Emily Kramer: Hiring the First Marketer for Your Startup

Hello, hello everyone. Happy Monday to you all. Thanks for joining us again. And today we have another super, super exciting Monday morning session. We do these every single week. And the idea that we have at Founder Institute is helping startup founders and people who are interested in the startup ecosystem get connected to experts and leaders within the ecosystem. I've completely forgot to introduce myself. My name is Daniel. I'm a part of the marketing team at FYI. So why don't you guys tell me where you're all coming in from? I can see we have people from Utah, we have people from Pakistan, Canada as well. Let me know in the chat. Turkey, awesome. Michigan, Switzerland, New York, Lisbon, Budapest. Awesome, awesome. Yeah, so today we have a super, super exciting speaker with us. We're also really excited to have her on as well. We're big fans of her work. We have Emily Kramer with us. Emily Kramer is the co-founder of MarketOne. It's a fund and community for marketing leaders and startup founders. She's also been, you know, she's played a wider role in creating the marketing teams of some of the biggest startups including Asana and Carta. So like without further ado, let me just bring her on stage. And while I bring her on stage, I'm going to share a poll over here, right? So today's session is all about hiring your first marketer. So on this stage, what you guys should be able to do is see a poll. So the question is, What is the primary factor you consider when you hire your, when hiring your first marketer? Is it relevant experience in the industry? Is it relevant skills, cultural fit, or ability to work independently? So the idea here, Emily, is you'll kind of get an idea of where our audience stands in terms of hiring their first marketer, right?

Awesome.

Yeah. So we have, can you see the poll?

So I'm excited to see the results.

Yeah. Okay, wow. So a lot of people, they, I think understandably, a lot of people, they prefer people with strong marketing skills, especially as their first, you know, logically I feel like that makes sense, but maybe the answer, it might be different.

No, that makes a lot of sense. We'll talk about it. I think the relevant experience in the industry is something that people often over-index on and it is important, but I'll talk a little bit more about why I think actually Experience with your specific go-to-market motion is almost more important than experience with your audience because marketers should be experts in getting to know your audience and you as founders should be experts in your audience and industry as well. So you can help them get up to speed. So something's usually gotta give when you're hiring a great marketer. And so often it's the direct industry experience. But anyway, I'm happy to dive in and tell you all more.

Yeah. So what we'll do is we'll just begin. Guys, if you can look towards your right, you should have a Q&A button. So if you have a question, click the button and type in your question over there. And if you see a question that resonates with you, upvote it so that later when we do go into the Q&A session, I'll see it and I'll kind of direct it towards Emily. And if you look towards the bottom, you should have this emoji option. If you like what Emily's saying, if you know, if you're enjoying the session, let us know. Right. So, okay. Right. I'm gonna take myself off the stage and kind of over to you.

Awesome. Thanks everyone for joining on Monday. I know it's different times of the day for everyone, but Monday morning for some of you, including myself. So thanks for being here and to start off your week. I'm excited to talk to you about this topic. It's a topic I know a ton about because I have built a number of marketing teams from scratch. So not only have I led marketing teams at Asana and Carta, but I've also been the first marketer 4 times, or first or second marketer 4 times. So I was the first marketer at Asana and then built that team up for 4 years and led the team. And then I was also first marketer at a seed-funded startup called Astro, which was later acquired by Slack. And at Carta, they had had a false start on marketing previously, and I joined when it was Series C, but they didn't have a marketing team at the time. So I've built a number of different teams and I've been in this role a lot of times at various different stages at companies with business models across B2B with some, some consumer elements as well. So I can, I can speak to that a little bit too. I also now have a fund. So like Daniel said, I invest in companies and then help them build out marketing. I invest across all things B2B. And I have a partner in this as well. And then we dive in and help you with things like hiring your first marketer. I also write a, I think, pretty popular newsletter, which is all about building B2B marketing specifically for founders and marketers. You can check that out as well. And I cover some of the things that I'm gonna talk about today in the newsletter as well. All right, so today what we're gonna talk about is hiring your first marketer, But in order to know how to hire your first marketer, you need to get a little bit of background just on marketing probably in general. And then from there, sorry, touched my mouse wrong. From there, we'll talk about when is the right time and how you actually go about doing it and what your first marketer will actually do day to day. So I'm gonna dive in. And you may have noticed that the first slide had a picture of pies. That's not 'cause I love baking, I don't. I don't actually love baking at all. It is because we're going to talk about something called a pie-shaped marketer. So we'll dive in there. So the first thing I tell founders is there's so much jargon around marketing and marketing roles, and every role means something different at different companies. Ask a marketer or a product marketer the definition of product marketing, and if you ask 10 of them, you're going to get 10 different answers. So it widely varies across across companies and, you know, even across marketers. So what do you— if you're trying to get a handle on all of this, how do you do that? Well, actually, marketing just has two parts. Marketing, you need to create great fuel, which is anything that adds value to your audience. Think the creative, the messaging, etc. And you need an engine, which is everything. And I'll have slides on this in a minute. Everything you use to distribute out that fuel. So you need these two parts. So really, when you're building up a marketing team, you need to think about fuel and engine. And then you need to, then you need to remind yourself that marketing hiring is actually not that much like sales hiring at all. In fact, it is more like hiring for product than anything else. So let me dive into these topics, fuel and engine, being more like product than sales, and go from there. So In sales, you're hiring a head of sales, typically not in this order. You're hiring some AEs, you're hiring some sales leaders. Ultimately, at scale, you have a head of sales, sales leads, AEs, and SDRs or BDRs. Pretty simple. Not simple, but there's archetypes for these roles and there's only a few profiles. In marketing, there are like 20 unique roles. There's a full org chart in my newsletter as well that breaks down each of these roles, but you have 3 main areas of marketing typically: growth, product marketing, brand and content, and tons of roles underneath this. So it's much harder to hire for or to figure out who you need to hire. Finding someone that's great at both things is obviously hard, but figuring out who you need to hire in the right order is more difficult. The other way that it's different from sales is that marketing really should be focused on the full funnel to be successful. They're mostly focused on the top of funnel, and that just means driving awareness, driving leads, driving qualified leads over to sales, which is in the blue parts of this funnel. But really, they should also be helping with all of the one-to-many communications throughout the entire funnel because they have access to the email tools, to the designers, etc., to do this. So they're not really just focused on top of the funnel, even though it's often about 70% of their focus. They're full funnel, whereas sales is laser focused on driving, driving business from opportunity to close. And again, this is mostly a— this is more of a B2B model here. But if you are consumer, the same things kind of hold your funnel, just might look a little different. In general, the way you can think about the divide of sales and marketing is sales is doing more one-to-one or one-to-a-few communication, whereas marketing is doing all the one-to-many communications. It's a good breakdown as well, just thinking about what does marketing do and how is this different. The other big thing, and I'm comparing it to sales because more founders seem to understand the sales side of things than the marketing side of things, at least how to construct a team and hire that first person. So sales is laser-focused typically on a quarter, driving revenue that quarter. Marketing needs to think about the quarter and driving leads, but also needs to be laying the foundation or feeding the top of the funnel for the future so sales can come in and close in the future. So marketing has both this short and long-term focus. Another big way that marketing is more like product is on the product team, you're of course going to have product metrics that the product team is trying to hit, but you are also going to have projects or launches or features that they're doing. They're going to be responsible for foundational work, um, improving the infrastructure, all of that on the product team. On the marketing team, it's actually similar. Marketing is going to have projects that have a longer-term horizon that might not have an immediate impact on funnel metrics, but are going to have a long-term impact. So it's important that you're not just measuring your marketing team on immediate quarterly goals. That's important. But sales, you're laser-focused on that. Marketing also needs to lay the foundation for the future and you need to make sure you're incentivizing that behavior because that tension between what sales is focused on and marketing focus on Make sure you're thinking about holistic and long-term growth. Okay, so this should feel a little, again, more like product because of the fact that they're focused more on long-term and short-term and metrics and projects. Um, and also marketing has the support typically of designers and operations people or engineer-type people for them. Um, so it's a little bit more like that. Founders tend to like that, uh, tends to help them frame better what they're trying to do on the marketing side with building a team. All right, so, uh, let's talk a little bit about the marketing skill sets and really how to hire this first marketer. So in marketing, I explained there's tons of different roles and there's 3 big buckets. Not everyone is going to put the, put marketing into these 3 buckets. They might do it a little differently. This is how I've simplified kind of how all teams are organized, especially on the B2B side, but also on the consumer side as well. So typically your first marketer, you're going to expect them to be in the orange. You're gonna expect them to be able to do some product marketing. PMM means product marketing. That's just because product managers took the abbreviation PM, so Product marketing is PMM. Um, the first marketer is typically expected to operate in the middle. They're expected to understand product marketing, which is understanding the audience, doing launches, understanding how to communicate with the audience, understanding the product and the market. Um, the growth, growth team on marketing is really responsible for distribution. Content brand is responsible for making all of the assets, all of the fuel. Growth is the engine. And so you're going to probably expect your marketer to be in the middle. Finding someone that's purely in the middle is really, really hard. I have hired and interviewed hundreds, maybe thousands of marketers in my career, and I've come across only a few that are pure, truly in the center of that orange. And if you're at a startup trying to hire someone that hasn't been working for 15 years, probably hiring someone with 4 to 7 years of experience, really hard to find someone in that orange. So recognize you're gonna have to make some trade-offs here and you're going to have to pick kind of which functions they're better at. And then again, a simpler way to think about this is fuel and engine, and I'll talk about that in a second. So what is this fuel and engine thing I keep mentioning? I've kind of been teasing it since the beginning of this presentation. The idea here is that you need to have fuel, the story, the content, the creative, and you need to have an engine. Those are the channels you're using, the optimizations you're making, the analytics you're using, the marketing ops, all of them, tooling, all of this stuff. So you need to have fuel and an engine at the simplest level, and you need to distribute your fuel through your engine learn what works, and modify the fuel that you're creating. This is what marketing is. Um, if it could be broken down into one diagram, this is what it is. And obviously you're trying to reach your specific audience. So behind all of this is make sure it's relevant to your audience, to your market, to your product. So this is what you need to do. So how do you get someone early on that can help you cover these things is what we'll be talking about here. So fuel typically breaks into these areas And the key roles there are really content marketing and product marketing. And the key roles on the engine side are growth marketing, sometimes known as demand gen, or some people think of demand gen as part of growth marketing. Again, there's so many different ways to think about this, but really this is just the engine and marketing ops. And then to really lay the foundation for all of marketing, you need a product marketer or a marketing leader that's really well-rounded plus the founders. So you as a founder can start laying this foundation before you even have marketers. Okay, so hopefully the fuel and engine thing is crystal clear. So the thing about fuel and engine is you can't just make fuel and make an engine and hope that they go together. I call what happens when you do that, when you're making just random fuel, random content, and you're not building a distribution engine that completely matches to that, that you have a Tesla at a gas station. You have a fuel station and you have something with an engine, but they don't go together. And so you want to avoid that. You also want to avoid having all engine and no fuel and all fuel and no engine. And what I often see with founders is they over-index on one of these things. A lot of founders will say to me, I just need a growth marketer. I need to get in front of more people. Great. But what are you getting in front of more people? Just asking for a meeting doesn't usually work. You need to add value. So where is this fuel coming from? Some founders also have made a lot of fuel themselves. Maybe they've written a lot of content. Maybe they've created some templates, whatever that might be. They've made a lot of fuel. They're giving talks, but they're not distributing it. So that's another problem that I see early on. So really, when you're thinking about, I'm hiring my first marketer, think, where is my biggest need? Is it on the fuel side or the engine side? Once you start thinking about this, you can start thinking about Who exactly does that mean in terms of marketing roles? All right, so now I want to explain a concept which is called pie-shaped marketers. So a pie-shaped marketer is someone that spikes in two areas of marketing and has breadth. So typically we talk about T-shaped people. I'm talking about people with two spikes, two vertical lines, which is pi, like the 3.14 symbol. So you're trying to find a pie-shaped marketer who can index on either over-index or spike is fuel and engine. So if you want someone that really spikes on fuel, you're probably going to want someone who has product marketing, content marketing experience. If you want someone who really spikes on engine, they're going to have more of a growth background. And how that breaks down into these individual roles or areas of marketing is like this. So product marketing spans a little bit of fuel and engine, but tends to be more on the fuel side. Content and brand is squarely fuel and growth is squarely engine. So think about hiring someone who has deep expertise as say a product marketer, some expertise as a content marketer would be a product marketing content pie-shaped marketer. If you want someone that kind of can span it all, you're looking more at trying to find a product marketing growth marketing hybrid. So they spike in one of those areas, but they have had exposure to other areas of product marketing. Similarly with growth and product— growth and content, spanning both things. The more you're spanning fuel and engine, the more you're trying to find people who are both left and right-brained, and the harder it becomes. But you're still trying to do that early on. So typically the archetype I tell— finally getting here— typically the archetype I tell people to hire early on is a product marketer, growth marketing, pie-shaped marketer. Depending on what you need, fuel or engine, they might spike more in growth or spike more in product marketing. You can see that's kind of middle of the road and hard to find, but that's really what you're trying to find. So this is kind of just a chart on how you figure this out. If you need someone that spikes on fuel and you have a really great engine already, maybe you have an outbound engine through SDRs and you just need great content, maybe you'll go for the product marketing content marketer. But most typically people need that growth and product marketing pie-shaped marketer. So back to basics, 'cause I've said a lot of words. Figure out if you have a fuel or engine problem, and then map that to the roles that you need, and make sure you're getting someone that's not just T-shaped as your first marketer, but pie-shaped with a couple of spikes. So now where are we? You've kind of figured out these archetypes, you've identified if you have more of a fuel and engine problem, You've identified what the person, what roles they might have been in before, try to figure out who you need to hire. You're hiring someone with breadth and depth in like 1.5, 2 areas. And then there's some other things to think about. I find that business model or go-to-market motion experience is more important, as I mentioned, than subject matter expertise. I'll explain that a little bit more in the middle, but just having consumer experience or B2B experience is not enough. It's also important to look within those high-level, you know, business-to-business, business-to-consumer, you know, descriptions and say, well, what exactly was the go-to-market motion? So it's going to be a marketer is going to have a very different skill set, which I'll get into if they've come from a product-led growth primarily company or if they've come from a top-down sales, high price point, long sales cycle, business model. It's almost a completely different job depending on your role. So that matters a lot. Do not think that if you've worked at a B2B company, it's completely transferable. Within consumer, it's similar. There's lots of different types of consumer companies. There's consumer subscription models, there's sort of D2C and e-commerce. And so it holds there as well. This business model experience is really important. It tends to be easier to get up to speed on the subject matter because it's the same process always on getting up to speed on the subject matter than it is to get up to speed on how marketing is different and how the different marketing roles are different if you've never seen it before. So it's really helpful for your first, and if not your first, your second or third marketer to understand the business model or go-to-market motion really well. Because we're talking about people that have a lot of breadth and some, and depth in a couple of areas, this team, this, this usually is someone who has spent some time at an earlier growth stage startup before. One of the biggest mistakes I see is that founders hire a marketer only with experience at big companies, you know, the Googles, the Amazons, the Facebooks, the Salesforces of the world. And what happens then is the teams get so siloed there, the product marketing team, the content team, the partnerships team, the brand team, the growth team, Demand gen, which is a part of growth team, gets so siloed that they don't have an understanding of how strategy works across all of marketing unless they're super senior. And early on, you don't need someone who's super senior. You need someone who understands strategy for your company but also can get in the weeds. And so typically that means that at some point, maybe not their most recent job, but at some point they've been at an early or growth stage startup Because they need to understand how all of marketing fits together. So what are you typically looking for? Great first marketers are people that maybe reported to a head of marketing one level down at a later stage company. So not a public company, but, you know, growth or later stage company. They've been, say, the head of growth or the head of product marketing, or they've been Maybe 2 levels down if it's slightly larger, later stage company. So those are people that were like head of growth marketing or growth marketing lead or head of demand gen, but they have had exposure to other areas of marketing. Typically this person has 4 to 7 years of experience. That's just to find these people that kind of spike in 1 or 2 areas that have enough working knowledge of how to put the fuel and engine together. That's typically what you're looking at. There are exceptions. I've seen great heads of marketing for, or sorry, great first marketers at startups. Working alongside founders with only 3 years of experience. I've seen people that have 12 to 15 and come in and are still really willing to get in the weeds but have a ton of experience. Obviously, those people come with a heftier price tag. The other big thing to look for is to make sure that your understanding of marketing isn't at complete odds with theirs. Usually, a founder expects marketing to be a couple of things, and usually a founder indexes on I think marketing is mostly engine. I think marketing is mostly fuel. I want them to do this. I want them to do that. And whatever I want them to be doing a ton on the SEO side, I want them to be doing a ton of paid. I want them to be working with SDRs really closely. Whatever that is, make sure that's not completely at odds with how the marketer views marketing. So it's helpful to just say, here's my expectations of what you'll get done in the first 6 months. And be really clear about that because my view of marketing doesn't match people's views of marketing who have come from really sales-driven, top-down organizations. It just doesn't. I won't thrive in an organization like that. So it's really helpful to understand where your differences are, and some differences are good to balance each other out. But if you have a completely different understanding of what marketing will and should do as a founder than the marketer, you're going to have problems and it's going to lead to first hire marketing mistakes, which I see all the time. I mentioned a little bit the go-to-market, go-to-market motion impacts marketing roles a lot. And I'm not going to go into all of these, and this is more of a B2B view. Again, that's more of my expertise, but the roles are really different, especially the role of product marketing. So product marketing in a sales-led, top-down sales, non-self-serve organization spends a lot of time on sales and even customer success enablement. Even early on. They're really a service to sales and customer success. Whereas in a self-serve product-led growth business, they're really a lot more focused on website improvements, website copy and messaging, working with the product team. And then of course, across all of this, they're always responsible for positioning and messaging, or they should be. So your product marketers, no matter what, need to be able to write. This is often overlooked. Make sure they can write, but it varies a lot. Service organization sales working more closely with product when self-serve. So the teams they even interact with most are different. Um, similarly, acquisition or growth would be the superset there. Acquisition, if you're in a self-serve business, it's inbound focus. That's a very different set of tactics than in a sales-led organization that's outbound focused. So recognize this as well, that these roles are different. Okay, well, sorry. Um, so let's put this all together and say like, what's a good profile for someone who's a first marketer? This is an excellent profile. They also happen to be an LP in my fund, but that's not why it's an excellent profile. It's just someone I could think of that had a really great profile. The reason that this person is great is that when they were hired at Primer as head of marketing, so when they were hired at Primer as head of marketing, which was a Series A company. Their background was great. Here's why. They have worked at startups. They were at Gusto when it was growth stage. At Gusto, they were doing growth marketing, which is engine, for 3+ years. At Huffington Post and Medium, they were doing fuel things, both being an editorial director and doing creative strategy. So this person balances fuel and engine. In more recent years, they spiked deeply on growth marketing, but they also spike on content. So they have two vertical lines in their T. They have a ton of breadth. They've worked at startups before, but they've also seen what great looks like. Like, they've been at startups that are successful, and they have a range of experience. This person's great. They have probably more than 7, closer to 10 years of experience. So a little, definitely a more senior first marketer. This is first marketer, head of marketing, profile, but this looks good. I also love when people have taken some time to do consulting. It really shows that they have that entrepreneurial spirit and can really get in there and do all the things. Something to note, maybe you've already hired your first marketer, maybe you're having regrets about the first marketer you hired, but the second marketer and third marketer, you can make up for it. But I want you to know that every marketer you hire, unlike sales, changes who you need next. And that's because every marketer covers a different set of circles, if you remember my org chart. Every marketer skill set's a little bit different. So you're really filling in a puzzle and your marketing hiring plan should change after every marketer you hire. Maybe not drastically. Maybe you knew you needed someone on the fuel side, product marketing and content, but exactly that profile has changed. So you need to constantly be sort of assessing the gaps, assessing if you have a bigger problem right now on fuel or engine and filling in the gaps. All right. I'm going to take about 10 more minutes before questions, 5 to 10 more minutes to go through really when and how to do, or really how and when to do this and what the marketer will do. This is the classic question. When do I hire this person? The answer is it depends, which is like the worst answer you can possibly get for anything when you're a founder. Just tell me what to do, you know, help me know what to do, guide me. But it does depend. But basically, the founders and the early team need to do some marketing on their own at first. You've heard of founder-led sales. Well, founder-led marketing is also a thing. You can get a couple of contractors to augment you, especially in certain areas like getting things set up or getting your first website out the door, like a very V1 of your website using like a Webflow template. But eventually you're going to have too many contractors to manage, and having a daisy chain of contractors is never successful. You need someone setting the overall strategy. You're going to have a lot more ideas, you're going to feel like a bottleneck where if you had a marketer, I could just do this, I could just grow this, this much, I could do this. And so you kind of feel like there's a lot more you could be doing. You've hired a contractor or two, you need strategy across the board. You have your first few customers. I'm going backwards up this slide. I'm not really sure why. It's just, you know, where my brain wanted to go first. You've acquired your first few customers or you've sold your first, you know, you've served in a self-serve way, you've, you know, hit an early revenue milestone. You don't necessarily have product market fit, but you feel like you're on the path. Like you feel like with more experimentation and more effort on the marketing side, you could figure out if you have it and you have a product in market. It doesn't need to be your final product. It could be an alpha, it could be you have design partners, but you need to have, you need to be beyond the build stage. Otherwise the market is gonna get bored. Board. There's things that they can do— interviewing customers, building up the website, starting to build up fuel, or meaning like community and content— but they're not going to have— they want something to be in market. Their goal is to drive— sorry, I keep hitting the mouse and my slides are flying around. You want them to feel motivated and have metrics to look at, and the best marketers are really motivated by that. So you don't want it to be too long before, um, you're going to launch something when you hire them, and preferably you already have. What to do before you have this first marketer, um, or what should you have done. So you shouldn't hire that first marketer if you haven't done any founder-led go-to-market, even if you don't really know what you're doing. You need to start planting some seeds so you don't get that marketer in there too early and not have them be able to have enough to do to make them successful and to make them feel motivated. These are really— if you get the right person, they're really scrappy and motivated, and you need to make sure they have things to dive into. You need to define your initial audience as a founder, and then marketing can refine that later. But probably from the time you have a pitch deck, you're defining that initially, and then marketing can expand on that. I mentioned building a V1 of your website. Just use a Webflow template. Don't custom code it. Don't use a headless CMS. Marketers know how to use Webflow these days. That's the default way to go. Use a Webflow template, change the colors, add your logo, change the fonts, get it up and running, and that will give a foundation from which the marketing team can build on or go, you know, do a more expansive redesign, site architecture, etc. Don't hire your first marketer if you only want them to build an engine. You need to recognize that you need fuel too. And just having a marketer constantly be trying to do paid ads or support and outbound but not have the time or the resource to make fuel is not going to work. Lastly, a mistake I see is I see companies come to me and say, I have 5 SDRs and I have no marketers. This is a mistake. A lot of the work that SDRs are doing when you have 5 and no marketers can be automated around some of the emails that you're sending, and SDRs or BDRs can be picking up the fallout from automated work or from inbound that doesn't make it through the funnel. And so a lot of the times what they're doing is they're sending a bunch of outbound emails in little silos through their outreach Instance, that's the tool that they use typically. And a lot of that can actually be— some of that first touch can really be automated, especially for not your highest value leads. So the point here is just it's easier, it's, it's simpler to figure out what you need on sales. But remember that marketing does one-to-many, and marketing can scale more non-linearly than sales and SDRs, who usually scale more linearly with revenue. So you can actually get a lot more bang for your buck if you hire the right marketer than hiring like just a whole bunch of SDRs. You might need them too, but they're going to work in tandem and make each other more efficient and effective. All right. Almost done here. I've thrown a lot of information about at you, but maybe you're not even convinced you need a marketer. So let's just say, what are they going to do? They're going to cover a lot. They're going to be building your foundation, setting your positioning, understanding your audience, figuring out your brand story. Mapping your marketing funnel, doing competitive analysis, laying the foundation. They're also going to be trying to create value-add fuel and they're going to be trying to build an engine. That's a lot to do. What they need to be able to do is they need to be able to deeply understand your audience, what any unfair or distribution advantages that you have that they can lean into, and your go-to-market motion to make a marketing strategy. These 3 areas are what I call the 3 drivers of marketing strategy. They need to set a strategy. You can't do everything, so they need to place their bets. What's our fuel strategy? What's our engine strategy? Do they go together? They need to figure out your company story and your product story and make sure that you're driving that forward and putting the right messages out there so you become memorable and the most desirable and differentiated product for your audience. They need to be, again, not forgetting about distribution when they create things. Don't just spit out a whole bunch of blog posts. Make sure you're thinking about distribution and getting mileage out of that fuel or out of those posts. And lastly, they need to be focused on impact over activity. You as a founder might have 25,000, like literally, requests for a marketer, but they don't need to do them all. They need to place the right bets. Being successful in marketing is actually quite similar to anything that's, you know, follows the Pareto principle or VC portfolio strategy. So I say, you know, one of the reasons I can really, you know, do VC now as a marketer is because I've been having to do this forever. I've been having to place tons of bets that I think can be winners, but only having a couple of things that actually win and return the portfolio or drive all your growth. Because what's gonna happen is you're gonna play strategic bets and then 1 or 2 things are really gonna make you grow fast. You're gonna do a lot of work and then a few things in tandem are really going to be what works. So you are definitely going to find that, you know, 20% of the things that you do drive 80% of the results, which doesn't mean you need to place your bets and not do everything. So don't expect marketers to cover all of the things in the yellow and blue on day 1. Expect them to place strategic bets based on your audience, your market, your product, your unfair advantages, and your go-to-market motion, which are these things. So make sure they use these and plan to use these things to develop your strategy. And they aren't just going to plug and play a playbook from another company. It's not going to work. They need to have frameworks of things that they're going to do, but not set playbooks of I'm going to use these 3 channels and I'm going to create these 3 types of content. That's not going to work. They need to deeply understand your business, your market, your audience, and how you're trying to sell. And those are these 3 buckets. When you interview, you want to ask questions about this as well. You want to make sure that they're not going to just plug and play from before. I'm not going to go too much into marketing advantages. We have this sort of set of things that we tell marketers and founders to look for in their businesses and to lean in when they have them. And these are like unfair advantages or distribution advantages. But if you have one of these things, whether that be you have a wedge in or you have network effects or your compliance business and there are regulations, or you have an audience that just, there's no community and content for them at all and they really wanna talk to each other, lean in and double down on these things and focus here and place bets here. So if you have one of these things, you can really double down on them. And I have a whole newsletter about this if you're interested, just called Marketing Advantages. I can't emphasize enough that when you hire a marketer, they need to be focused on impact over activity. They don't need to write 150 blog posts. They need to write, you know, a few that are going to have massive impact. They need to place strategic high-impact bets. So in the next 3 minutes here, just a couple of things. Here's a little bit of a scorecard that we kind of use when helping companies hire. Again, they can balance strategy and execution. They have that experience overall. They understand your business model. They spike in 2 of 3 of these areas, which is product, marketing, growth, and content. And they have proficiency somewhat in all of them. They're pie-shaped. They probably have experience managing some people because you want them to be able to continue to grow in that role. Not required, but helpful if they do. No matter who the marketer is, it is so helpful if they can write. Even with ChatGPT, it is still helpful that they can edit and write and write on brand. So it's getting— the bar there is getting a little lower on the ability to write because you can, you know, use writing tools, but you still need a really good editor. So maybe I should change that to ability to edit. Every marketer that you have should have some ops and analytics abilities. They don't need to be the best ever, but they need to know what metrics to be measuring and how to measure And then lastly, of course, they need to align with your marketing approach, align with your founder vision, align with the company, all of those things. So scorecard, um, I put some interview questions in here. I'm just going to put them on the screen for a second but not read them so you can see them in the recording. I'm assuming there will be a recording. Um, okay, we don't have time to go through all of these. Um, one quick thing on assignments: if you're going to give a marketer an assignment don't give them a 30, 60, 90-day plan. It's nearly impossible because they're not gonna be able to grok these 3 things right away, and it's going to take them a lot of time, and you're not gonna get as much single signal for them. On the growth marketing side, the biggest surprises are typically, wow, I thought I was getting something that was super analytical, but they can't analyze basic data and they can't set up tools. So you really wanna dive deep into, can they do basic analytics? Can they look at web data or funnel data and then figure out what campaigns or optimizations to make off of that? So I like to give anonymized data, have them look at it and say, what, what would you do? What channels would you use? What optimizations would you make based on this data? And then talk about it. Not a full presentation, just analyze spreadsheet and talk about it. Product marketing. I like to make sure that they can, if you're on the lean more self-serve PLG, I wanna make sure they can own that website and do it super well. And they can write copy for it, and they can, you know, optimize the conversion flow, and they can make sure that the messaging is on point and actually write the copy. So that's kind of what you're making for— assessing for there. In a top-down sales business, you want to actually look at sales enablement materials they've made before. Lastly, on the content side, you want to know that they can not only write content or create good content and edit good content, but also distribute it. So if you're asking them to write something, also make sure they write a distribution plan up with that or talk through a distribution plan. With that. That's all I got. I ended at the exact moment I wanted to. Do we want to take some questions, Daniel, before we put it into— put everyone into groups?

Yeah. Awesome. Thank you so much. I mean, that was really great. I think you can probably tell you're getting like a ton of love down there through our emojis. Yeah, like I feel like a lot of what you said kind of resonates with us and generally what you see in marketing, especially the part about placing many small bets, right? Yeah, like, yeah, so we have a ton of questions here. Some of them you have kind of answered already throughout your talk, so I'll probably not go there, but okay, so what I'll do is I'll just bring up the super interesting ones on stage. So here's one that's kind of very getting a lot of upvotes. This is from Vijay. What percentage of equity in a pre-seed company should the first marketer receive as an average?

Yeah, so here's where I tell you that at pre-seed you probably shouldn't hire a marketer, but it depends on how big the pre-seed is. You should probably wait till seed. I should have said that between seed and A is really typically where I see people hiring marketers again because you, I mean, rounds are all different these days and how much people are raised are different and all of that. So I understand that it's, it's just a designation. But for the first marketer, whether it's at pre-seed or seed, depending on their seniority, because sometimes you're hiring a first marketer, you don't expect to really be able to scale and manage people. And sometimes you're finding that leader early on. And I think you should be open to both options. You should be open to the first marketer. This is kind of how I was at Asana. First marketer, lots of experience. It was kind of mine to lose to be head of marketing. And then they just kept letting me do it. That's one profile. The other profile is, you know, you're probably going to need to layer them, but they can get in there and get a bunch done. So it highly depends on that. For the first archetype, you're looking at— I tell marketers not to take at that point very early on, pre-seed, seed, the senior marketers, not to take less than 0.5%, which some people might be like, wow, that's a lot. That's what I think is fair. I think in general for these first marketers, anything below 0.1%, no matter the architect, is really low. So that's how I think about it. So now you're looking at this range from 0.1 to 1%. 1%, 2% is like you're hiring them as a VP or C-level, like early on, which is more rare. But you're in the 0.1 to 1% range, and it's really dependent on what they're going to do. The average that I see is 0.4 or 0.5%, the average from a good— from a company that is compensating them well and fairly. That's what I tell people to take.

Right, awesome. Yeah, I think that was super detailed. So, okay, so we have this, we have another question. This is from Keith, but I kind of want to change it around because Keith is like, he's very specific here. So the question is, what are some effective strategies for attracting and evaluating candidates for the marketing role? And I just kind of want to ask this bit and not the rest of it, right? Apologies, Keith.

Which bit?

Yeah. Can you hear me?

I couldn't hear you on which particular part, but now I can hear you. Can you hear me, Daniel?

Yeah, yeah, I can. Yeah, I can.

Okay. So let me take the part. Are you want, do you wanna take the part about the, the government and senior care industry or just forming part partnerships.

So yeah, so we'll kind of leave that out because we have a ton of startup founders from kind of all across, uh, you know, the— all, all across, um, the world. And like, I think this might be going too specific, so let's just answer the first bit.

Okay, cool. Yeah, so I think when you're trying to attract candidates, and specifically trying to attract a candidate who you think is going to be really great for your company, which is what Keith's asking here, You need to sell them on a couple of things. One, you just sell them on your vision and what you're building and get them excited about it. Two, the thing that often trips up marketers and what I tell marketers is the founder relationship is more important than any, you know, obviously you want to be joining a company that can be successful, but the founder relationship is more important, I say, to marketers than even necessarily going somewhere where it's your dream product or your dream go-to-market motion or whatever it is. They have to feel like they can work with you because a lot of times when marketers fail at startups, it's because the founder doesn't understand marketing, doesn't seek to understand marketing, has completely overblown expectations for what one marketer can do, doesn't understand all of that foundation work that needs to go into it, thinks marketing is only engine or only, only fuel. So a lot of it is like feeling like the founder is going to guide you and help you in areas, but also is going to recognize sort of the full range of responsibilities you have to do and understand that you're going to need to be setting strategy, doing work, have some contractors to support you, and that your job isn't just driving leads that quarter. I think that's the biggest thing. There's just this crazy emphasis. And a lot of times founders treat marketers like salespeople and they're not. They're doing a mix of sort of, they're doing a ton of work again, like a product person would. So I think it's really just building that rapport with them and like having real conversations about what they'll do and listening and learning on both sides. So I think it's just building rapport and building a relationship. Like a lot of things, it's like, I wanna go work, and I know a lot of marketers do that. A lot of them have been sort of burned by founder relationships in the past that understands what I'm trying to accomplish and is gonna work with me, not sort of work against me or try to, you know, kind of make me just purely service organization to sales. So let marketers do their marketing thing and show that from the start and you'll be off to the races. Yeah, awesome.

Yeah, I think that kind of makes a ton of sense. So we have, okay, so we kind of similarly have another question that more so relates to first-time startup founders and this is what our general audience is made out of. And it's written here who asks, how do you learn to be a marketer if you're starting out assuming you've never done any marketing before?

Yeah, a couple of things. Um, if you want to understand the strategy and how to place those sort of like strategic bets and how to get started, not to plug my own stuff, but to plug my own stuff, this is exactly what our newsletter is for, is like early stage building of this out at sort of that strategic level, but it goes pretty tactical as well. So it's not just because I wrote it, I wrote it because there's a huge gap in information here. And so our newsletter, which is just newsletter.mkt1.co, has a lot of this information. There's also just for basic, for individual tasks, like I need to get marketing automation tool up and running. I need to, you know, send an email out to all of these people. Like those things are very like there's a lot of that very tactical content out there and available. What tends to be missing is the like, how do I set my strategy and figure out what to do and what not to do? And that's really what we're trying to cover. So you need to figure out kind of where to start, what channels to start on first on the engine side, what fuel is really gonna speak to your audience. And so sort of figuring some of those things out, things out, what are the key drivers of our strategy? What are we gonna be placing our bets on on the fuel side? What are we gonna be doing on the engine side and how can I build up this foundation? But really also at the beginning, like you're not trying to do things that massively scale before you have a marketer. You're trying to do a lot of like one-off things that start to scale. So you don't need to learn how to be the world's best marketer. You need to learn the basics. You need to do those things I talked about doing early on, and you need to get someone in there and really support them. But yeah, I— the best thing I can do is say, go read my newsletter. That's literally why I wrote it. There's a huge gap in content here. Daniel, I can't— you're muted, I think.

My bad. Yeah, sorry. So yeah, we have a link for the newsletter in the comments, so you guys can check it out there. So let's just take one more question and then we can kind of move on to the networking part. So guys, what will happen afterwards is you'll be moved to the networking lounge where you guys can talk to each other. Hopefully, Emily's around, you can maybe talk to her too. The FI team will be there too. So, you know, if you have any questions about FI or the sessions that we do, we'll be there to answer all questions. So yeah, so this is a question from Alexander here, right? From your experience, have you seen a successful first marketer who was hired part-time rather than full-time. And I think this is super relevant for startup founders, right? Because a lot of the times you don't have the resources to find a full-time marketer.

Yep. I think this can be early on. Again, it's like when to hire a first marketer. I think before you hire a first marketer, you typically have a contractor or an agency or, you know, whatever you wanna call them, a part-time marketer doing something for you. Whether that's, you know, there's so many different— it's such a range of what that could be, whether it's making some initial content or helping you with your initial website. Don't spend a ton of money on your first website, though. Just use a template. You'll do it later. Whether it be helping you refine your story or helping you with some of that messaging work or whatever it might be, you're probably going to use a contractor first. What doesn't end up working well, I don't think— well, okay, it's really hard to find. It is possible to find sort of the fractional head of marketing that is trying to do everything for you that is not deeply embedded in the business. It's really hard to have someone who's going to deeply understand your audience, your market, your product, your go-to-market motion, the intricacies of how your product and sales team works that isn't spending 40+ hours a week with you. It's just hard. But you can— it's easier to find contractors and agencies to do specific not your highest level strategy, but chunks of the work. And so I think it's more possible for you to be setting the strategy and have maybe 2 or 3 contractors that are helping you until you hire— until you, you know, bring in that first marketer. It's just a really hard thing to do on a part-time basis because of the level of work you have to do. But yes, early on you can definitely have some contractors, but I wouldn't necessarily try to hire like a part-time head of marketing, but I have seen it be successful, but it's just really hard to find that right person. So I think there's a lot to get up to speed on. It's hard to outsource it all.

Yeah.

Awesome.

So yeah, Alexander, you have your answer there. So Emily, thank you so much for joining us. Yeah, it's been Super, super fun. A ton of insight, a lot of takeaways for us at the FI team, and I'm sure our audience as well. Guys, do check out MarketOne's website. You can also subscribe to their newsletter. Yeah, so show Emily some love while we kind of end the session here. So yeah, we have sessions every Monday, so you guys can check us, check our upcoming events out at fi.co/events. We'll be in the networking lounge to answer any questions. Emily, thank you again for joining us.

Yeah, thank you for having me and thanks for everyone's attention on a Monday and hope you have more success trying to hire and manage marketers in the future.

Awesome.

Thank you.

Bye.