Why the First Startup Marketing Hire Usually Fails
Because founders hire “a marketer” instead of the right kind of marketer
Founders ask me this question a lot: What should I look for in my first marketing hire? Too often, early startup marketing hires fail, and founders know that.
The failure usually shows up in one of two ways:
The founder hires a marketer to focus on messaging, and then disappears, assuming positioning is now “handled.” It isn’t. Messaging requires the founder’s ongoing involvement, especially when the product is still evolving.
The founder hires a marketer to drive pipeline before they have product-market fit or positioning. Spending $$ on distributing a sub-optimal message is $$ down the drain.
Marketing is different from almost every other function you’ll hire for. It’s a function with several distinct sub-disciplines.
In sales, the rep in New York is doing the same job as the rep in London. In engineering, yes, you have specialties, but a senior engineer in one stack can usually ramp on another. Marketing doesn’t work that way.
Under the marketing umbrella you have product marketing, communications, demand generation, marketing ops, and design. These are distinct skill sets. Hiring a great demand gen person and expecting them to also own your messaging strategy is like hiring a great radiologist and expecting them to see patients in the emergency room. They’re both doctors. One diagnoses; the other treats. You would not want them to switch.
So when a founder asks me “should I hire a VP or a more junior do-er?” I usually push back on the question. The more important question is: which flavor of marketing do you actually need right now?
AI has changed this a bit. Senior marketers can do more (and should be expected to do more) than ever before. One person with the right instincts and good AI tooling can cover ground that used to require a team. But it hasn’t collapsed all the disciplines into one. It’s mostly made good marketers faster.
Product marketing vs Demand generation
For most early-stage B2B startups, it usually comes down to two options: someone with a product marketing background, or someone with a demand generation background.
The case for starting with product marketing
Founders are often better at positioning than they realize. You sold the early deals. You know the domain. You’ve had the customer conversations. The problem isn’t that there’s no story, it’s that the story lives in your head and nowhere else.
Take Charity Majors, the founder and CTO of Honeycomb, as an example. Charity didn’t just build a product. She invented a category, using the term observability as early as 2016 to describe and differentiate Honeycomb from simplistic monitoring tools.
That’s product marketing at its best, and it happened because someone with deep domain knowledge spent lots of time thinking about the problem, speaking with customers, and even writing an entire book on the topic.
You may think that I’m making the case for founders to lead product marketing. And I do think founders are best positioned to drive messaging. But hiring a product marketer can make sense as long as the founder stays involved. For example:
A product marketer can help get the story out of the founder’s head and into a format the rest of the company can actually use: website copy, sales decks, one-pagers, competitive battlecards.
A product marketing hire is a good fit if your product is evolving quickly. In the early days, when what you’re selling can change substantially from quarter to quarter, a product marketer can own the process of keeping messaging up to date and aligned across all the teams that are customer-facing.
A product marketer is also a great fit if you are scaling your sales team. Sales will demand sales collateral and provide constant feedback on positioning based on their customer conversations.
The biggest failure mode is the founder who hands off positioning and then disappears. Messaging is not a one-time exercise. The market evolves, competitors shift, you learn things from customer conversations that should feed back into the story.
Charity was inspired by the term observability as it was being used in another domain (hardware) and then “spent a couple of years trying to work out how that definition might apply to software systems.” Yes, it took years for her to nail the messaging. So don’t expect to solve positioning over night.
The case for starting with demand generation (or a growth marketer)
If product marketing is about what you say, demand generation is about getting people to actually hear it. Running campaigns, testing channels, driving traffic to your website, and filling the funnel is the job of a demand gen marketer. Content, events, webinars, digital channels, whatever combination works.
Some founders take this role a step further and hire a growth marketer. In addition to running campaigns, a growth marketer will also be working on optimizing the product itself, seeing the first-time user experience as an extension of the marketing funnel. This profile typically makes sense in a company with a product-led growth approach.
The best growth marketers share a trait: they experiment constantly, kill what doesn’t work fast, and double down hard when something does. They are allergic to running the same playbook quarter after quarter regardless of results.
Product marketing builds the message, and demand generation distributes it. For that reason, demand generation typically builds on product marketing.
This is the right hire if:
Your messaging is somewhat stable you’ve got product-market fit, customers who get what you do and love it, but you need more of them to know you exist, and/or
You’re a founder who stays deeply hands-on with messaging and needs someone to build and run the distribution engine.
So which profile should I hire?
Start with the problem. What’s actually blocking you? If everyone’s confused about what you do, hire a product marketer to refine the message. If everyone who hears about you loves it but almost nobody has heard of you, hire a growth marketer to drive awareness.
And if someone suggests you hire a VP who will “oversee all of marketing” before you even have a team, just know that what you’re actually getting is someone who manages. What you need, at this stage, is someone who does things.
More on this topic
I recently co-authored a post for the Ansa blog When (and how) should I make my first marketing hire? with my long time friend and former MongoDB colleague Justin Dunham. Justin now runs an agency called ércule that helps startups build organic and content marketing. Watch the Ansa blog as this is the first in a series on this topic.
Ansa and Base10 are co-hosting a breakfast event for founders at Base10’s San Francisco offices, where Justin and I will be talking about this topic, along with Austin Lau from Anthropic. You can apply to attend here.