The first marketing hire survival guide

In recent months, I've had many friends take on roles and startups where they're the first marketing hire. The first marketing hire is probably the biggest challenge in our industry. You are ostensibly being hired to do marketing, but in reality the role turns out to be quite different. You are being hired to find out who the customer is.

Nobody knows who the customer is

Many times, in this stage, founders think they are at the customer creation stage and the scale stage, but typically they're still in the customer discovery stage.

That distinction matters because the job is completely different. If you are in the customer creation stage, you are taking a mature product with a mature positioning and a mature understanding of how to find new customers, and you are, to put it simply, finding new customers.

But when you're the first marketing hire, it turns out more frequently you are in the customer discovery stage. You are trying to understand who is the best fit in the market for this product. The elusive "product-market fit."

This has happened to me before. I wasn't technically the first marketer, but I joined a startup that thought it understood what their product was and who their customer was. In reality, they did not. The product was indeed quite awesome. It was a very sexy demo. But they were never able to find customers who cared about it. Customers found the demo quite interesting, and then struggled to find a reason to use the product in their company. This was repeated ad nauseam for the 18 months that I was at that startup.

If you are the first marketer in a startup, you need to truly understand which job you're taking on, because your success in the role will depend on those first 48 hours.

What the first 48 hours are actually for

You need to go talk to customers. Five customer or prospect conversations, read 90 days' worth of support tickets, and sit in on as many sales calls as you can where you say absolutely nothing.

As you observe, you will learn a few things:

1. Do customers parrot the language you're using to describe the product, and the ways they plan to use the feature in their company?
2. Do salespeople spend time having to explain why the product could be useful?
3. What are the pain points that customers say they have, and do these pain points map to capabilities of the product?

In short, you are trying to gauge whether there is pull for your product or whether your product needs to be pushed.

If there's pull for your product, then you are past product-market fit and you are doing the customer creation job. If not, then you are doing the customer discovery job.

The one-page document

Once you know what kind of job you're doing, you need to create the one-page document. This is a simple document that you can use to help you understand the market and circulate it broadly within the company. I go deep on this in Picks and Shovels, but your first attempt does not need to be right. It needs to exist so you can improve it. It will consist of:

• a list of the customers that you interviewed
• the key takeaways
• the product-level perception: how customers perceive the product
• which features resonated the most

You are not passing judgment on which stage the company is in. Rather, you are reflecting and synthesizing what you heard customers say.

And then you will use this document to have conversations with leadership across the company to ensure that everyone is on the same page about the stage the company is in (customer discovery or customer creation), who the customer is, and the path going forward.

By the end of those conversations, the company should be able to answer three questions:

1. Who is this for? Be specific. Not "developers." Which developers? Working on what? At what kind of company? In what situation?
2. What does it do? One sentence. If you can't say it in one sentence, you don't understand it yet.
3. Why does it matter? What changes for the customer? What can they do now that they couldn't do before? What pain goes away?

The founder's half of this

It is the founder's job to protect the first marketing hire's first week. The founder needs to be the one who says "we are not ready to do marketing yet" when everyone else is clamoring for event sponsorships and social media ads. The founder needs to be the one who says "we are not ready to do marketing yet" when the sales team wants to start selling. The founder needs to be the one who says "we are not ready to do marketing yet" when the product team wants to start building.

You will very quickly know as a marketer whether your founder understands marketing at this exact stage. The founder doesn't have to be a marketing expert, but they do have to empathize with the marketing challenge. If they are in denial about what that challenge actually is, it's better that you know that now.

What not to do in week one

So far, I haven't written anything about writing a marketing doc, a strategy doc, a marketing plan, or anything else like that. You certainly haven't put together an event sponsorship plan. You certainly haven't started redoing the website. You certainly haven't dug into the onboarding emails. There will be plenty of time for that, but right now your job is to understand which of these two situations you have stepped into.

From there, you can begin to accumulate the buy-in that you will need eventually to sell your marketing plan.

Because, trust me on this: if you and the founder disagree about which stage the customer is actually in, you are probably not alone in the company. As the new person, you will find it very difficult to sway the founder, and so you need to build support.

The isolation nobody warns you about

As I mentioned before, this is the hardest job in marketing. You're the only marketer. You have no peers, no gut check. Every decision feels like high stakes because there's nobody else to test it against. There's nobody else in your corner, so you need to do the work to get people there and to see the world the way you see it. As I have written many times, the essence of marketing is leadership, and you need to lead the organization down the right path with a shared understanding.

What month one is supposed to produce

Month one is all about customer understanding. Focus on that, and you can set yourself up for a very successful month two and beyond. If you get sucked into the vortex of building marketing programs and marketing content before you understand your customer situation, you will be in for a bad time. The problem won't be that the company is in a different stage than you thought. It will be that your expectations and leadership's have drifted apart.

It's totally fine to be the first marketer in a company that does not yet have product-market fit. In fact, you can be quite successful at this, but you need to know early on and you need to get buy-in that everyone else agrees that this is the stage that you're in.