Eric Siu and Neil Patel argue that aspiring entrepreneurs should work for a marketer first to master traffic acquisition, conversion optimization, and customer acquisition cost. Andrew Wilkinson's Tiny Capital built multiple multi-million-dollar companies largely through superior marketing. Founders with deep marketing knowledge reduce CAC, speed growth, and avoid costly agency mistakes.
Today we are going to talk about why you should work for a marketer before you become an entrepreneur.
If you become an entrepreneur and you want to do well, you're going to have to grow. If you want to grow, you got to figure out how to get that traffic, how to get those sales, optimize for conversion. And you can learn all this on your own dime or even hire other consultants to help your agencies. It's going to be expensive, but on the flip side, If you go work with some marketer before you become an entrepreneur, you can learn a lot of the skills you need to make your own business grow faster.
I think that's one of the biggest weapons. So you have our mutual friend, Andrew Wilkinson, who runs Tiny Capital. He used to think that marketing was— he comes from a design background and he's okay, marketing. A lot of people in product design in the past were like, marketing is the devil. We don't need marketing. It's about building the product first. And then you realize a lot of these products, which are great, end up failing because they don't have good marketing. They don't have a good marketing and sales engine. I think the two kind of go hand in hand here. But so you have to understand what's going on. And before you become an entrepreneur, if you understand the ins and outs around digital marketing or just marketing in general, you're going to be able to call BS. Let's say when you start hiring other people, let's say when you start hiring other consultants or agencies, oftentimes if you don't know what's going on, they're going to run circles around you. And the other anecdote I want to share is one of our mutual friends, the same founding company, Started multiple companies. One's worth over $1 billion now. One sold. They're doing really well. And then another one was doing like $50 to $60 million a year. And so I asked them, I said, hey, what's the trend here? And they said, you know what? I said, I noticed it's been the same founding team, but the guy was like, one of the guys was like, that's not exactly it. The one thing is we're really good marketers. We have the ultimate marketing team. And so if you can, if you look at it from that perspective where they went from 3 different industries that are not related, they just had really good marketing. You understand that marketing is one of the biggest levers that you can pull. And all the other stuff. I'm not saying design's not important, product's not important. It's all important. Customer success, important. All of that's important. But if you understand marketing, you're going to have an unfair advantage over other people when you become an entrepreneur, because you can do anything that you want virtually, Neil.
And it'll keep your cost of customer acquisition down. In business, if you look at a lot of the publicly traded companies out there, one of their biggest expenses is the cost to acquire customers, right? Whether it's marketing or sales. So if you can end up spending or learning a lot of the marketing techniques yourself, you can end up being more efficient and grow faster.
All right. That is it for today. Go to marketingschool.io/live, that's L-I-V-E, to learn about our marketing, our virtual event, and our live event.
