People & HR

How to run a performance review cycle as Solo Media and Creator Founders

People & HRFor Solo Media and Creator Founders4 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

You are the only person who knows how everyone on your tiny team is actually doing. There's no HR department, no performance system, no structured check-in cadence — just a vague sense that your editor is stretched thin, your VA is bored, and you haven't told either of them anything useful about their work in six months. When you finally carve out time to do a review, you're writing feedback from memory, pulling Slack threads, trying to remember what you agreed to in January. There's no record of goals you set, no aggregated feedback, and the whole process lives in a Google Doc that nobody reads again afterward.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

People & HRFor Solo Media and Creator Founders4 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A structured review cycle where goals, self-assessments, and your written feedback all live in one place — not scattered across Notion, Slack, and your memory

A set of recurring check-in prompts and task completion data that mean you're evaluating actual output, not vibes from the last two weeks

A lightweight system that works for a 1-3 person creator business — no enterprise HR software, no forms your contractor will ignore

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

Project Management Task Manager Meeting Notes Knowledge Management

Data sources & config

Project Management and Task Manager handle goal tracking and review deadlines. Meeting Notes connects to your calendar — Starch syncs your Google Calendar data on a schedule — and archives every recorded check-in, automatically extracting action items and commitments made per person. Knowledge Management connects to Notion from Starch's integration catalog, queried live, so historical goal docs and prior reviews are searchable when you're writing new feedback. No HR platform required.

Prompts to copy

Build me a performance review tracker for my two-person team — an editor and a VA. I want to track goals we set each quarter, their self-assessment responses, my written feedback, and a rating on four dimensions: content quality, reliability, communication, and initiative. Show everything in a kanban where each card is one person's review cycle.

Create a Q2 2026 review task for Maya (editor) due June 15. Attach her goals from the Q1 review note, flag it P1, and remind me two weeks before the due date.

Summarize all meeting notes from January through June that include Maya or the editorial workflow. Pull out any goals, commitments, or feedback moments mentioned in those calls.

Draft a performance review for Maya based on these notes: [paste summary]. Her self-assessment says she wants more creative ownership. Use a tone that's direct but encouraging.

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Open Starch and describe your review structure in plain language: 'Build me a performance review tracker for Maya (editor) and Dev (VA) with quarterly goals, self-assessment fields, my written feedback, and a 1-5 rating on content quality, reliability, communication, and initiative.'

2 Pull in past context: ask Starch to search your Meeting Notes archive for every check-in that mentions each person by name, then summarize what goals, commitments, or concerns came up across those conversations.

3 Set up recurring quarterly review tasks in Task Manager — one per person, P1, due two weeks before each quarter ends — so you're not scrambling to block the time last-minute.

4 Two weeks before reviews are due, send each team member a self-assessment prompt via Gmail. Starch drafts the email for you: 'Draft a self-assessment request for Maya asking her to reflect on her top three wins this quarter, one thing she'd do differently, and what she wants more of in Q3.'

5 When self-assessments come in, paste them into Starch and ask it to pull out themes: 'Summarize Maya's self-assessment and flag anything that differs from my own observations in the meeting notes.'

6 Draft written feedback using Starch: feed it the self-assessment, the meeting note summaries, and any Slack context you have. Ask for a draft in whatever tone fits — direct, developmental, or a mix.

7 Score each person on your four dimensions in the Project Management app. Starch doesn't score automatically — you make the call — but it surfaces the evidence so you're not rating from memory.

8 Run the actual review conversation as a recorded meeting. Meeting Notes transcribes in real time and generates a summary with decisions and action items after the call ends.

9 After each review, archive the outcome: goals agreed for next quarter, any compensation or role changes discussed, and the date. Starch saves this to Knowledge Management so it's searchable when Q3 rolls around.

10 Set follow-up tasks in Task Manager for any commitments you made — 'introduce Maya to the podcast editor contact by July 1' — so they don't evaporate after the call.

11 One month into the new quarter, pull a lightweight check-in: ask Starch to show you which goals each person has made progress on, based on tasks completed and any notes from weekly syncs, so you're not waiting until the next formal review to course-correct.

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

Q2 2026 Review Cycle — Maya (Editor) and Dev (VA)

Sample numbers from a real run

Review tasks created (one per person)	2
Meeting notes archived and summarized (Jan–Jun check-ins)	11
Self-assessment emails drafted and sent	2
Feedback drafts generated by Starch before final edit	2
Goals carried forward into Q3 tracker	6
Founder time spent on the full cycle (hours)	4

It's June 1. You have two reviews due by June 15 — Maya, your part-time editor who cuts your podcast episodes and writes the show notes, and Dev, your VA who handles sponsor outreach follow-ups and your Notion editorial calendar. You open Starch and ask it to pull every meeting note from January through May that mentions either name. It surfaces 11 check-ins. Maya mentioned in February that she wanted to try writing the newsletter intro instead of just the show notes. You never followed up. Dev flagged in April that sponsor briefs were arriving late and slowing down the turnaround. Both of these would have been invisible in a Google Doc review. You ask Starch to draft Maya's feedback based on those notes plus her self-assessment, which said she felt underused creatively. The draft comes back in two paragraphs — direct, fair, grounded in specifics. You edit three sentences and it's done. The whole cycle takes four hours instead of a day and a half, and for the first time, both conversations feel like they're based on something real.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Time to complete full review cycle per team member (target: under 3 hours)

Percentage of goals set last quarter that were actually tracked mid-quarter (not just reviewed at the end)

Number of commitments made in review conversations that were followed up within 30 days

Months since last structured written feedback delivered to each team member

Comparison

What this replaces

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

Lattice or Leapsome

Built for teams of 20+; pricing starts around $8-11 per person per month and the setup assumes you have an HR manager configuring it — overkill for a 2-person creator business where you're the HR department.

Google Docs + Notion templates

Free and flexible, but there's no thread connecting your meeting history, goal tracking, and feedback drafting — you're still synthesizing everything by hand from memory and scattered notes.

15Five

Good weekly check-in product, but it's another standalone subscription that doesn't talk to your editorial calendar, your task list, or your meeting notes — you end up with more dashboards, not fewer.

Just doing it in Slack DMs

Faster to start, but there's no record, no structure, and six months later neither you nor your editor remembers what you agreed to — which is the exact problem a review is supposed to solve.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — project management, task manager, meeting notes 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 only have one part-time contractor, not a full employee. Is this overkill?

Probably not. If you pay someone money to do work and you want them to keep doing it well, they deserve to know how they're doing. The setup here is lightweight — one tracker, recurring tasks, and a few prompts. You're not building an HR function; you're just making sure the conversation happens and that you have something to refer back to.

Does Starch store my team members' personal information or review data?

Review content you create in Starch lives in Starch's database. Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified yet, so if you're handling sensitive compensation data or anything your contractor might consider confidential, keep that in mind. For most solo media operators, the data in play is goal-tracking and written feedback — not payroll or medical records.

Can Starch pull in actual output metrics — like how many episodes my editor delivered, or how many sponsor briefs my VA sent?

Yes, with some setup. If your task completion lives in the Starch Task Manager or Project Management app, Starch can report on it directly. If your editorial calendar is in Notion, connect it from Starch's integration catalog and the agent queries it live. You describe the metric you want to surface and Starch pulls it — for example: 'Show me how many tasks Dev completed in Q2 tagged with sponsor-ops.'

What if my editor or VA isn't based in the US and I don't use Paylocity or ADP?

The performance review workflow here doesn't depend on payroll integration at all. It's built on task data, meeting notes, and documents — not pay stubs. If you want to reference compensation in the review, you'd paste that context in manually. The payroll connections in Starch (Paylocity, ADP) are useful for headcount and payroll reporting, not for this workflow.

How do I handle a review for someone who doesn't want to be on camera for a recorded meeting?

Meeting Notes works best when there's a recorded call to transcribe, but it's not required. You can run the review over a voice call and just paste your notes in afterward, or do it async over email and let Starch summarize the thread. The goal is a written record of what was said and agreed — how you get there is up to you.

Can Starch help me set goals for next quarter during the review, not just assess the past one?

Yes. After you finish the feedback section, prompt Starch: 'Based on this review and Maya's self-assessment, draft three goals for Q3 that address her request for more creative ownership and our need for faster episode turnaround.' You review and adjust the draft, then save the agreed goals to the tracker so they're waiting for you when Q3 ends.