
Hiring the first head of marketing at a startup - tosh
https://helenmin.com/blog/first-head-of-marketing
======
jjohansson
I was the first Head of Marketing for a high growth tech company (we raised
USD $71 million last year). I've been here almost 3 years, growing leads by
11x and revenue by millions with a tiny team and budget.

My advice to those hiring HoM for a B2B startup:

1\. Hire a performance marketer (i.e. leads, revenue focused), not a brand
marketer. Your sales team needs leads to grow, not "brand awareness". Once
you've got a nice flow of leads, that's when the softer side of marketing
becomes important.

2\. If they are focused on how big of a budget they'll get, that's a major red
flag. The first channels should not be paid. Budget needs to be small to start
-- once you prove ROI/traction, it's now a conversation about scaling quickly,
and not about blindly throwing money away.

3\. A quick look at their resume or LinkedIn should tell you everything you
need to know... is it full of numbers/data, or is it a list of tasks &
buzzword bingo?

4\. Hire someone who can do everything themselves. Make sure they won't need
to rely on agencies.

Edit: Regarding the article's recommendation about hiring ICs to perform
smaller tasks. I personally would find this unappealing because it means I
can't build my own initial team, and I'll need to investigate what those ICs
have done so far -- have they made poor decisions I'll need to undo?

~~~
gogopuppygogo
Agree entirely.

To expand a bit for those outside of this space, a performance marketer is
often called a direct response marketer. They measure the direct response to
everything they do. The alternative is often called an awareness marketer.
They tend to focus on creative that can create awareness.

2.) A b2b startup just turning on revenue and looking to show a profit
typically needs to validate a really high return from marketing efforts. The
salary of a marketing head isn’t free. Do the math off what it cost to acquire
revenues and profits off that salary. (e.g. $120k/year to a contractor for
this role is $10k/month to the company, that should buy you at least a 2X in
profit (you really want to be at 4x in profit) if you are in b2b). Once you
have something working you need budget to pour fuel on the fire and get it
going.

3.) Disagree here. Plenty of information can be considered confidential by
employers and may not be published.

4.) Initially true but Agencies add value as you increase spending. They
likely have negotiated better ad rates than your single startup can manage so
you’ll save on spend by going through them. Also, don’t discount the creative
they can do. Nearly all big companies have struck a working partnership with
an agency over creative works the agency designed. There is value here but
don’t expect them to figure out your initial strategy. Also, avoid agencies
that don’t have good ad spend like the plague. Recently spoke to one that
bragged about an average 1.2X return on Capital to their customers in top line
revenue from advertising. For every dollar we would spend they would likely
bring us $1.20 in revenue. That’s horrible. I can do better with direct mail.

~~~
PragmaticPulp
> 4.) Initially true but Agencies add value as you increase spending. ...
> There is value here but don’t expect them to figure out your initial
> strategy.

Exactly. The parent comment was spot-on about not hiring someone who is wholly
dependent on external agencies to get anything done. Avoid people who are
basically middlemen between your company and external agencies. You're better
off going directly to the agencies in that case.

You want someone who can chart the initial strategy and then judiciously
augment with external agencies when appropriate.

------
user5994461
IMO the challenge with marketing is the very high budget and lack of (visible)
returns .

Marketing will want to launch marketing campaigns: adwords, facebook, ads in
the tube, sponsoring events, sponsoring personalities, TV ads...

The smallest ad here and there start at 100k each. It's very quick to burn
millions of dollars. It's unbelievable how quick money can go down the drain.
Besides, the more they spend the better for their resume so marketing is
really enticed to go big.

When the founder wants to start marketing. He's probably budgeting to hire a
couple people and do some things but he doesn't comprehend the costs. One or
two years later, when the founder sees the bills and the lack of returns, he's
pulling the plug on marketing.

In that sense marketing is like software projects. When your CMO/CTO shows up
with a 200 pages spec software / $500k ad project, the answer is to say no.
Both type of projects tend to spiral out of control quickly and fail.

~~~
pembrook
First, you’re talking about advertising, not marketing. Also this all might
have been true 15 years ago. But these days you aren’t likely to see a startup
with under $50million in funding (so, 99% of startups) do TV ads and OOH and
event sponsorships.

Those are “brand” advertising techniques still popular among legacy CPG brands
who are stuck in the old world. Those are the campaigns with no exact way to
measure returns other than educated guesses.

Any properly run startup today is focusing the majority of ad spend on “direct
response,” or direct sales ie. Facebook ads, google AdWords, etc. or actual
human sales teams.

This spending is 100% measurable so any company paying more to acquire
customers than the customer’s exact LTV is simply dumb or trying some
nefarious loss leader strategy.

Facebook and Google sit at the top of S&P 500 right now because their ad
networks _are_ so measurable and perfectly targeted.

There is no problem with a lack of visible returns on Facebook or google ad
spend.

~~~
chiefalchemist
Marketing (and advertising) revolves around human behavior. Anyone who thinks
that's easy is a fool, or not human ;)

Fact #2 that most inside a given (startup) brand find hard to swallow is this:

Nobody cares. About your product, or your brand.

Sure, there's an audience of early adopters, and maybe you're gotten traction
there. But once you get past "the cool kids" the dynamic changes. As you
venture towards the middle of a market, people like their status quo. A wink,
a smile and "try me, I'm new" isn't going to cut it.

Or maybe you're a B2B play. Yeah, (e.g.) banks are great customers. Do you
think you're the only one with that in mind? Do you understand how slow they
are to evolve? And...They don't care. You need them. They don't need you.

Solving tech problems is _easy_ relative to growth-seeking marketing (and
advertising).

------
cm2012
If you're also interested in knowing which marketing channels to test first
for your start-up, I charted most major channels by public spend data and
level of customer intent here: [https://www.rightpercent.com/b2b-guides/which-
marketing-chan...](https://www.rightpercent.com/b2b-guides/which-marketing-
channels-are-best-to-grow-your-business-2020-update).

A bunch of other founders have told me they find this chart really useful.

~~~
michaelbuckbee
I like it and made something similar a while back in spreadsheet form:

[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1l-0VLKWIzqu2dwyxmmNJ...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1l-0VLKWIzqu2dwyxmmNJB3PaeygHagTGzg1QBsoHyWU/edit?usp=sharing)

------
unishark
> I tell them this is analogous to walking into a dentist’s office and
> proclaiming, “Look how great my teeth look—and without a day of brushing! Do
> you want to be my first dentist?” Yuck.

Interesting comparison since a dentist's job is to fix problems (so why would
they prefer a customer with no problems?). For other roles, it certainly sucks
to fix the mess no one wanted to deal with anymore, but this is often the only
thing that motivates hiring you in the first place.

~~~
traceroute66
I would agree with this. Given the choice between (a) some marketing type with
an ego and only interested in a corner office with a view and a quiet life or
(b) someone eager and not afraid of rolling their sleeves up and getting
dirty, I know who I would choose.

The same goes with my dentist. I once walked into a dentist as a new patient,
all the dentist was interested in was the quiet life (i.e. selling me tooth
whitening services). I walked out and never went back.

Frankly the entire blog post reads as sneering and looking down at small
businesses, completely ingoring the realities of small business life which
might prevent the hiring of some marketing types.

Its all very well if you live the cushy Silly Con valley "small business"
life, but for most small businesses, the reality is different.

I'm sure all small businesses would love to employ armies of sales, marketing,
technical etc. etc. ... but let's get away from the MBA textbook into real
life shall we ?

~~~
melon625
Author here. Through the lens of small businesses, I completely agree with
your comment. This post is specifically for venture-backed startups, most
likely in Silicon Valley, with technical founders and/or an engineering-first
culture. Sounds super specific, but there are a lots of companies in this
category! Thank you for reading.

------
achenatx
One of the services my company provides is marketing automation for B2B
ecommerce companies.

the core of modern digital marketing is content. As an example, I was involved
in an adverse possession lawsuit. I started searching for articles about
adverse possession. A few law firms had very good articles about adverse
possession. They went into case law, examples of winning/losing etc., but most
law firms just said they did adverse possession. Consumers are much more
likely to buy from vendors that also give them the information they need to
make a decision.

Content can be product videos, great product descriptions, tools to help make
product decisions, how to use the product to achieve goals, forums etc.

The content needs to drive the next step in the buying process. Signing up for
a mailing list, requesting help, putting something in the shopping cart.

Once you have content with actions you can start using paid ads to drive
traffic to your content.

Once your content gets traffic you will start rising in organic search.

Using analytics you can optimize conversions, run experiments, etc. It
requires daily or weekly monitoring and constant calculation of return.

You can ask most marketing people what a standard deviation is and they have
no idea, let alone a two tailed T-test. How can they be testing effectiveness
with zero understanding of statistics? When is a 10% increase an actual
increase vs. statistical noise?

------
polote
The main takeaway of the article is that if you are founder who doesn't
believe in marketing, you will might need several head of marketing before
finally understand why you need to have a marketing budget

------
Mulpze15
"Set up a small team of one or two strong individual contributors to take on
marketing duties."

I think a strong IC Sales + Marketing, who can work solo, generate revenue
(Sales), while thinking longer term and process (Mktg + sales op), would be a
killer.

Does it exist or am I dreaming? Anybody has such experience, seen it working
or not?

~~~
doteka
Sales by itself is a fulltime job as is marketing. That’s like looking for a
software engineer who will also take care of accounting.

~~~
CPLX
Not really. It’s not super uncommon for an early sales lead to handle basic
demand gen.

~~~
doteka
Only if you’re talking “2 pizzas can feed the entire company” stage, really.

Early stage b2b salespeople would, pre covid, spend all their time in between
customer meetings in the car on the way to next one. Hard to implement a solid
early stage marketing strategy behind the wheel.

------
presspot
It's amusing to read a bunch of people who know very little about marketing
wax philosophically about marketing

~~~
shostack
On the flip side, these threads can be fun when the people who know their
stuff share what they know and talk shop a bit.

------
aniken
Gabriel Weinberg's book Traction is a good resource in this regard. It's what
my co-founder and I used as part of our guiding principle in terms of our
basic marketing plan at the very beginning of the business, before individual
people were hired to do any marketing work.

I would recommend all technical founders read that book. If anything it gives
you a good frame or reference you can use to interview people with...

If you are going to interview a potential head of marketing, they should be
able to explain the same high level thinking that the book presents, in terms
of testing 1 or 2 channels, focusing on those channels until they are maxed
out, and then opening up or using other channels for the next phase of growth.

If a rough growth plan doesn't invoke the same concepts as the book I would be
skeptical they really know how to grow/scale a startup business properly.

On top of that, early on you should have a list of all the potential channels
that could work for your business, in order to understand from the beginning
how far you could probably scale your business, in order to make sure the
venture is worth the time and building the product isn't a waste. If based on
the uniqueness of your product, idea, service, etc there aren't many
traditional channels available (or you couldn't make them work somehow) then
that should be a warning sign.

------
lmeyerov
Roles like content marketing, ad-based leadgen, devrel, marketing strategy,
and managing a team of the above are pretty different, and the needed mix is
stage + company + funding dependent.

I think of the startup path as basically the options of:

\- Scrappy: start with content marketing / generalist for basics, potentially
via a senior VP/CMO consultant/advisor + founder, and then get a full-timer.
Bigger question is Sales or Marketing full-timer first. After content table
stakes, switches to experiments to figure out strategy (ads, devrel, viral
freemium, ...): Most bang will come from a couple things, so need someone
experienced enough to experiment to find them. If things are going well, can
get the advisor as an early superstar hire, or at least basics setup for one.

\- well-Funded and with fit: Hire someone to build the team and guide them
through experiments.

Note in both cases, someone senior in startup experience, esp for your
segment, is useful, even if as an active advisor / consultant.

A trickier q to me is when to fire the marketing lead, esp as things are still
getting figured out. Once fit is achieved, it is more of a numbers and process
game, but before then...

------
redelbee
I was an early employee at a direct response advertising agency that spent
$100m+ per year on behalf of clients, and after that I led an in-house team
for a retail brand with a $20m marketing/advertising budget.

Based on that experience I think the right agencies can fill the marketing
need quite well for startups. I think the main concern is that the knowledge
isn’t completely outsourced so there is a core of competence in the company.
In my experience it’s much easier to find solid expertise across the multitude
of marketing channels with agencies, even though it’s likely more expensive.

I like the idea of getting individual contributors first to kick things off,
but then I’d look for agencies as a next step. This could coincide with a CMO
hire because many marketers have worked with agencies in the past so they will
help in the search for the right partners.

------
mintone
Interesting. I had the reverse experience recently of joining a (global)
marketing company/agency as their first CTO - the goal being to build products
to sell. The role was very much the same as the blog post - build a team,
define tech within the org, help the rest of business and take on tasks I've
delegated for years.

I didn't get past the last one and lasted for a year - marketing isn't 'all
fluff' but it is a _very_ different beast from the tech industry and has a
relatively short term mindset. Build something in 30 days, build something
else completely after that, build something else again in the next 30 - I
burned out after a year and whilst I'm grateful for the learnings and
opportunity it afforded me, I will never stray from what I know again.

I think this is part of the disconnect we have.

------
mepiethree
This is super useful to me as someone who works for a company about to hire
our first marketer - I guess a Super IC! We are also about to hire our first
UI/UX person (people?) and I'm wondering if anyone here knows of similar
quality resources about that

~~~
jon-wood
Honestly, my best advice on hiring a UX/UI person at the sort of stage you
sound to be at is “don’t”. Get a frontend developer with an eye for design
instead - hiring someone in a UX specialism too early will just result in a
lot of unactionable reports being generated because the people actually able
to implement anything are already busy building other things.

The only exception I’d make here is if your UX person is able to implement
their suggestions themselves, without dragging people away from other work.

~~~
pembrook
This advice depends on what you’re actually building and where you’re needing
design help.

If it’s a Saas product and you aren’t able to close leads due to a lack of
product features, then sure, don’t hire someone to design what you already
don’t have the resources to build.

However, I doubt this is OP’s problem. I’m guessing they already have some
traction, and are having customer complaints about the general usability or
are losing to more polished competitors. In this case, it’s stupid not to
bring in specialist design help.

Hiring more construction workers to work on a poorly architected building
won’t suddenly make it more appealing to tenants. If the architecture is the
problem, hire an architect!

~~~
mepiethree
we are indeed the latter case! We are B2B and have a good amount of clients
for one of our services but for others we just have to deliver reports with
screenshots of our tool since it's a pain in the ass to work with. 12
engineers but no one with any training on how to make things intuitive and
delightful. Probably planning to contract with a UX person but flying blind on
what skills to look for

------
Putintseva
Thank you for the article! it fits me with all aspects. now I am working on a
startup and responsiblefor marketing. I have a lot of work ams sometimes I
even don't know what to do at first. so your article help me better understand
where I am now and where I am moving. Marketing without budget is not a
marketing. You are right here at 100%!

------
hrktb
Slighty off topic, but how do these companies chose their upper level titles ?

Thought the article there’s mention of chiefs, coaches, managers, and I kinda
wonder why for marketing it comes out to be a “head”.

Naively it feels like a head -> body image with a strong top down connotation,
people below that role becoming string puppets to the “brain”.

~~~
marcinzm
I've seen Head of X across the board in startups and not just in marketing.
Head of X is a role description that does not tie to a traditional corporate
hierarchy level (CXO, Director, VP, etc.). It conveys that they are in charge
of X which is important for external parties to understand when communicating
with them. They may be a Director but still Head of X. But if you see Director
of X you assume there's a VP of X who is really in charge but in a startup
that may not be the case. Head of X is also flexible enough that if you hire
someone over them one day it doesn't feel like a demotion or require
contortions with titles (SVP, etc.).

~~~
hrktb
Thanks. If I understand correctly, it’s a position roughly equivalent to
“Lead” but without assumption that there is a team behind nor of any official
hierarchical position.

Still feels weird if you have both a COO and a “Head of operations”, but I
guess that’s a complex situation to start with.

~~~
marcinzm
Usually Head of X translates into a manager position although they may have no
team. So it's like the manager version of a lead.

>Still feels weird if you have both a COO and a “Head of operations”, but I
guess that’s a complex situation to start with.

It's fairly common to have a CTO and a Head of Engineering but I'm not sure if
there's that sort of responsibility split on operations as well. In the eng
case, the HoE generally focuses on team management while the CTO focuses on
strategy/architecture/whatever. Often the case when the CTO is a founder and
no one wants to remove their title but they're not scaling as a manager.

------
rajacombinator
Are there really startups that don’t think about marketing any more? Not many.

------
inthewoods
So much to digest in the article and the comments - not sure where to begin.
As background, I've been running marketing teams for high tech B2B companies
for about 12 years. This will be just a rambling set of thoughts that come to
me on a Saturday night. So, with that caveat, a few things in the article jump
out at me:

\- Marketing leadership tenure is definitely short. Average lifespan for a CMO
is supposedly 23 months. I can see it. The great irony about this is that I'll
often hear people say, about a marketing leader's resume, is that "it has a
lot of short stays" \- showing that they are relatively unaware of the
dynamics of the role.

\- The kind of marketer you hire depends a lot on the size of your company and
your go-to-market motion. As the author correctly points out, at the
beginning, you are better off hiring a performance marketer, content marketer,
or product marketer - depending on your product and the problems you're trying
to solve.

\- If you're selling an enterprise software product, you should probably hire
a product marketer first to support that team, especially since attracting
enterprise clients generally doesn't come from, say content marketing or, say,
SEM. That's not saying it doesn't happen - it does, but it just far less
common.

\- If you're selling a solution that can be bought off the website, then you
should probably start with a content marketer or performance marketer. If the
ASP is low, then these are likely a requirement for the business to work -
marketing is your sales team.

\- In my experience, you generally hire a VP or CMO when you've reached
somewhere around $10m in revenue. I've typically been brought in here.

\- Usually, the founders will tell you that they really care about brand and
perception in the market. Don't fall for it. All they care about is leads.

\- As a marketer joining a company, what I think you should be looking for is
a company and product that has a clear mission, and clear sense of who they
are marketing to. If you don't have these, as a marketer, you'll just about
always fail (and I've had that experience). There are, of course, exceptions -
some companies do create a new product category, but most of the time you're
going into an existing market.

\- Be extremely skeptical of the founder saying they are forming a new market
- most of the time it means that they really don't have a buyer or budget, or
that they exist "In between" product categories which can be extremely
challenging because you'll be competing against product in multiple categories
with functionality deficiencies that can make it very hard to win. Maybe just
as important, it will be incredibly hard for you to create compelling
messaging around such a product.

\- The most common situation I see is this: company has achieved decent
product/market fit, and has grown to approximately $3-5m using primarily
content marketing. However, it's largely tapped out. This isn't always the
case - if a startup is going after a very horizontal, broad market, that has a
large online audience, then these strategies can scale much better. But my
experience is with high tech, B2B companies - often very "niche" \- so they
tap out. The solution that the founder have come to, along with their Board,
is that they need to build a real marketing team. So they're bringing in a VP
of Marketing to "fix it" and allow them to continue the growth required to
validate their valuation.

This is a dangerous place for a marketing leader. The expectations are
incredibly high, and you don't know what marketing can really do to help.
Again, the founders will sell you on brand, etc - but it's all about the
leads. This situation is often the reason for high marketing leadership
turnover. They need leads, they bring in a VP, she or he tries to scale it
through other channels like events, outbound, etc - and doesn't see enough
success in the extremely short window and they are shown the door.

One other interesting thing often happens in these situations - as the VP of
Marketing, you bring actual measurement tools/analytics that allow you to
precisely measure what is working and what is not. And then you find out that
the metrics they were using were bullshit and the situation is even harder
than you thought.

\- Marketing leaders are shown the door because they often come up with
marketing strategy/tactics/messaging that the founders just don't agree with.
The leader may be right, or the founder may be right - but these conflicts
make for quick exits. Founders can be extremely stubborn, and some may suffer
the dreaded "I've been successful in this one area, and now I feel I am a
master of all areas."

\- Marketing leaders are shown the door because they don't know what they're
doing. You need a very broad skill set in my opinion to be a successful VP at
a startup - understanding everything from analyst relations, to SEO, to how
run marketing automation and a huge amount of other technology. I've had
friends at startups talk to me about their new VP of Marketing who didn't
understand how browser cookies worked. That guy did not last long.

\- East coast vs. west coast high tech marketing is night and day. West Coast
have a go big or go home approach. They will spend 5-10x current revenue on
marketing with the intention of just dominating that market. East coast
companies almost always have much more conservative approach. I've seen
companies succeed and fail with both.

\- In my experience with, again, relatively niche B2B high tech solution,
Google Ads words and most paid spend produce results that make it difficult to
justify the spend. I'll couch this by saying that I'm sure there are successes
out there, and that maybe I just suck at it, but I've done it across multiple
companies and have rarely seen truly scalable success. I think you're better
off figuring out how to get your content spread as far and wide as possible
vs. paid digital spend.

This is all, obviously, my experience - your mileage may vary! Ramble over,
comments welcome.

~~~
paulstovell
This comment really resonated with me - I’m a founder of a company which hit
$10m a couple of years ago, we’ve been through two heads of marketing with no
success, and everything you wrote is spot on with my experience. Thanks for
posting it.

~~~
inthewoods
Assuming you're guy (and company) behind Octopus Deploy, I get it - I've
marketed a DevOps-oriented tool, and it's more challenging than most.
Developers generally want to be left alone with the product, and while things
like events can sometimes work, they're more about brand awareness than sales.
I would guess that content marketing is you best channel - with your
documentation possibly being a great source. Thanks for the comment and glad
it helped someone! :)

------
staysaasy
Nice article. On a semi-related topic, I find that one mistake that folks make
is buying into the "hype" around Head of Sales / Marketing candidates. The
first thing that these people learn how to market or sell is themselves, and
even mediocre ones can usually present themselves and their backgrounds really
well. There are great people out there but be careful!

