Stop! Don't hire a VP of Marketing

If you are an early-stage startup + Who to hire instead

Reading Time: 5 minutes

I’ve seen this painful mistake happen over and over again, and I simply had to write about it. Here’s a classic scenario:

• Founders get a couple of pilots going or have a handful of paying customers.

• They think, “Gaining momentum, I need to get sales and marketing going!”

• They find a marketer who is experienced in their category (Fintech, Productivity SaaS, Developer tools, etc.)

• Marketer’s background: Head of marketing or a senior marketer at a fast-growth startup, or a startup that has seen better days, or a hungry, ambitious junior marketer with 3+ years of startup experience.

• They hire them as a VP of marketing. Celebrations all around!

• In six months or a year, the founders let the VP of marketing go, or the marketer quits.

What went wrong?

I’ve seen a few different scenarios play out with early-stage startups:

🎸 Hired a rockstar — The founder gets super enamored by someone’s background, experience, and pedigree (Harvard MBA? check, worked for a Unicorn? check). Hiring such a person is like wearing shoes three times the size of your feet. They are just too much for your stage. In a few months, the rockstar will realize they’ve made a mistake and quit.

📈 Wrong person for your stage — This is a painfully frequent scenario. The marketer has all the right experience for a fast-growth or scaling-stage startup, and your startup is simply not there yet. The VP of marketing will stick around for a bit and try to move your startup in that direction, but most likely, they will move on for a better fit, or the founder will realize the fit is off, and they’ll part ways.

🩳 Right person, wrong level — The founders hired the perfect person for an early-stage startup. They are scrappy, move fast, and execute like a champ. But they are not a leader yet. They may be in a few years, but the founders simply gave them the title to get them on board, and now the person has to grow into it. This is an uncomfortable spot for many. Some self-aware marketers can do it, but others fail, and now the founder finds the marketer lacking and wants to hire someone over them, which will likely make them quit unless they have a low ego, are aware of their skill gaps, and are willing to learn and grow.

🍤 Aimed too low — This is the worst mistake, IMHO. The founders hired an average marketer who ended up with an above-average title and, without interviewing them thoroughly, hired them as a VP of marketing.

🎩 Overindex on industry vs. stage — This happens if the founder considers industry expertise to be crucial, like Security, Life sciences, Fintech, or Proptech. Founders hire an industry insider who turns out to be a mediocre marketer. You can learn the industry if you are a smart marketer; it takes time, but it’s not that hard. However, it’s hard to gain great functional skills quickly and deliver results. Speed is critical if you are early-stage. If that VP of marketing is unable to build a team right away, they will struggle to execute.

Opportunity cost is HUGE 🐘

For early-stage startups, time is even more important than money. You can always raise capital in good market cycles, but even during difficult market cycles, you must optimize for time.

Why?

Because new entrants are constantly popping up. Established players are not fools; they invest in innovation or gobble up innovative startups. If you waste your time getting to market with the right audience, the right message, and a differentiated value, you’ve given your competitors time to catch up to you.

A startup with a better, stronger GTM and product that’s just as good or better than yours will eat your lunch.

Want proof?

Zapier and IFTTT.

AirBnB and VRBO.

Stripe and Braintree.

You can argue that the winners had better products, but no product wins without a strong GTM.

What to do instead?

B2B startups — Hire a customer-focused product marketer who can get her head around growth. Even if she doesn’t have direct demand-generation experience, she knows her way around a customer funnel and can understand how to work with an AE or an SDR to drive deals.

What does this background look like?

• A few years of experience taking a startup from $0 to $10M in revenue.

• Demonstrable experience with your chosen GTM model (product-led growth? sales-assisted? enterprise?)

• An early member of the marketing team and has grown with the startup instead of hopping around for a better title and growth.

• Demonstrable growth in job function (taking on additional responsibilities) and/or advancing from an individual contributor to a manager.)

B2C startups — Hire a customer-focused lifecycle marketer who knows her way around growth. A good lifecycle marketer will know how to think about renewal, referral, and building viral loops, which is essential for B2C. She must also know how to work with product teams on growth initiatives and understand key customer acquisition metrics CAC/LTV to guide a demand generation agency.

Customer-focused marketer is crucial

Too many marketers these days are inside-out thinkers. This is a consequence of titles like “product marketing”. They are overly focused on marketing product features instead of focusing on who the customer is, what they care about, and why they should care about your product.

This is super important for early-stage startups because your fit might still be shaky and not yet repeatable. Your marketer has to be the customer advocate. They must know their needs, pains, biases, and aspirations better than anyone else in the startup.

Finding the right person takes time

Founders are overly optimistic about finding the right marketer. They almost always think they’ll find someone sooner than they do. Unless you know someone who is a terrific fit and there’s a magical perfect match between you two, you are looking at three to six months to find a good marketer.

Rather than rush to hire someone, work with a consultant, freelancer, or an agency to meet your immediate needs. Hiring the wrong person fast will cost you more in the long run than hiring the right person slowly.

Finally, here are two fantastic reads on this subject:

So you think you are ready to hire a marketer? by Ariel Jackson of First Round Capital gives an excellent overview of the different marketing functions.

This great post on how to hire your first marketer by

Emily Kramer of MKT1

talks about hiring a π-shaped marketer. She also gives a great list of interview questions to help screen candidates.