People & HR

How to run a performance review cycle as DTC Brand Founders

People & HRFor DTC Brand Founders4 apps10 steps~20 min to set up

You run a team of 8 people across ops, creative, and fulfillment — and performance reviews happen whenever you remember to do them, which is usually after someone quits or underperforms long enough to become a real problem. You don't have an HR system. You have a Notion doc from 2023, a Google Form your ops lead built, and a Slack thread from the last time you tried to do this. Managers (usually you) scramble to write feedback three days before a check-in, pull numbers from memory, and the whole thing feels like a formality. The people who needed the most coaching got the vaguest feedback because nobody documented anything. You've lost two strong hires in the last year partly because they felt like they were flying blind.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

People & HRFor DTC Brand Founders4 apps10 steps~20 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A structured review cycle that runs on a real schedule — self-assessments collected, manager notes drafted, and action items tracked without you project-managing every step

A centralized place where past reviews, decisions made, and development commitments live so next cycle isn't starting from zero

A lightweight task system that turns each review's action items into assigned, prioritized tasks with due dates so follow-through actually happens

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 Meeting Notes Task Manager Project Management

Data sources & config

Knowledge Management connects to Notion (Starch syncs your Notion pages on a schedule) to pull in any existing team docs, role descriptions, or past notes you've stored there. Meeting Notes runs during each 1:1 review call and archives transcripts into the review hub automatically. Project Management and Task Manager need no external data source — they run natively in Starch.

Prompts to copy

Build me a performance review hub where I can store each team member's review history, track their goals from last cycle, and see a summary of what we agreed to do differently

Create a project for our Q2 2026 review cycle with tasks for: self-assessment collection by April 25, manager draft reviews by May 2, and 1:1 review meetings scheduled the week of May 12

After each review meeting, extract action items and create tasks assigned to the right person with a 30-day follow-up due date

Build me a searchable doc where I can write manager notes for each person during the cycle — bullet points on wins, misses, and what I want to focus on in the 1:1

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Open Project Management and tell Starch: 'Create a Q2 2026 performance review cycle project with milestones for self-assessment, manager reviews, 1:1 meetings, and follow-up tasks — due dates spread across May.' Starch creates the project, stages, and milestone tasks.

2 In Knowledge Management, create a review hub: 'Build me a structured doc for each team member with sections for their role, goals from last cycle, self-assessment notes, manager feedback, and agreed development focus for next 90 days.'

3 Ask each team member to fill in their self-assessment section directly in the Knowledge Management hub by April 25 — no separate form tool needed, just a shared structured page per person.

4 Before each 1:1, open Knowledge Management and ask: 'Summarize what we agreed on last review for [name] and flag any goals that look unfinished based on my notes.' Use this to prep your talking points in under five minutes.

5 Run the review 1:1 with Meeting Notes active. It transcribes in real time and generates a post-call summary with decisions and highlights — you focus on the conversation, not your keyboard.

6 After each call, tell Starch: 'Pull the action items from today's [name] review meeting and create tasks — assign development goals to them, coaching commitments to me, with 30-day due dates.' Tasks appear in Task Manager immediately.

7 Update the Knowledge Management hub for each person: paste in the meeting summary, mark the review as complete, and set the agreed development focus for Q3 so it's there when you need it in August.

8 At the end of the cycle, ask Starch: 'Give me a summary across all Q2 reviews — how many action items were created, which are overdue, and which team members have no development task active.' Use this as a 10-minute ops check four weeks later.

9 For any review conversation that surfaces a recurring team-wide gap (e.g., three people flagged unclear priorities), create a shared Knowledge Management doc: 'Build a page summarizing the three most common feedback themes from our Q2 reviews and what we're doing about each.'

10 Set a recurring project in Project Management for Q3 reviews before you close out Q2: 'Duplicate this review cycle project for Q3, shift all milestone dates out by 90 days, and assign the self-assessment reminder task to me.' The next cycle starts itself.

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Worked example

May 2026 Review Cycle — 8-person DTC team

Sample numbers from a real run

Team members reviewed	8
Action items created across all reviews	24
Action items completed within 30 days	19
Hours spent by founder on review admin (vs. prior cycle)	4
Prior cycle hours (manual doc prep, chasing self-assessments, re-reading Slack)	14

Going into May, you had 8 reviews to run across two weeks — creative lead, two performance marketers, ops manager, two fulfillment coordinators, customer support rep, and a freelance email strategist you're bringing on full-time. In past cycles you'd have spent a weekend reading Slack history and writing notes in a doc nobody saw again. This time: Knowledge Management already had each person's last-cycle goals pulled from Notion. You told Starch to create the cycle project on April 20; by April 25 all eight self-assessments were in. Your performance marketer flagged that she didn't understand how her Meta ROAS targets were set — something you'd heard informally but never documented as a real gap. Meeting Notes captured the exact moment in her 1:1 where you agreed to build a shared CAC target doc she owns. That became a task in Task Manager, assigned to her, due June 1. Four weeks later, 19 of 24 action items were done. The 5 overdue ones showed up in your weekly Starch summary before they became surprises. Total founder time on review admin: about 4 hours across the whole cycle, down from what felt like a part-time job the quarter before.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Action item completion rate 30 days post-review (target: >75%)

% of team with an active development goal in Task Manager at any given time

Time from review meeting to completed manager notes in Knowledge Hub (target: same day)

Voluntary turnover rate quarter-over-quarter

Cycle completion rate — % of scheduled reviews that actually happened on time

Comparison

What this replaces

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

Lattice or Leapsome

Purpose-built for performance management with more structured review templates and 360 workflows, but starts at $11/person/month and assumes you have an HR function to configure and own it — overkill for an 8-person DTC team where the founder runs HR.

Notion + Google Forms (current state)

Free and flexible, but you're the one wiring the forms, chasing submissions, and manually turning notes into follow-up tasks — which is why the cycle doesn't actually run on schedule.

15Five

Strong on recurring check-ins and OKR tracking, but another standalone subscription that doesn't know about your Shopify data, your ad spend, or anything else your business runs on — you're still context-switching.

Linear or Asana for task tracking post-review

Good standalone task tools, but they don't connect to where the review content lives, so action items get created and then orphaned from the conversation that generated them.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — knowledge management, meeting notes, task manager 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 an HR system. Can I actually run a real review cycle in Starch?

Yes — that's the use case. You describe the cycle you want to run, and Starch builds the project, the per-person docs, and the task tracking. You don't need a dedicated HR tool. Most DTC founders at under 20 people don't; they need a system they'll actually use, not a platform that requires a full-time admin to configure.

Will Starch integrate with our existing Notion docs where I've stored some team info?

Yes. Starch syncs your Notion pages on a schedule, so any role docs, past review notes, or team wikis you've already built there will be searchable and usable inside your Knowledge Management hub. You're not starting from zero.

What if I use Google Meet for the 1:1 review calls — will Meeting Notes work?

Meeting Notes captures and transcribes your review calls. Connect Google Meet from Starch's integration catalog and the agent handles the rest during the call. After the meeting, it generates the summary, pulls action items, and you can route those directly into Task Manager.

Is my team's review data secure? You mentioned Starch isn't SOC 2 certified.

That's true — Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today. If your team is small and you're comfortable with the current security posture, most founder-run DTC brands are. If you're at a stage where compliance certifications are a hard requirement, that's worth knowing upfront.

What happens to action items between review cycles? I always lose track of them.

Each action item from a review gets created as a task in Task Manager with an assigned owner and due date. You can ask Starch at any point: 'Which action items from the Q2 review cycle are still open?' and get an instant summary. The goal is that nothing from a review conversation disappears into a doc nobody opens.

Can I use this for a freelancer or contractor, not just full-time employees?

Completely. The system is just structured docs, tasks, and meeting notes — there's no payroll or employment-status logic baked in. Tell Starch to create a review record for a contractor and it treats it the same way. Lots of DTC teams run on a mix of full-time and fractional people; the cycle works either way.