Most early-stage SaaS companies get marketing wrong before they ever hire their first marketer. Not because the founders are bad at business, but because the conventional advice on when to invest in marketing, who to hire, and what to build first is largely disconnected from how early-stage companies actually work.
This series is about fixing that.
Over the next several posts I will cover the decisions that matter most in the first 12 to 24 months of building a marketing function, based on 19 years of doing exactly that across nine startups. Some of those companies made it. Some didn’t. All of them taught me something useful.
The topics will cover GTM strategy, ICP development, demand generation, pipeline building, and the hiring decisions that accelerate or stall growth. Not frameworks. Not theory. Specific things that work, and a few that don’t.
If you are a founder trying to figure out when to make your first marketing hire, a CEO wondering why pipeline isn’t growing the way it should, or a marketing leader at an early-stage company trying to build something that actually scales, this series is written for you.
The first post goes up next week.
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