I built a free HR checklist for founders after realizing most HR content is written for enterprises, not us
Quick backstory: I kept running into the same problem while trying to get basic HR processes in place for a small team — role clarity, hiring, onboarding, performance conversations. Everything I found online was either written for HR professionals managing hundreds of employees, or so generic it wasn't actually actionable.
So I built a practical, self-diagnostic checklist specifically for the 5-30 employee stage — the point where "we're basically a family" stops working but you're nowhere near hiring an actual HR person. It covers 5 areas: role clarity, hiring, onboarding, performance & policies, and the employee lifecycle (promotions, offboarding, etc).
It's meant to be a fast gut-check — see what you've already got covered and what's quietly missing — not a lecture.
Made it free because I mostly want feedback from people actually dealing with this right now:
https://people-consultant-8uwwoj.subscribepage.io
Would genuinely love to hear:
Does this match the gaps you've actually run into?
Is there a 6th area I'm missing?
Anything that reads as obvious/unnecessary?
This is a great example of solving for a specific audience instead of everyone. Founder-focused resources are way more useful than generic enterprise advice.
Same thinking we’re applying with ScaleBlogger.
Going through something similar right now, actually — got flagged by Gumroad and looking at where to move. Been checking out Lemon Squeezy and Payhip as options since they both explicitly support payouts to my country (worth checking before you commit, several "alternatives" quietly don't support Stripe/PayPal where I am).
One thing worth setting expectations on if you're evaluating these too: neither one actually helps you get sales or find your first customer. They're checkout + delivery infrastructure, not marketplaces — no discovery feed, no organic browse traffic like Gumroad's Discover page. Both have affiliate program tools and coupons/upsells, but you still have to recruit the affiliates and bring your own traffic. So whatever channel got you your last sale on Gumroad, you'll need to lean on that again wherever you land.
Curious if anyone here who's already moved off Gumroad found a platform that actually does more on the discovery side, or if it's just accepted that you bring your own audience everywhere now.
The 5-30 range is exactly where I've watched founders get hurt, not from bad intentions but from process that only lived in one person's head. I scaled Henson Group through that stage multiple times across different countries, and the failure mode was never a missing policy, it was inconsistency, two employees getting different answers to the same question because there was nothing written down to point to. I'd add a section on documentation itself, whether decisions get recorded anywhere, since that's usually the leading indicator before the other five areas start breaking.
Inconsistency, not a missing policy" is a really precise way to put it — and it reframes the other five areas differently than I'd been thinking about them. Role clarity, comp, decision rights — none of those fail because nobody thought about them. They fail because two people get two different answers, and there's nothing to point to that settles it.
Your framing suggests documentation isn't really a sixth parallel area — it's more like the mechanism that makes the other five actually hold up under pressure. A role definition that only lives in the founder's head isn't meaningfully different from no role definition once the founder isn't in every conversation.
Given you've seen this play out across multiple countries — did the documentation habit tend to start deliberately (someone decided "we need this now"), or did it usually get forced into existence after an inconsistency already caused a real problem?
Answering your actual questions first. The sixth area is compensation. At 5 to 30 people it is the thing that reliably blows up, because the first handful of hires were negotiated ad hoc in different market conditions, and somewhere around employee 15 people start comparing notes. Bands do not need to be public, they just need to exist before somebody asks why.
Then a distribution point you did not ask for. The checklist is invisible right now. It sits on a subscribepage domain behind an email gate, so none of the authority lands on anything you own, and it can never rank for the queries your people are actually typing, things like hr checklist for startups or onboarding checklist small team. That is a lot of search demand you are opting out of.
The fix is cheap. Publish the checklist as a plain public page on your own domain, and put the email capture on the version people want to keep, the printable or interactive one. You keep the leads and gain a page that compounds instead of one that disappears down the feed.
It also fixes the thing currently working against you. You said you mostly want feedback, but an email wall filters out exactly the casual reader most likely to give you a quick honest reaction.
Compensation makes total sense as the sixth area, and I like how you've framed the trigger — it's not that ad hoc negotiation is wrong early on, it's that nobody revisits it once employee 15 starts comparing notes. That's the same shape as the decision-ownership point from a comment above: things that work fine at small scale because everyone has direct access, then quietly break as the team grows past founder-visibility. Might end up being related sections rather than two separate additions.
On distribution — you're right, and I don't have a good counterargument. Right now everything's gated behind an email wall on a subdomain I don't own, which means zero SEO equity building anywhere and a real filter against the casual reader who'd give the most honest, low-stakes feedback. That's a fair cost I hadn't fully priced in.
The honest reason it's set up this way right now: I'm bootstrapping this without an owned domain or site yet, so Gumroad and MailerLite were the fastest way to get something live. But your proposed split — public page for the "read once" version, email gate only on something worth keeping (printable/interactive) — is a much better long-term structure, and cheap enough that there's no real reason not to move toward it.
Appreciate you thinking this through in this much detail — genuinely useful, not just "nice tool" feedback.
A possible sixth area is decision ownership and escalation: who can make which decisions, where agreements are documented, and what happens when a manager and team member disagree. That gap often stays invisible while a team is small because everyone can ask the founder directly, then becomes painful as context gets distributed. A lightweight decision log plus a recurring feedback cadence might fit the checklist without turning it into enterprise process. Would that be useful alongside role clarity and performance conversations?
This is a really good addition, and honestly a gap in the checklist as it stands. You're right that it stays invisible specifically because of direct founder access — the moment that access gets diluted (a new layer of management, someone remote, a second office), decisions either stall waiting on someone or get made inconsistently by whoever's asked first.
The role clarity section touches the edge of this — knowing who reports to whom — but doesn't get into decision rights specifically, which is really a separate layer. Your framing of "who can decide, where it's documented, what happens on disagreement" is a cleaner way to scope it than I had.
I like the decision log idea specifically because it's low-effort to start (a shared doc, not a system) but creates the paper trail that prevents the same disagreement from happening three different ways with three different people. Going to think about how to fold this in as a sixth section.
Have you seen teams handle the escalation/disagreement piece well, or is that usually where it breaks down even when decision ownership itself is clear?
The 5–30 employee focus makes this more useful than a generic HR checklist. That transition point is specific enough to surface problems founders often don't realize they have until the team has already outgrown informal processes.
Exactly — and that's actually why I scoped it that way. Below 5, informal just works fine, and above 30 you're usually either hiring an HR person or already have systems in place. It's specifically that messy middle where founders are doing HR themselves without realizing it, and there's no natural trigger that says "now's the time to formalize this."
Curious what it looked like on your end, if you've been through that stage — was there a specific moment that made it obvious, or did it just quietly get harder over time?
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That transition point sounds interesting. I’d be curious what you’re hearing from founders who have actually gone through it.
Honestly, this thread itself is turning into a decent sample. Two comments above flagged things I hadn't fully scoped in: compensation blowing up around employee 15 once people start comparing notes, and decision ownership/escalation quietly breaking down once a team gets big enough that not everyone has direct founder access anymore. Both came from people who'd clearly been through it, not guessing.
The common thread across all of it, including your original comment, seems to be: things that work by default at small scale because of proximity to the founder, then break silently as that proximity goes away. Role clarity, comp, decision rights — all the same underlying shape.
I don't have a large formal sample yet — this project's early — but that pattern is showing up consistently enough in the replies here that I'm fairly confident it's real, not a one-off.
That’s an interesting pattern, especially with it showing up across several HR issues. Would you be open to sharing the best email to reach you on?
Happy to continue the conversation — people-consultant@outlook.com works, or feel free to just DM me here on IH if that's easier. What's on your mind?
Thanks! I’ve just sent it over.
Looking forward to hearing your thoughts whenever you have a chance.
Thank you