From 4 to 27: what actually broke first 

We launched three markets: US, India, and Brazil. India was handled entirely by an agency; I only stepped in later for editing, so it barely featured in my own reporting until much further down the line. Brazil ran on freelancers alone and slipped a little; we simply didn't have enough hands for it. US was the one my actual team owned: two writers, two editors just hired, and three freelancers I brought in to help hit a deadline that had already been set before I had a team to meet it with. Six weeks later, it was done, 112 pages, on time.

This is the story of that team, the one that started at four on the US launch and grew, in fits and bursts, all the way to 27.

The plan behind the growth

By the end of that first year, the roadmap was clear: two new markets every quarter, with roughly 80 pages per market. I sat down with that number and started doing the boring (and to me, painful) math that nobody gets to see in a case study: if roughly 40% of the upcoming markets would be English-speaking, how many people would I actually need in-house to carry the bulk of that work, rather than lean on freelancers indefinitely?

From there, I mapped a team structure to support the growth, not just headcount, but layers: junior writers, senior writers, and team leads. I wrote job descriptions and KPIs for each role before a single person was hired into them, because I wanted the structure to exist before the pressure did, not the other way around. Management wanted hiring to be concentrated in our India office, so I handed over the finished structure and job specs to them, and they started advertising and screening.

On paper, the plan was solid. In practice though, plans meet reality faster than you can say 'snap'.

What broke first: nobody knew how we worked

The very first crack showed up almost immediately, and it had nothing to do with skill. It was about information. New hires had no onboarding materials, no brand-specific content guidelines, and nothing written down about how our team actually operated day-to-day. All of that had lived in my head and in scattered Teams messages, which really works fine for a team of four and falls apart the moment you are hiring in bursts.

So I built it: a proper onboarding set covering the style guide, brand content guidelines, team information, and how-tos for basic day-to-day operations. Nothing fancy. Just the first version of "here's how we actually do this," written down so it didn't have to come out of my mouth every single time.

What broke second: nobody knew how to do it well

Once people had the onboarding basics, a second, quieter problem surfaced: a lot of the writers didn't understand good linking practices, contextual linking, or general SEO fundamentals. The very first hires also struggled with industry-specific quirks too. They knew how to write. They didn't yet know how to write for search, for online gamblers, or how to do both at once.

That gap is what pushed me to build actual training material, not a one-off briefing, but something repeatable that a lead could run new writers through without needing me in the room. It's a small distinction, but it's the difference between fixing a problem once and fixing it every time it recurs.

The part I didn't expect: letting go was the hardest hire

The team structure I'd designed; junior writer, senior writer, team lead, held up. What didn't hold up as neatly was me. I stayed involved in a lot of things that should have been fully owned by seniors or leads, mostly because it was faster to just do it myself than to keep coaching someone through it, or constantly referring questions to someone else, which would in turn result in me just ending up as the middleman.

One of the last appointments I made was a deputy editor, specifically to take on the nitty-gritty I hadn't been able to hand off. In hindsight, that role probably should have existed sooner. Scaling a team isn't just about adding people under you; it's about knowing when you need someone beside you, someone who can absorb the operational weight you're still quietly carrying alone.

By the time the full India team was properly set up, around July 2025, freelancers had phased out almost entirely, kept on only for non-English markets. The in-house team had genuinely taken over.

The hardest lesson: priority isn't as obvious to everyone

If you'd ask me at the time what the single hardest thing to teach was, it wasn't writing quality or SEO. It was priority.

I had to repeat, more times than I'd like to admit, that commercial requests needed to be publish-ready by a specific date, full stop, ahead of other work. It seems so obvious when I write it here. It was not obvious to leads who were juggling their own workloads and hadn't yet built the instinct for which fires actually needed to be put out first. That instinct doesn't come from a KPI document. It comes from repetition, and from watching someone make the call wrong a few times before it clicks.

How the hiring happened

None of this was one smooth ramp up from 4 to 27. Hiring came in bursts, roughly two to three people at a time, over about six months. The last burst was the biggest (and most taxing), a mini team of five, and it came with something that mattered more to me than the headcount: promoting one of the writers in India into a team lead role. Growing a team from the outside is one thing. Growing leaders from inside is another, and it's the version of growth I am proudest of.

How I knew it worked

The team was fully self-sufficient about six months after the last writers were onboarded, and two months after the deputy editor came on. I noticed it in small ways before I could say it out loud: questions that used to land in my DMs were being answered by a lead before I even saw them. That's around when my time there wrapped up, which is its own story for another post.

What I took from the whole process wasn't really about org charts or headcount math, even though there was plenty of both. It was that transparency scales better than control does. Every fix along the way, onboarding docs, training materials, the deputy editor role, existed because something wasn't clear enough, not because someone wasn't capable enough. Write it down, teach it properly, and let it go. Really let it go, not the version where you're still the one answering for it at 9 pm.