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Ask HN: How early did you bring in a full-time marketer?

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Ask HN: How early did you bring in a full-time marketer?

#1

Post by jblochjohnson »

Hey entrepreneurasaurs:

At what stage in your company's development did you decide it was worth it to have a full-time marketer on your team?

We have a three-person team (all developers, although we're learning the business ropes), and we're trying to chart out the money we'll need in our first year; we can get a minimum-viable-product out the door in three months, and then were considering bringing in a marketer. Any advice you could give would be greatly appreciated!

Re: Ask HN: How early did you bring in a full-time marketer?

#2

Post by solost »

My first advice is figure out what type of marketer do you want? There is a huge difference between a business development specialist and an online marketer. Generally a business development specialist is focused on distribution, partnerships, sales, and potentially affiliate programs if you are lucky. A traditional internet marketer will be focused on SEO, content development, user experience, email etc.

My advice is that if you can make the time you should start looking now, even if you are not ready to hire. It is going to take some time to find the right person to mesh with your personalities and if you do find a great person they need to be as excited about your product as you are.

Re: Ask HN: How early did you bring in a full-time marketer?

#3

Post by AmberShah »

My own startup is nowhere near needing that but my experiences with startups would say: not anywhere near that time-frame. For one thing, it depends on what you're thinking about in terms of marketing.

Are you thinking customer-development and incorporating feedback into the product? That should be done by the founders and product people.

Are you thinking of people who do things like social media and PR? For that you can hire a more experienced firm or consultant with a hire hourly rate but likelier to do more in that hour than some junior "marketing" major.

If I had to put some value on it, I would say: once you have built a "fully" viable product that is market tested and its value is confirmed.

Re: Ask HN: How early did you bring in a full-time marketer?

#5

Post by entrepreneurNB »

Bring in a marketer ASAP! Getting your product and company's name out should start from day one. You should have a marketer who is going to events, making connections within the industry, networking with VC's and investors, and playing a dynamic role with the team. This may require you to give up equity to bring someone in if you are bootstrapped but it is definitely worth it for long term success. Best of luck!

Re: Ask HN: How early did you bring in a full-time marketer?

#6

Post by giffc »

The money side depends on how much equity you want to share. I think it is worth bringing someone on board very early. You don't want to go from a cold, standing start at PM fit. You don't want a big company, big budget marketer but what Sean Ellis calls a "growth hacker" who can get creative, and experiment with many different user acquisition approaches. Ideally this is someone who can wear a lot of hats, is very product oriented and can help with customer development, and contribute a lot to the venture pre-PM fit, whether it be UX, working on bizdev relationships (these take time), a blog/PR strategy, and other avenues of attack. The more they can do with the least amount of money, the better. Someone who cares a lot about analytics and finds startup metrics for pirates the coolest thing ever. Someone who obsesses about messaging. Someone who has been at the super early stage before. Good luck!

Re: Ask HN: How early did you bring in a full-time marketer?

#7

Post by il »

I'm going to be in the minority here and as a marketer I am probably biased, but I think you should have a marketer or a business guy as soon as possible, when you are designing your product, writing sales copy, setting pricing ,deciding the angle/niche you target and so on. These are are critical early marketing tasks. By marketer I don't mean one of the millions of narrow minded seo guys. I mean someone who can develop a deep understanding of your target audience and the marketplace and how your product fits in

Re: Ask HN: How early did you bring in a full-time marketer?

#8

Post by lsc »

il wrote: post #7

I'm going to be in the minority here and as a marketer I am probably biased, but I think you should have a marketer or a business guy as soon as possible, when you are designing your product, writing sales copy, setting pricing ,deciding the angle/niche you target and so on. These are are critical early marketing tasks. By marketer I don't mean one of the millions of narrow minded seo guys. I mean someone who can dev…

I agree you need someone who understands your target market from the beginning. However, I think that for some markets, a conventional 'marketing guy' would be the wrong choice... for example, I sell infrastructure to SysAdmins. Yeah, if I wanted to sell infrastructure to managers, I'd need a conventional marketing guy. But for my current target market? I am pretty close to the optimal 'marketing guy' because I'm building a product that I would want to buy myself, and I'm selling it to people who buy it for the same reasons i would buy it.

I think it's essential to have someone on the team who understands the target market, their needs, their culture, and their feelings. It's really difficult to know how to build something you don't want for someone you don't really understand.

Re: Ask HN: How early did you bring in a full-time marketer?

#10

Post by patio11 »

You already have three full-time marketers.

To elaborate a little: there isn't a huge distinction between much of what you're doing right now and the really crucial marketing stuff for small startups. You're already making decisions with SEO implications, for example, and that is highly likely to be an important channel for you. If you don't feel comfortable making those decisions, rather than getting a dedicated SEO Guy I'd strongly suggest that one or all of you start reading/doing/measuring/testing. Ditto on copywriting, etc.

Don't even get me started on the degree to which building the product or talking about building the product is marketing.

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