Every founder hits the point where they can’t do the marketing themselves anymore. Revenue is coming in, the product works, and they’re tired of writing ad copy at midnight. So they post a job.
That first hire goes wrong a lot, and usually it’s because the role was set up badly from the start.
The two common mistakes
Hiring too senior. A founder brings in a VP of marketing with a big-company resume. That person is used to setting strategy and handing the work to a team. At a young company there is no team, the budget is small, and the strategy depends on experiments nobody has run yet. A few months in, they’re frustrated, and so is the founder.
Hiring too junior. The opposite move is to hire someone early in their career who’s good at social media and hope they figure out the rest. They can post consistently. It isn’t fair to expect them to decide where the budget goes, build a measurement system or tell the founder when an idea is wrong.
Both mistakes come from hiring against a title. Start with the work in front of the company right now.
Figure out which layer you need
I think about demand in layers: capture, proof and brand. Each one needs different skills, and most companies need them in that order.
If you can’t yet predict where next quarter’s customers will come from, your first hire is a capture hire. You need someone who can run paid channels, read the numbers and judge them by closed revenue. Look for someone who is comfortable in a spreadsheet and talks to the sales team every week.
If capture is working but deals stall because buyers don’t trust you yet, you need someone who can build proof. That person interviews customers, writes case studies and builds the materials sales actually uses.
Brand is rarely the first hire. It matters a great deal, but it’s hard to build before there’s a working engine and real customer stories to tell.
Hire for the job the company has this year, and let the role grow from there.
Do it yourself first
I’d push most founders to run marketing themselves for longer than feels comfortable. You don’t need to be good at it. You need to understand it well enough to recognize good work when you’re hiring for it.
A founder who has run a few campaigns, asked customers why they bought and seen what a qualified lead looks like will write a much better job description. They’ll also know within a month or two whether the hire is working.
Consider the other options
Sometimes the right first move is to skip the hire. An agency or a part-time senior leader can cover several skills while you learn what you actually need. I run an agency, so take that with a grain of salt. Still, a lot of early marketing work needs a few specialists for a few hours each, which is hard to find in one full-time person.
Whoever you bring in, measure them on revenue and make sure they talk to sales constantly. Without that, you can end up with a busy marketing function and the same pipeline you had before.
Get the first hire right and the second gets much easier, because by then you’ll know what the company actually needs.
