Brand Founders3 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

When you hire your third or fourth person — a customer experience rep, a warehouse coordinator, a paid social manager — you're the onboarding. You pull together a Google Doc with passwords, record a Loom, drop them into Slack, and hope they figure out the rest. There's no written process for how you run Meta campaigns, no documented SOP for how refunds get processed in Shopify, no explanation of how the reorder spreadsheet works. Two weeks in, they're still asking you questions you've answered three times. You're paying someone to learn from you while you're too busy to teach them.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

People & HRFor DTC Brand Founders3 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A searchable team wiki that holds your SOPs, campaign playbooks, refund workflows, and reorder process — so new hires can answer their own questions on day one

An automated onboarding task list that assigns priorities and deadlines to every new hire without you building it from scratch each time

A booking page for onboarding check-ins so your new hire can schedule a 1:1 without the 'when are you free?' thread

The Starch recipe

Apps, data, and prompts

The combination of Starch apps, the data sources they pull from, and the prompts you use to drive them.

Apps used

Knowledge Management Task Manager Scheduling

Data sources & config

Knowledge Management connects to Notion via Starch's scheduled sync — your existing Notion pages, databases, and docs sync automatically and get indexed for AI search inside the wiki. Task Manager runs standalone inside Starch with no external data source needed. Scheduling syncs with Google Calendar via Starch's scheduled sync (events, calendars, availability windows) and connects to Calendly from Starch's integration catalog, queried live when a new booking comes in.

Prompts to copy

Build me a team wiki with sections for Paid Social (Meta campaign setup, audience naming conventions, budget rules), Shopify Operations (how we process refunds, how we handle stockouts, how we tag orders), Klaviyo (our flow naming system, suppression rules, list hygiene), and Inventory (how to read the reorder sheet, who approves POs). Each section should have an AI search bar so a new hire can ask a question and get an answer from our docs.

Create an onboarding task list for a new Customer Experience hire starting Monday. Include tasks for: read the refund SOP by day 2, shadow one live support session by day 3, handle first 5 Shopify tickets independently by day 5, review Klaviyo flows by end of week 2. Set P1 for anything in week 1, P2 for week 2. Send me an overdue alert if anything slips.

Set up a booking page for 30-minute onboarding check-ins at the end of week 1 and week 2. Sync with my Google Calendar. Add 15-minute buffer after each one. I'll share the link in their welcome Slack message.

Run these in Starch → or paste them into your favorite agent

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Open Knowledge Management from the Starch App Store and connect your Notion workspace — Starch syncs your pages, databases, and existing docs on a schedule so your wiki starts populated, not blank.

2 Tell Starch what sections you need: 'Build me wiki sections for Paid Social, Shopify Operations, Klaviyo, and Inventory — pull in whatever relevant Notion docs already exist and flag anything with no content so I know what to write.' Starch organizes the structure and surfaces gaps.

3 For any section with no Notion doc behind it, type what you know into Starch in natural language — 'our refund process is: customer emails, CX rep checks order in Shopify, issues return label via loop, logs outcome in the refund tracker sheet' — and Starch writes the SOP.

4 Set a stale-content alert: tell Starch 'flag any wiki page that hasn't been updated in 60 days' so your Meta campaign playbook doesn't become outdated three quarters after you write it.

5 Open Task Manager and build your onboarding template: describe the role, the key tasks, priorities, and deadlines. Starch saves this as a reusable template — the next time you hire, you install it rather than rebuilding it.

6 Assign the task list to your new hire's first two weeks. Set P1 tasks for anything in days 1-5, P2 for week two milestones. Enable overdue alerts so you find out before they fall behind, not after.

7 Open the Scheduling app and connect Google Calendar via Starch's scheduled sync. Create two meeting types: '30-min Onboarding Week 1 Check-in' and '30-min Onboarding Week 2 Check-in'. Set availability, add buffer time, and copy the booking link.

8 Write your new hire a welcome message in Slack. Drop in the wiki link, the task list view, and the scheduling booking page. That's their orientation packet — no PDF, no lost email.

9 On day one, your new hire uses the AI search bar in the wiki to answer their own questions. You can see what they're searching for — questions with no good answer surface the gaps you need to fill.

10 At the week 1 check-in they booked, you review task completion from the Task Manager view. Anything overdue is already flagged. You spend the 30 minutes on actual questions, not status updates.

11 After week 2, review which wiki sections got the most searches and which tasks slipped most often — that tells you where the onboarding is still broken and what to document next.

See this running on Starch

Connect your tools, describe what you want, and the agent builds it. Closed beta is free.

Try it on Starch →

Worked example

CX Hire Onboarding — April 2026

Sample numbers from a real run

Wiki sections built at start	4
Notion docs auto-imported	11
SOPs written by founder via Starch	3
Onboarding tasks assigned	14
P1 tasks (week 1)	7
Check-in calls booked by new hire (self-serve)	2
Founder questions fielded in Slack (vs. prior hire)	6

You hired a CX rep starting April 7. The week before, you spent 90 minutes in Starch: connected Notion, had Starch build the wiki structure (Shopify Ops, Klaviyo, Refunds, Escalation Policy), imported 11 existing docs, and typed out the 3 processes that only existed in your head. Starch wrote those into SOPs. You built a 14-task onboarding list — 7 P1s in week one, the rest in week two — and set it up as a reusable template for next time. You created the scheduling booking page, dropped everything into a Slack welcome message, and sent it. In week one, your new hire searched the wiki 23 times and asked you 6 questions directly — down from around 30 with your previous hire who had no wiki at all. Both check-ins were self-booked. The 6 questions they did ask pointed to two wiki gaps (your Gorgias escalation flow and your 3PL contact list), which you filled in week two. The template is saved. Next hire takes you 20 minutes of setup, not 90.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Founder questions asked per new hire in first 2 weeks (target: under 10)

Days to first independent task completion (handling a real Shopify ticket or publishing a live Meta ad)

Onboarding task completion rate by end of week 2

Wiki search-to-question ratio (how often new hires find answers themselves vs. pinging you)

Time to reusable onboarding template (goal: every role has one before the second hire)

Comparison

What this replaces

The other ways teams handle this today, and how the Starch version compares.

Notion alone

Notion holds docs but won't build an AI-searchable wiki from your existing pages, assign task lists with priority alerts, or connect to your calendar for check-in booking — you'd assemble those yourself across three separate tools.

Gusto or Rippling onboarding modules

Good for compliance paperwork and benefits enrollment, but they don't know your Shopify refund process or your Meta campaign naming conventions — the operational knowledge still lives nowhere.

Loom + Google Drive

Video walkthroughs are better than nothing, but they go stale, can't be searched by question, and don't tell you when your new hire is stuck or what they're looking for.

A hired ops person to run onboarding

Solves the problem but costs $60-80k/year and still requires someone to write the underlying docs — Starch makes the docs and the structure, not just the delivery.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — knowledge management, task manager, scheduling all running on connected data. Setup in plain English; numbers stay current via scheduled syncs and live agent queries.

Try it on Starch →

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

I don't have any documentation written yet. Does this still work?

Yes — that's actually the most common starting point. You describe the process to Starch in plain language (how you handle a stockout, how you approve a refund, how you structure a Meta campaign test) and Starch writes the SOP. You're not filling a template; you're talking to Starch like you'd explain it to someone on your team.

My existing docs are all in Notion. Will they just import?

Starch syncs your Notion pages and databases on a schedule — pages, databases, and content come in automatically and get indexed for AI search. You'll see which docs imported cleanly and which ones Starch flags as incomplete or stale.

What if I hire for a totally different role next time — does the onboarding task list work for a paid social manager, not just CX?

You build separate templates per role. Describe the paid social manager's first two weeks to Starch, and it builds a new task list with the right priorities and deadlines. Save it. The CX template and the paid social template both live in Starch and you install whichever one applies.

Is the Task Manager available right now?

Task Manager is currently in development. You can request beta access through Starch — it's one of the core apps in the onboarding recipe and worth getting on the list early.

Does Starch store my Notion data? I'm cautious about sensitive info leaving our workspace.

Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified yet — that's worth knowing if your company has a formal security review process. For most DTC teams at the stage where you're documenting your first SOPs, the honest answer is: it's a practical tradeoff between having searchable documentation vs. having nothing at all.

Can a new hire actually search the wiki themselves, or do they need a Starch account?

The wiki is built as a Starch app — your new hire would access it through Starch. You can describe exactly what the search interface should look like and who has access when you build the app. If you want it fully self-serve and frictionless from day one, build the wiki first and set their access up before they start.

What tools does this replace for a DTC team?

In most setups: Notion (for the wiki, partially), Calendly (for check-in booking, via Starch's integration catalog), and whatever task tracker you're using for the new hire's first two weeks. It doesn't replace your HR system for payroll or benefits paperwork — it replaces the operational knowledge layer that those tools don't touch.