The Definitive Founders Playbook for Building a Dream Marketing Team

Rock on. All right. Hello. Welcome to the panel. So I think it's important to sit down and really establish what the agenda is going to be. We're going to make it really easy. 2 minutes of context, 28 minutes of insight. Sound about right?

Sounds great.

Sounds perfect. Okay, so here's the context. Over the last couple of years, I've been working with a variety of different founders and startups and smaller companies after moving from large enterprise. And I started to see certain things with founders. Now, if you're a marketer, you've got a swim lane in your company. If you're a coo, you're a cfo, you've got your swim lane, you've got your area of expertise, the thing that you bring. But if you're a founder, you don't have a swim lane. You've got everybody's swim lane. And even as you build and grow your company, you're still responsible for all of those different swim lanes within your organization. And so the founder has to be this sort of proverbial Swiss army knife. They have to be all things to all people. They're negotiating a lease, they're getting office furniture, they're hiring new people, they're talking to customers, they're engaged at events, they're getting funding. They're everything for everybody. And nobody is that good. Nobody has all of those skill sets. And so when we sat down over the course of the last year, I started to realize that there's a book in here someplace. And so for the last year, interviewing 70 founders, entrepreneurs, investors, advisors, the people in the entire ecosystem to talk about what's it like to be a founder. And we started to see certain themes emerge. And then when I sat down with Caddy and Elena, we started to see that those themes emerge across a variety of different companies, that it's resonant that it is in just about every organization that founders have these same similar five or six things that they're always struggling with. And so now onto the insights portion of our presentation. That's what we're going to talk about today. Are we ready to go? Yep. Okay. How about quick introductions? Kadi, do you want to tell us who you are, what you do, why you're here?

Yep. My name is Kadi Srinivasan. I run the global digital marketing team at Dropbox. So essentially, we look at how we can acquire users, engage them, nurture them, upsell them throughout the journey. At Dropbox, my journey has been a little bit interesting. I wasn't a software engineer way back when. And then kind of found my way into marketing. And so over the last few years, I've had kind of a bird's eye view of both startups and big companies on how marketing is evolving and how if done well, marketing can be a powerhouse of growth and revenue. So that's what I'm here to talk about.

Perfect. Love it. Elena.

My name is Elena Verna. I work for Malwarebytes, which is a cybersecurity company on Endpoint Solution. I run product design and marketing for consumer product for Malwarebytes. My journey really started in analytics. I was a data analyst at SurveyMonkey. That's where I started my career. And I went into product marketing. I went into product, then I went into performance marketing, then I went into growth. So to me, a lot of it is a blend between product marketing and analytics and two way to drive acquisition and to drive growth. It's a fantastic question to ask nowadays because the lines are blurred more than ever before. So that's why I'm here.

Perfect. Love it. Okay, so before we begin, quick note to the tech team. The timer has not started. And if you don't start the timer, we will talk forever. So a grateful crowd size. All right, perfect. So let's start with the first one, the big question we hear all the time. When do I hire marketing? When do I bring marketing into the organization? Right. So let's drop this bomb right off the bat. Big one, big topic. We can discuss lots of different avenues we can take off of this. But either one of you, when do you bring marketing in?

Yeah, I can go first if you want. So I advise a lot of startups and typically what I say is if you have product market fit, that's the time that you start thinking seriously about marketing. Because that's the time when you start thinking about how can I actually scale up now that I know that my product has stickiness, it has engagement, it's not bleeding users, and now I can start going after a bigger tam. And it's not just about the timing of when to bring marketing in or when to start scaling up marketing. It's also what are the first things, first capabilities within marketing that you want to bring in. I typically say you don't want to start with brand because it's not something that you want to start defining right off the bat. What you want to start doing is more about growth marketing. So think about what is your funnel? How do you optimize the funnel? What kind of people can you bring in to help drive that kind of Optimization help grow that. And then you can start adding on all of these other pieces of marketing that then just makes it more of an accelerant to the product that you have.

Elaine?

Yeah. What are you trying to solve with marketing? Usually companies, they come in and they say, okay, marketing, I need marketing because I need to drive acquisition to the top of my funnel and therefore I need marketing team. And that's a slippery slope to go after because marketing means budget. Marketing means you need to have a lot of systems, a lot of people that are actually going to drive this traffic to your site that then you need to convert, that you need to activate that you need to engage, you need to retain. I would actually go one step further and say can you product acquire customers? Do you need a marketing team? A lot of push nowadays are coming into product led growth. What is product led growth? It's the product that actually drives virality and drives acquisition into the product. So think about Slack. You cannot join Slack Slack and use it by yourself. You need other people to join Slack in order for you to make that product work. You create the viral loop out of that one user that you've acquired. That one user will drive additional users into the product. Malwarebytes, for example, we have our target Persona that refers our product to everybody else that has issues with their devices. You have an issue device, oh, just run malwarebytes. They act as our marketing agents. So can you get your users to actually act as your marketing agents? Because that's an organic viral way and a stable way to organic way to really acquire your customers. Now once you establish that you can have a product led growth, then start a marketing team. But be aware that once you start the marketing team, you going into the journey of a much larger budget, much more accountability for the spend, a much lower profit margins for you to actually spend on the product development and research. So I think it's dangerous to start a marketing team way too early because you take the focus off product and you take the really responsibility off product to drive your growth. Make your product work for you first before you go into the marketing endeavors. Especially with branding teams which are so loosely measured in terms of how do you actually spend your money, which is very valuable spend. But at certain stage of the company, once you've onboarded your product led growth, once you onboarded your performance marketing, then you can go into brand.

Yeah, I think the thing that I heard the big takeaway here was it's really what's the problem you're solving, right? It's flipping the question on its head because what most people are doing is well, when should I bring in marketing? And so they go outside, they start talking to mentors and advisors, when do I bring marketing in? And they hear their stories. But what they really need to do is start asking themselves that question, what is the problem that I'm trying to solve? Right.

A problem people solve. They want more money, they want their company to make more money because they have investors and they need to pay off those investors. So if you need more money, you need to look at all of your metrics and say, is it actually acquisition that I'm struggling with? Maybe it's activation, maybe it's retention. Your marketing team may or may not help you with that. So you need to be just understand where your growth and where most of your drop off actually going on. Yeah.

I would also add if you think about the again, kind of dissecting that problem, it could even within the, let's take demand gen. Right? Even within that there are so many different flavors of that problem. Are you trying to drive demand gen by increasing the top of the funnel? Are you trying to drive demand gen because you want that end conversion to revenue? What specific part of that whole stack are you looking to solve? What problem are you looking to solve? The other thing to keep in mind too is not all heads of marketing are similar. Everybody comes with a different background, a different skill set. And it's very rare that you'll find a unicorn that's really good at brand and product marketing and performance marketing and growth and kind of that comes in one package. So you need to be really thoughtful as a founder or a CEO or even executive member to say what is the first edge of marketing you want? What's kind of the first thrust and hire for that? And then you start layering on, okay, what is the next problem that marketing can solve? What's the third problem marketing can solve and then kind of build your team that way?

Well, and the thing I think is really interesting is there really are those sort of three, three main buckets for marketing. You've got your product marketer, you've got your brand marketer and then you've got your growth marketer. And you're not going to find all three in any one person. Maybe there's three people on the planet that can do all three of those really well and they've already been hired by Ford and Coca Cola. So you're not going to find those people. Maybe you find someone that's got two, but more likely you're going to find that person that's got one. And so what's the problem you're solving at that particular time and using that as the lever to go bring in that kind of marketer.

You will never find people who are those or I shouldn't say that. It's very rare to find unicorns. But what you're looking for is people who have the in depth expertise in one or two of those areas but know what to hire for in the area that they don't have skill sets in. And you also want to look for people who are, who know when to turn on certain levers. Again, going back to what Elena was saying around brand, you don't want to turn on a brand investment when you are a small product, when you're just finding your product market fit, that's just going to burden a bunch of money and nobody's going to be happy. So you need to find people who know when to turn things on and when to start addressing strategic levers for growth. And that should be part of a portfolio of skills that you look for in a marketer.

Nice.

And you don't necessarily need a cohesive marketing team either. There's so many companies out there that are now breaking it up. Product marketing sits with product, brand and creative sit together. Performance marketing is marketed as growth marketing and assist with growth teams. So I think you do what's right for your organization. So there's no like this big elephant in the room. I'm starting a marketing team. Just do what's right. Get yourself the expertise that you need. Get people that are just wanting to get things done and position them in the best, in the best way organizationally for them to succeed. Then once you're big enough, you can start your cohesive marketing team. But there's fewer and fewer companies that actually have that. And there's a reason for that. Because it's impossible to find that one leader that will be really, really good at both areas.

Yeah, that's an interesting point. It was one of the conversations from the book last year. Talked to one person who did a lot with tiger teams early on. And instead of hiring a big entire marketing organization, they would hire one marketer and then they would find a good product person. They would find someone that had some savvy around the brand. They would find someone from sales, put together a team and go tackle, solve one particular problem and do it in a really smart way and then rinse and repeat. And that kept them from having to build a team of 10 or 15 marketers and use those resources to become more fit, more scalable and drive their business.

Yeah, I think that's a great observation. I think this also starts the question of how do you organize your marketing team? You could organize it by functional silos like product marketing, brand marketing, growth. But what you're talking about is there are some forward thinking CMOs who have actually organized their teams around the specific areas of the customer journey. So they have teams that are just focused on onboarding, teams that are focused on first time user experience, teams that are focused on retention. And so those teams are truly cross functional because they pull in people from all of the different disciplines and force them to work on a problem together. And so you're essentially really focused on customer experience when you do that. And then you're making sure that somebody is responsible for all the different use cases of how users come in and how they stick to your product.

Yeah. So basing them around metrics as opposed to the functional areas. So your job is not to drive traffic, your job is to drive activations. For example, what means to achieve activation is to get the traffic through the signup flow, through onboarding, to your aha moment in the product. It's a much more better problem to solve for your business because it will be linked to the outcome of an engaged user that then you can move into conversion. So then you have a team that can, can be focusing on paid conversion or something along those lines, but usually it goes into activation, conversion, retention. And those are the three tiger teams that you form that are throughout the process. And each one of those will specifically be linked to the outcome metric that you're driving, which is total bookings. But then you have the actual KPIs that the teams are thinking and breathing about, as opposed to saying, okay, let me bring more traffic to my site. Guess what? That can be a vanity metric that can literally mean absolutely nothing depending on the type of traffic that comes in.

Yep.

Well, and I think that what's really interesting about what we're talking about is it's breaking down the traditional hierarchy of CMO and then the teams below them. Right. The traditional org chart. And what you're looking at and what we've been talking about is finding ways to go tackle the specific problem they're addressing and building the teams and structures around that and tying them to outcomes, deliverables, measurements. Right. Instead of just throwing it over the wall and saying, well, the marketing organization will solve that. And I think that's where some of the disconnection has come in with founders and Marketers is because they don't understand the structure and who's going to be responsible for those pieces. And so it never feels like there's somebody that actually owns that one problem.

Yeah. I think it also goes back to the metrics question. If you're not able to clearly define what marketing can own a single metric, then you're likely not doing it right. You're likely not defining what problem needs to be solved. Marketing as a founder, you can't be in a position where you let different groups influence metrics. You need to enforce accountability in terms of what is the one metric this organization can drive that is solely under your control, which then probably leads to revenue or some kind of growth metric. But what is that one thing that we can all align on and then use that as a forcing function to say this is the problem we want to solve. In subscription businesses, for instance, an example of that would be how many signups, how many subscriptions you want to generate. Easy metric marketing can be completely go towards it. It contributes to revenue. It's a very easy to understand problem to be solved. So kind of comes back to, what is your North Star? What's the North Star KPI that you want to help drive?

And not to be process driven, but outcome driven. Because if you give them a metric, you're driving towards a successful outcome for the company as opposed to a process. I have done my task and therefore it's time for me to move on, as opposed to, I have done my task, I need to achieve an outcome and then I can move on.

Yep. Well, and I think the thing that makes this really interesting is the founder, the business leader, the CEO can actually become part of the equation. They can sit down with the marketer or marketing team or whatever the structure is that they've got in place and say, look, you're responsible for this thing. Right? Here's the outcome I expect and here's what I want to get reported on. And so it doesn't become this big black box. It's something that they can help and work on and partner on. And this creates a relationship between the marketer and the founder, the CEO that I think has been a struggle in most organizations.

Yep, yep.

Because founders and CEO do the checklist. I need this in order to succeed. I need this team. I need this process. I need to spend. Spend money on ads, I need to do search engine optimization as opposed to give them a metric to solve. Let the team figure out how they're actually going to solve it and what they need to do.

Yeah, I have found exactly that too, is a lot of founders come to marketers and say, run this thing for me. Run paid AdWords or run this X, Y and Z. So it's like a patient coming to a doctor and saying, give me cough medicine because I have cough, versus letting the doctor diagnose what you have. Right. So as a founder, you need to be able to give the market, the head of marketing, a chance to sit at the table and help you formulate strategy for the company and then be able to say as an equal partner, okay, the company wants to grow by 15% or hopefully not 15, but 50% by the end of the year. Marketing can contribute 30 percentage points off that. And here's how we're going to do it. So kind of work backwards from what the outcome should be, like Elena was talking about, but let the marketer come up with a strategy versus dictating what it should be.

Well, and I think this comes back to what we were saying before. Identify the problem. Right. Bring in teams of people to help you do that, partner with the organization to do that, but then also allow the subject matter experts to come in and give way in and play the role that they're supposed to instead of just being task management masters.

Yep, yep.

Perfect. Okay. All right. So this was one of the other ones that we talked about and I loved the short and sweet answer to a relatively complex problem and one that we're hearing a lot of today and you'll hear over the next day. It's category creation. Right. And so you have some really great insights because this is one of those things. It's very buzzy. Everybody's talking about it. Category creation being king of categories, top of mind for just about every founder. Talk about it.

Okay, I'll start. So category creation, why? I mean, yes, it's sexy to create a category because then you're inventing in a space. But fundamental problem that you're actually trying to solve is for the demand that already exists out there, that there's no solution to address that demand. So before creating a category or thinking about creating a category, you might want to find a product market fit to the problem that already exists. Figure out what category that exists currently in find your customers, get them to the aha moment of your product, get them so they can actually retain in your product, and then you can use some of the branding exposure to actually drive new category creation. But guess what? If you, if you start on the category creation, nobody's going to search for that category. Nobody's going to know how to find it. So find your customers, get that buzz going, get that product market fit, get that compounding growth where everybody's talking about you and then come out and say I'm this new category. So to me it's more of a branding play if anything, but it comes much farther down the line in the life cycle of a company versus going from the startup and saying, I'm doing this new thing that nobody does before. Well, nobody will search for it. So. And guess what? You need to get some of the organic growth at the beginning. If you're really only marketing driven company and that's the way that you means of driving acquisition, it would be very hard for you to scale in accelerating fashion right from the start.

Yeah, I agree with Elena. So there is a great book by Seth Godin called All Marketers are Storytellers. And the big premise of that book is if you are a great marketer, what you're doing is tapping into a common worldview that a huge swath of consumers have. And then you're capitalizing on that worldview. And by capitalizing, we are talking about creating a product for them or creating a story that resonates with that set of users. And to me, this idea of category creation is just that you're identifying a huge set of users that have a common worldview of something, of a problem that need to be solved or a need that needs to be met. And you're solving that problem for them either through a product or a service or a story or a message or a brand, a premise or something like that. And if you do it well enough and in big numbers and profitably, you have a category, you've created a category. So it's as I think it's as simple and as complicated as that is. Go back to the fundamentals. You want to build a great company. What do you base it on? It's based on the fact that a huge number of people across the world want your product for a need that nobody else has solved for them. And start from there. And then your category is naturally going to come just if you do it the right way.

Well, what I love about the answer is so category creation is big and weighty and can weigh on like Atlas, right? Can weigh on a shoulder of a founder's mind. Right. They can be really something that they struggle with. And so the way you've broken this down and taking it down to the fundamentals of what's the product market fit, what's the aha moment, what's the thing that you're creating for your customer and then go in on that and use that as the lever. Category creation can come down the road, but it's just like a lot of things that we're talking about and we'll talk about too early for some of these activities in marketing, whether it's brand or content or you name it, can be just as detrimental as not doing it at all.

I also think when you start as a founder, you have a specific idea of what your product is and what need it is. Solving for users five years down the line, that may not be the need anymore because consumers change a lot of things to change. And so it's really hard to say, this is the category I'm going to create and say 10 years from now, it's going to be the same category that's going to be relevant. If you're agile enough, you're moving with the changes in the consumer mentality and the consumer responses, and you're recreating something or you're redefining and pivoting something and building a category. It's easy to say, people like Uber, they have created a category. But that's in retrospect, we look back and we think, oh my God, yeah, they did create a category. But I am sure a lot of people, as they're going through the process, they're not actively thinking, that's my one, one thing I need to do, I need to create a category. What they're thinking is, how am I going to get this product in front of people and get them to love it? And that's what you should be thinking about. That should be your priority.

Yeah, what the problem you're solving. Can you get your customers, customers to aha. Moment in couple seconds flat after they've started engagement with your product, do they have the need to come back? And then the bigger questions come in terms of, do you have actually, are you monetizing on the value metric for the customers? So does your engagement equivalent with monetization? Then you're actually solving fundamental problems that will really unblock your business growth, as opposed to saying, okay, I'm creating category creation and therefore my business is going to grow. So those fundamental boulders are much more important to address from the beginning as opposed to really anything else.

Perfect. Okay, I think we've got a little more time. So here was one that we heard quite a bit was, you know, from a founder or leader's perspective, the CEO or CFO doesn't confuse me. I know what the COO does. I have no idea what the CMO does. And marketers speak their own language. And you guys frankly confuse the hell out of me. Right. Heard that one time and time again. And so let's break that down a little bit. If you're a business leader and you're hiring that maybe it's the first marketer or the first team or a couple of those key people all the way up to that cmo, how do you break through that? How do you connect with the marketer? Especially when you feel like I really, this is a conversation I'm not equipped for. How do you have that conversation with a marketer and know the right kind of marketer to bring in at the right time? And how do we educate them to do that?

There's also one more category, growth. What is growth? Is it product? Is it marketing? Who knows? I think connecting, you just have to get people that are passionate about your product, that get it, that actually want to connect customers to your product and that are engaged in it. So. So I almost think about cluser equivalent of like product marketer is a great first hire just because they will actually connect your product to customers and they will think about that journey and they're agnostic of acquisition or conversion or engagement funnels. They're thinking about the entire customer journey. So think about more of generalists, I think at the beginning that can really context switch and help you with whichever problems that you're solving with, as opposed to getting specific specialist that will focus on one specific vertical of driving some certain activities in your marketing funnel and then you just grow it organically. So it's a need base. But getting generalist at the beginning, from my perspective, is the bigger bang for your buck that you're going to spend on a person actually getting you to the outcomes that you want.

Yeah, I would agree. I think you again, I think it comes back to some of the original things that we were discussing around what is the problem you want to see solve. But I think you need to have somebody who can help you think through what the company strategy is going to be at the beginning. As a founder, you're dealing with many different things, one of them being what should be my business model, how should I do this kind of pricing, what is the impact that's going to have on users and how do we bring users into the funnel. So you want somebody who can help you think through those kind of decisions. And so there needs to be a certain level of altitude and seniority for that person. Like Elena was saying, at the same time, I would Also balance it with, you need to have someone, you need to have a person or a few people in there who can be extremely scrappy. They need to be growth marketers, they need to be experimenting, they need to have the DNA of constant testing and iteration. And so you can't create strategy in a vacuum. You need to have the underlying data and a assumptions to prove that. And so you need to have that balance of somebody who's senior enough to understand how to help drive strategy based on what's happening and then an execution person who can help put out those experiments, get those learnings and move fast. So I would kind of look at a set of people like that who you can bring in and assign them a problem, a metric and say, go get this done.

Well, and there's the off quoted statistic of average tenure of a CMO is like 18 months. Right. And part of that problem is because you bring in people that don't fit the company, the company's place, aren't passionate about the product or service that you're offering. And so you go find somebody and you're like, I want this footprint, I want somebody who did this at one of my competitors, or I want somebody who did this at a really storied brand, not realizing that they may be four or five steps ahead of you in where you are in your product life cycle. They may have a team of 20 people working for them and then they come into your organization and they're a team of one. You spend all your money on this one person and then you're asking them to roll up their sleeves and do things that they're ill equipped to do.

Yeah, and that kind of boggles my mind, this idea of best practice. Because if you are trying to hire somebody who has done this before, what innovation are you actually expecting out of them? Right. Yeah, because they're going to follow a playbook. They're going to come in and do what your competition, who's likely four times bigger than you, is doing. And so where is your level of scrappiness and innovation and entrepreneurship that you want? So I don't think that you should always index on going after experience. You should look at, does this person have that problem solving ability? Do they have that ability to think critically and be creative about solving a completely new problem that we are trying to solve and how do we bring more innovation to that?

Hiring CMO is an organizational consolidation. Do you really need that at that moment in time? And that's a pretty expensive move as well. You're paying over $200,000 to somebody doing what? Managing a team. You just need to be careful where your money is actually going well.

And I just noticed our title is called Playbook for Building a Marketing Dream Team. And you, you just said screw the playbook. So I think we're going to have to rethink this entire structure.

There is no joke just to qualify that though. What I'm saying is that you don't want somebody who has done a thing before, many, many times. You want somebody to come in and build a playbook for you right in your company. Because you're unique and you have a different. You want to do things differently. You don't want to go against the same competition, beat your head on the same door and try to do the same things. It doesn't work well.

Look, the thing that I heard that I can distill back that we sort of repeated time and time again is it's know the problem you're solving. Yeah, right. That's the first one. Know that you've got really good product market fit because from that all things will flow. Right. It's having people come in that are really excited. That enthusiasm goes a long way. They still need a skill set. Right. You're not just hiring somebody in off the street that's sort of like bubbly. Right. But you need someone with a skill set. But you want that enthusiasm for the product and service and for you as a founder and as a leader. And then you need to work with them so that they can enable the process that you're looking to build and then also not rely on the prior successes of somebody else. That they've got a great resume and they've got a great background. But do you want somebody that's just going to come in and bring the template and try and make that fit in your organization. Your golden snowflake. You're unique, right. And so do you want somebody that's going to come in and just do that time and time again? And the answer is likely no.

But marketing is one of the only organizations that are truly going through the very big shift nowadays. You still have your product orgs, you still have your engineering orgs, your finance, your accounting. But marketing is what really is starting to break down in a lot of organizations because they want to have marketing be more effective and be more submerged with the rest, the of. Of the rest of the teams. And therefore there's no such thing as consolidated marking team like I think in a lot of the organizations and they're moving away from that. So It's a. It's a living, breathing animal of whether you actually need it or not. But I think starting with actually decentralized teams is a lot more effective at the beginning compared to starting trying to bring this team that can be very disconnected from everything you're doing on the product and engineering front.

Perfect. Well, we're just about out of time. The one thing I wanted to add is something that we talked about in prep. One of the reasons both of you do this is because you truly, thoroughly enjoy the conversations that happen in the hallways with attendees afterwards. So I would encourage everybody to reach out to Caddy, reach out to Alana, reach out to me. We're going to be around for the rest of the afternoon, but I think we're out of time. So thank you all for being a kind, attentive audience and have a great rest of the show.