How to survive solo marketing at a startup

So you’re the first marketing hire at a startup. Welcome to the pit; it’s going to be a rollercoaster and will test your patience in ways that will mostly make you grow as a person. This is a gauntlet of earning trust, moving quickly, and being accountable for your actions and outcomes.

Here’s how to not lose your mind.

Move immediately on day one

Map out your skill graph. You were hired because you’re especially good at something and ok at a few other things, so get some early wins. Engineers at early stage startups are expected to get changes in within the first day of showing up (usually to docs or some minor fix). You should hold yourself to that as a marketer as well.

With the tools accessible to you in the market, these are all now achievable on your first day:

• Product: Ship minor docs changes to increase visibility on some important feature that was buried
• Content: Do a sweep on something that was under-promoted and create an article or newsletter for it
• Demand Gen: Optimize an SEO pillar article that has gone stale
• Brand: If there’s an existing design system, assemble existing elements into new creatives more aligned with your taste (don’t generate new creatives from nothing)
• Ops: Do an audit of what tracking exists and where the gaps are, it is most likely broken or sprawling

Personally, I prefer to get into the product-side early to get immersed quickly. I run through the onboarding flow and take notes on how I felt. You will never get this opportunity again, so I use this time wisely to become more knowledgeable and develop opinions without influence from the team.

The goal isn’t necessarily to make a giant impactful change, but rather an important optical play to show that you move quickly. Odds are, your founder has seen someone with your job title spend too much time evaluating and creating strategy docs that never bore fruit, so you’ll want to break expectations here.

What about strategy?

Your job in the first week is to make incremental changes and observe. You want to watch how the company operates and what the weaknesses are. You’re trying to figure out what your company hasn’t done yet and sometimes that involves scouring the Notion archives to pick apart a bunch abandoned documents.

You will be respected a lot more by declaring your findings after some good internal research and shipping a bunch of small changes rather than declaring strategy too quickly.

Don’t use playbooks

This is the biggest pitfall for marketers, salespeople, or anyone in GTM really. Unless you are moving to a job in exactly the same product space, you need to reevaluate your methods. Do not assume that your ad strategy, SEO strategy, and positioning strategy will work the same way. Even in similar companies, the ICP can be different in nuanced ways that aren’t immediately obvious on face value. Success is one of the worst teachers, as it tells you to repeat things and not experiment.

I was once asked to develop a self-serve motion for a company that really needed an enterprise motion. I’d spent a lot of time developing a playbook for how to do community/product-led growth, so I tried applying it. Naturally it didn’t produce the outcomes that we expected. Had I joined with no playbook, I would have gotten to the answer a lot sooner, which was that we needed the traditional B2B path.

Metrics and accountability

You will be defined by your ability to drive signups and revenue; do not avoid this. Often your company’s internet footprint is low enough that you need to run awareness campaigns to get stuff off the ground first, but understand that it will always come back to signups and revenue. As a marketer, start with signups first.

Address it from the beginning and create a dashboard that tracks the number of non-gmail signups to your product. Advertise this dashboard to everyone and give updates on it twice a month, good or bad. The more you communicate this, the more your company and founders will naturally be trained to expect both good and bad times. If you are the one to bring up signups dropping off a cliff, it will go over way better than if it is independently discovered.

I personally post a weekly update of things that have shipped to keep myself accountable to reduce the opacity on what I have going on. The goal isn’t to have radical transparency but just enough so that people can at least describe what you do.

Golden rule: Do not publicly give repeated updates on long-running tasks. The optics of this read as you are not making progress, even if you are.

Everything, everywhere, all at once

You’ll benefit from appearing like you’re everywhere rather than spending a lot of money on one channel. Partner with a bunch of small creators, do work that doesn’t scale with companies that you have relationships with, and address every ad delivery medium. I know that I’m doing my job right when I hear “I’ve been seeing you guys everywhere these days.” This is easier with a higher budget, but if you’re limited on cash, you need to get creative.

Send customers unforgettable objects or swag. Wear ridiculous colors at meetups and conferences. Act immediately when someone presents an idea. Breaking expectations is memorable.

Your founder is an overflowing well of progress

In the same way that you have some super powers that make you specifically good at what you do, your founders will have the same quality. Maybe they are especially funny on social media. Maybe they have gotten dangerously good at recording podcasts. Or maybe they are extremely well connected and accidentally know everyone. If you lean into your founder’s strengths and help them with logistics, they will likely end up as your best converting medium. Yes, they have a lot going on, but every single founder I’ve worked with put aside time to help out with marketing when there was a clear ask.

If you build a routine of giving them impactful work and showing them the results, they will take time out of their day to work for you. Ask for their time with confidence and earn trust in proving that it was worth it.

Your founder is an overflowing well of ideas

You need to learn how to say no to your founder. Because they are in the nucleus of the operation, they see everything and will have the deepest and most fleshed out ideas. Conversely, because they are in the nucleus of the operation, they are steeped too strongly in the company soup and will often struggle to view the world from the outside. You simply cannot act on all of these things, but you must act on a few of them. Multiple founders I’ve worked with have gotten excited that I actually say no to them, as it shows that I have strong convictions.

Write all of their ideas down, do the most impactful ones, and report on the outcomes. By actually acting on their high-impact ideas, they will view you as a curator and will start implicitly respecting your judgment while also getting to see their ideas come to life.

Some basic Do’s/Don’ts with AI

Do: Have an agent scan all of the company’s internet presence for opportunities and weaknesses.

Don’t: Provide large text bombs of AI-generated output for people to read. Respect your coworkers’ time and summarize its output.

Do: Have agents create marketing assets from existing assets and design frameworks.

Don’t: Generate something from nothing. As mentioned above, AI is best at cobbling together existing systems and coalescing ideas, not pure creative generation.

Do: Set up automated scanning for opportunities. Create autonomous agents that scan for events, newsletters to advertise on, podcasts to advertise on, things for your founder(s) to be a part of.

Don’t: Build when buying is clearly the right option. Make internal tools when blocked, but the maintenance of managing a home-brewed CRM or BI tool will be overwhelming.

Use AI to question everything, audit everything, and unblock you logistically. The moment you start baking it into strategic work streams, its training set will take you down paths of least resistance, which are usually wrong for startups.

A game of trust

The battle that you are fighting is that everyone has opinions on marketing. If you aren’t gaining trust in your ability to strategize, other people will start doing it for you. Establish trust early by moving quickly, be publicly accountable for your work, and don’t setup busywork for yourself that prevents you from innovating.