Smart, early-stage startup founders often ask similar questions about hiring their first marketer:
- “We need a growth leader who’s ‘done it before.’ Where do we meet one?”
- “We need help with big-picture, strategic marketing questions, but we also need to execute fast. How do we do both with our limited resources?”
- “We need multiple, distinct marketing skill sets to beat our growth goals. How do we find someone with the right combination of talents?”
Sound familiar? Unfortunately, there’s no one-size-fits-all answer for how to find that unicorn growth hire. But by giving careful thought to the considerations described here, you can save yourself a lot of time (and money) as you navigate this process.
Get clear on the different types of “growth” skill sets
“Growth” positions at startups can mean a lot of different things depending on who you ask. Most commonly, founders use the term to refer to one of these four types of roles:
Generalist marketer
This role represents the classic “marketing manager” skill set, someone familiar with a relatively broad range of marketing tactics.
Founders looking to hire for this type of role often fall into one of 3 camps:
- “We have a long list of marketing & growth ideas, and we have a hunch that executing on these ideas will help our company grow.” The risk here is the possibility that these hunches are wrong.
- “We’ve already started to execute on our marketing ideas, we have some evidence that our approach is working, and we want someone to build on what we’ve started.” This scenario forms a stronger case for hiring a generalist marketer.
- “We’re having trouble communicating what we do in a way that resonates with our customers. We hope a marketing manager can solve your problems.” If you haven’t yet identified messaging that works, that may point to a need to solidify your product-market fit before hiring a marketer.
Vast ranges of backgrounds, strengths, and weaknesses exist among generalist marketers. The better you understand exactly which specific skills you need, the more likely you are to find someone who checks the right boxes for your startup.
Growth marketing or performance marketing
Conventional growth marketing roles at later-stage companies tend to focus on optimization. How can we squeeze another 15% out of our paid media budget? How can we improve our email drip campaigns to convert more of the users who enter our funnel? What A/B or multivariate tests can we run on our pricing page to increase revenue?
When you’re first launching your marketing function, optimization is rarely the goal. The goal is to build a customer acquisition machine from the ground up, not to incrementally improve existing growth mechanisms.
Growth marketing skill sets do, however, have a role to play at early-stage startups. If paid ads will be an important growth channel for your company, you need support from someone with experience running paid ads. Same story for any other performance marketing channel that might be key to your company's growth.
Regardless of your specific growth model, it’s invaluable to have someone deeply familiar with the mechanics of a high-converting funnel, as well as with the analytics infrastructure necessary to measure and improve your funnel’s performance.
Generalist marketers often have some experience with certain growth marketing tactics, but the depth and breadth of this experience vary widely, so don’t make assumptions based on someone’s past job titles.
Product-oriented growth
As with growth marketing roles, the focuses of growth product roles at mature startups differ greatly from those at younger startups. A scale-up’s growth team might have an entire squad focused on boosting the conversion rate of a checkout or login page. Discussions of “growth hacking” tend to emphasize similar, incremental tweaks.
Incremental “growth hacks” have limited value for young startups. Product folks focused on growth need to take much larger swings at this early stage.
While elements of growth thinking — funnels, user psychology, analytics, emerging platforms, conversion rates — remain core to this work, optimization like you see at scale-ups has little value at this stage.
With the increasing popularity of product-led growth, another common misstep is considering product-led growth tactics separately from the core product. If PLG is truly going to be a key driver for your company, it needs to be central to your product strategy, not something you tack on later.
Of course, while PLG can be incredibly powerful, it doesn’t need to be part of every company’s growth model (and not all products are well-suited to PLG).
Some — but not all — growth marketers have experience working in product-oriented growth. Again, don’t make assumptions about a candidate without digging in further.
Sales or business development
We sometimes see sales or business development roles at early startups described as “growth” roles. Yes, salespeople have their place in growing startups’ revenue, especially at B2B companies. Others have written in more depth about making your first sales hire, so we won’t cover it here.
Validate channels to identify exactly which skills you need
Understanding what type of growth role you’re hiring for is a great start, but it’s usually not sufficient. Within the realm of marketing roles, a huge range of skills exist, and candidates vary widely in their strengths and weaknesses.
More-experienced founders sometimes launch new startups with strong hypotheses about their distribution models — and if this is you, you may already know which skill sets you need.
But if you don’t yet have this conviction in which distribution model is going to work for your startup, you should strongly consider validating growth channels before making your first marketing or growth hire.
Starting with channel validation reduces the risk of wasting substantial time and money on the wrong person.
How startups can validate growth channels before hiring full-time
We may cover more tactical details about how to validate growth channels in a future post. But for now, know that at a high level, there are 3 ways to go about this ahead of hiring a full-time employee.
1) Hire a traditional marketing agency
No mincing words here: hiring a traditional marketing agency is usually a terrible way to validate growth channels.
Why? The business model of any marketing agency involves repeating the same set of marketing tasks over and over again for different clients. This model is the only way an agency can reach any meaningful scale.
That’s all well and good once your startup has established its growth model and is ready to start scaling it up.
The problem is that seed-stage startups are often still building conviction in which growth model is going to work for them. You need lots of different skills to try lots of different tactics — not just the one skill a given agency happens to be good at.
Agencies — especially smaller, more startup-friendly ones — that claim to be able to deliver in lots of different areas of marketing are usually bluffing. Best case, these agencies do one thing well. Worst case, they can’t do anything well.
2) Founders (or other members of the early team) validate channels themselves
Finding the right distribution model is key to any startup’s success, and it’s a valuable place for founders to spend their limited time.
This approach can work especially well for teams with more time than money.
Growth is not rocket science, and many smart folks can figure out what they need to at early stages with enough internet research. The main risks are:
- There’s way more junk marketing content online than quality marketing content, and it’s sometimes hard to tell the difference
- Doing it yourself requires a ton of trial-and-error; don’t underestimate the amount of time involved
- False negatives are always possible. Without experience, it can be hard to know whether your experiment failed because the channel isn’t the right fit for your business — or because you made mistakes in how you executed the experiment.
Founders leaning towards this DIY approach can reduce these risks by obtaining advisory support from an experienced practitioner. Bowery Growth sometimes works with pre-seed founders in this type of capacity.
3) Hire a specialized consultancy or a fractional CMO / head of growth
Some consultants with prior experience as the first growth or marketing hire at a startup offer this type of channel validation as a service.
If you’re looking to hire a consultant along these lines, make sure that:
- They’re willing and able to help with actual execution, not just strategy recommendations. Not all consultants are willing to “get their hands dirty.”
- They truly specialize in working with startups at the same size and stage as yours. Experience at name-brand scale-ups or public companies may look nice on a LinkedIn profile, but it’s not particularly helpful at this stage.
- They have existing networks to source whatever skills you need. Nobody can do everything, but the right growth leader needs to be able to close any gaps quickly — and on a scrappy budget.
Shameless plug: all Bowery Growth does is work with early-stage startups on piloting their marketing programs. We specialize in helping founders quickly validate growth channels before making full-time marketing hires, handling both strategy and execution.
Since we’re not an agency, we use a high-touch model and only accept a very limited number of clients. As a result, our pricing also tends to be higher compared with agencies.
Moving on…
Common profiles for a startup’s first marketing or growth employee
The seasoned executive
Well-capitalized startups (and/or those willing to hand over double-digit equity percentages) sometimes turn to a true veteran to lead their go-to-market efforts.
These folks have a decade or more of experience in CMO-type roles, deep industry experience, and an extensive network of relevant connections.
Founders often seek these sorts of hires when:
- The candidate's experience, industry knowledge, and connections will truly make-or-break the startup’s success
- The founding team lacks this type of background
Unless you also have the budget to hire a team around this executive, it’s essential to ensure this individual is willing and able to roll up her sleeves and execute. Many executives aren’t… especially if they’re accustomed to leading large teams at large organizations.
The emerging leader
This profile is the most sought-after among early-stage startups — and often the hardest to find.
The “emerging leader” has previously played a key role in growing an organization, starting at a similar stage to where yours is now.
Ideally, they’ve performed this work with formal management responsibilities, but either way, they’ve demonstrated impressive leadership that was key to their previous startup’s success.
Founders often also seek someone with experience working in the same industry as their startup.
What makes these leaders so hard to hire is:
- Most startups don’t achieve break-out growth. There are only so many folks who’ve led growth at the winners, especially if you’re narrowly focused on hiring from a specific industry vertical. Folks with this background have a ton of opportunities, even in weaker job markets.
- Succeeding in a zero-to-one marketing or growth role at a young company is extremely demanding. Those who truly understand what it takes to win may not have the appetite to repeat this process — especially when they can earn higher salaries at more-stable, later-stage companies.
The early-career hustler
In this situation, you’re emphasizing potential rather than track record. Hopefully, the candidate has some relevant experience, but you’re banking on their ability to learn quickly, figure stuff out, and adapt.
This route works best when your early-career employee has access to formal mentorship from more experienced professionals. Don’t leave this part to the employee to figure out! As a founder, your network and resources better equip you to find an exceptional marketing advisor to work with your team.
Without access to the right resources, even the smartest, early-career employees may try to “re-invent the wheel” at times. Why waste time solving problems that others have already solved? First-principles thinking has its place in growth — but only when applied to areas of the field that will truly give your company a unique advantage.
As with other types of early-stage marketing roles, honing in on key aptitudes is useful here. How important are technical abilities? Proficiency with data? Writing skills? Knack for design?
The transitioner
Sometimes, folks at larger tech companies — or from industries like finance or consulting — will look to early-stage growth roles as a means of transitioning into the startup world.
Before hiring someone with this type of background, the questions you need to answer are:
- Are they resilient enough to handle the ambiguity of an early-stage startup environment? Even at the best-run startups, stuff changes fast, and everyone onboard needs to roll with the punches.
- Are they willing and able to get their hands dirty? Having good ideas about growth strategy means little without execution, and the pace of execution should be much faster than at older companies.
- Are they scrappy? If someone’s used to working at a larger organization, getting stuff done without dedicated resources handling each functional area may be an adjustment.
Don’t be swayed by impressive, brand-name companies on a resume, and don’t be swayed by a candidate’s polish.
By digging deeper in an interview, you can see how well they understand (or can figure out) the nitty-gitty details about how marketing work actually gets done.
Making your marketing or growth role attractive to a talented candidate
Sell your company vision
If you’ve gotten this far, you already know the importance of explaining your company’s vision in a compelling way to candidates. Many great marketers are storytellers by trade, so they’ll be especially attentive to how you frame your startup’s journey.
Clarity on what you’re seeking
Maybe you’ve gotten some strong signals on which distribution channels are working for you, and you need someone to take them to the next level. Maybe you’re still figuring out your growth model.
Either way, it’s important to be honest — to yourself and to the candidate — about where things stand.
The worst-case scenario for an ambitious professional is being brought in to execute on specific channels that won’t actually lead to the company growing. This can happen either because founders have committed to the wrong channels or because the company doesn’t yet have product-market fit.
Growth trajectory for the role
As with hiring for any role, it’s useful to map out possibilities for how the candidate could expand their skills and responsibilities as your company grows.
Details will obviously change — that’s the nature of startups — but painting a picture of how things could unfold demonstrates that you’re invested in helping your employees succeed.
Transparency on your company
Great marketers dive deep into the numbers and assumptions underlying your business model.
You’re better aware than anyone of the risks and uncertainties that will inform your company’s success. That’s fine!
Being transparent with the candidate about the knowns and unknowns will build trust — and this context will equip them to help you solve some of these challenges.
Transparency on your offer
Blind promises about the future value of an employee’s equity no longer fly for smart employees.
Anyone paying attention is well-aware of how down rounds, liquidation preferences, 90-day exercise windows, and illiquidity affect startup employees’ financial prospects.
Working in startups requires an optimistic mindset, but be real about what you’re offering. Employees’ incentives are very different from yours as a founder.
Get an outside opinion
Knowing how well your job description communicates the factors described above can be difficult. Getting feedback from a friend or advisor who roughly matches the profile of the candidate you’d like to hire is a great way to better understand whether you’re on the right track with your JD.
Feedback on this post? Anything we missed? We’d love to hear from you! Email us at nate [at] bowerygrowth [dot] com.
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