Your First 3 Marketing Hires for a Shopify Brand (And Why an Agency Beats All Three at $17k/Month)

The advice you've heard is that your first proper marketing hire should be a Director of Growth on around A$120k, and they'll come in and run the whole show.

What actually happens at the revenue stage most brands are at when they hire that person is you've bought one expensive opinion, a long ramp, and a single point of failure who still can't edit a video.

I want to walk through this properly, because the "who do I hire first" question is one of the most expensive decisions a founder makes, and most people get talked into the wrong order. I'll run the same first-hire draft the big operators run, price each role with the real fully-loaded numbers, and then make the case I actually believe: that at six figures a month and below, your first two or three hires shouldn't be hires at all.

The draft the 9-figure operators actually run

There's a game the best DTC operators play with each other. You're starting a brand today. Zero revenue. Who are your first three marketing hires, in order? It's a good exercise because the ranking forces a real opinion out of you.

What's striking is how little their answers look like the standard advice. Nobody's first pick is a generalist Director of Growth who'll "own strategy". The picks cluster around one belief: in 2024, the scarce thing isn't someone to press buttons in the ad account, it's someone who can make content that actually sells.

So here's the draft, the way the sharp operators play it, with the fully-loaded cost of each pick. And by fully-loaded I mean the number that actually leaves your account, not the salary on the offer letter.

Hire 1: the content engine (call it a performance creative strategist)

This is the pick almost every serious operator makes first now, and ten years ago it wouldn't have even been in the top three.

The job is not media buying. The job is to feed the ad account a steady supply of content that's built to perform: hooks, angles, scripts, briefs to creators, the occasional product seeding push to get real people making real videos. They live in the answer to one question, which is "what's working in our account and how do we make more of it."

Here's my take on why this goes first. You can have a flawless account structure and the truth is it barely matters if the creative is weak. I've watched a brand with a genuinely messy account outperform a tidy one three to one purely because the ads were better. The impact sits in the creative, so your first dollar of headcount should sit there too.

The nice part: this is the one role where you can hire junior and win. A sharp, hungry person on maybe A$75k who lives and breathes social can become disproportionately valuable inside six months, because the skill is taste and reps, not a decade of experience.

Fully-loaded cost, though, is never just the A$75k.

• Salary: A$75k
• Super at 11.5%: ~A$8,600
• Software, hardware, a content/editing stack, a slice of overhead: call it ~A$10k
• The hidden one: a 3 to 4 month ramp before they're producing anything that scales

So you're closer to ~A$94k a year in real outlay, or ~A$7,800 a month, and that's before a single ad is good. Land the wrong person and you've burnt the thick end of A$30k discovering it.

Hire 2: the editor-designer who turns ideas into assets

A creative strategist with nobody to build the work is just a person with good ideas and no output. So the second pick is almost always the pair of hands: a designer-editor who can cut the video, build the statics, lay out the emails, and keep the landing pages from looking like a 2014 template.

This is the unglamorous hire that quietly decides whether hire one was worth making. Great briefs die without someone fast and capable turning them into a finished ad this week, not next month.

What I'd look for is range over polish. At this stage you don't want a specialist who only does motion graphics. You want someone who can move between a UGC edit, a clean static, and an email layout without flinching, and who's quick.

The cost maths:

• Salary: A$70k for a strong all-rounder (or a 40-hour-a-week overseas editor for materially less, which is what a lot of operators quietly do)
• Super and overhead: ~A$18k loaded on top
• The catch: one person is one person. They take leave, they get sick, and your entire content output stops the week they're away.

Call it ~A$88k a year fully loaded, ~A$7,300 a month. Two hires in and you're already past A$15k a month in real cost, and you still have nobody owning retention and nobody whose actual expertise is paid media.

Hire 3: the retention bet (and why it's third, not first)

The third pick splits people. The operators who go all-in on acquisition will tell you you don't even need this role yet. The ones who've been burned by a leaky back end put an email and SMS person here.

I land on retention third, with a caveat. Here's the thing - who exactly are you retaining when you launched eight weeks ago and have a few hundred customers? The honest answer early on is that your acquisition hire can run the Klaviyo flows themselves for a good while. A welcome flow, an abandoned-cart sequence, and a post-purchase series isn't a full-time job at A$40k of monthly revenue.

So if I take this pick, it's a 60/40 acquisition-to-retention person, not a pure retention specialist. Someone who can stand up the core flows and send a decent campaign, without commanding the salary of a dedicated lifecycle lead.

• Salary: A$80k for the blended profile
• Loaded: ~A$100k a year, ~A$8,300 a month

Notice what's still missing after three hires. Nobody in this trio is a media-buying expert. That's not an oversight. The operators are quietly telling you that pure tactical media buying has become close to a commodity, and they'd rather spend the headcount on content. Hard to argue with.

Add it up, then look at what you've actually bought

Three hires, fully loaded, land somewhere around A$23k a month: roughly A$7,800 plus A$7,300 plus A$8,300, before recruiter fees, before laptops, before the months of ramp where none of it is firing yet.

For that A$23k a month you've bought three salaries, three sets of leave, three people who can each be poached, and a real chance that at least one of the three is a mishire you won't catch for a quarter. You've also bought a management job: someone, probably you, now has to hire, onboard, set KPIs, and run weekly check-ins for all three.

And here's the part nobody mentions in the draft. You've made three single points of failure. The day the editor quits, output stops. The day the creative strategist leaves, the pipeline dries up. You've concentrated your entire marketing function into three individuals at the exact moment your brand can least afford a gap.

The version I'd actually run under six figures a month

So here's where I break from the standard advice, and it's the whole reason I'm writing this.

There's a framework the good operators use: you hire when the value a person can produce is clearly greater than the fully-loaded cost of having them. By that test, three early hires at A$23k a month is a hard bet to win when your revenue is still finding its feet. You're carrying senior-level fixed cost against junior-stage output.

The other lens they use is honest about the founder's time. You hire either to grow the business or to buy back your time. A rented team does both at once, without the fixed cost or the ramp.

What I'd actually do at this stage is rent the expertise and own the content. Concretely: a content engine plus a paid-media operator on a flat monthly, sitting beside one in-house person whose whole job is generating raw material and being the brand's voice.

The maths is the uncomfortable part. A capable rented team running your paid media and creative system tends to land somewhere near A$17k a month all-in. That's less than the fully-loaded cost of two of your three hires, and you get a team rather than an individual. No super, no recruiter fee, no three-month ramp, no single point of failure, and no quarter spent realising the Director of Growth was the wrong call.

I'm not pretending a rented team is free of trade-offs. You don't get someone sitting in your standup every morning, and you have to actually manage the relationship. But for a brand under six figures a month, the order of operations the draft assumes is backwards. The expensive hire is the last thing you need, not the first.

When one of the brands we work with was getting going, that was exactly the call: rented expertise and a content engine, not a A$120k director. The scaling came later, the team came later. The early move was to put the money where the work actually moved revenue and keep the fixed cost off the books.

Where I'd start if you're deciding this right now

Before you post a single job ad, sketch the org chart you think you need, then put the real fully-loaded monthly cost next to every box. Not the salary. The salary plus super plus tools plus ramp plus the odds of a mishire. Most founders have never seen those three numbers added up in one place, and the total tends to change the plan.

If you want a second opinion before you commit to that first salary, a Signal/Noise Audit will map which of those roles is actually your bottleneck and which one a rented team could cover for less, so you're hiring into a gap that's real rather than one the standard advice told you to expect. Sound like your situation, or is your bottleneck somewhere else entirely?