When I joined SoFi as a Director of Paid Acquisition, the entire team worked out of a single room in the Presidio. To create a “conference room,” someone had hung a shower curtain across the mouth of an alcove. We were scrappy, and I was doing everything myself.
I was convinced that vertical affiliates was the right acquisition channel for lending. But because we weren’t sure what our LTV would be, the CEO didn’t want to risk the high CAC that came with the affiliate channel. So instead, I experimented with guerrilla tactics like scraping the directories of student organizations at every business school and cold emailing them all.
And then we raised the 7th largest venture round of 2013.
Suddenly we were hiring aggressively and bringing-on agencies and contractors at a blistering pace. It required a completely different playbook, and my mindset had to change with it. Instead of “being indispensable” by playing every position, my role became “put yourself out of a job” by hiring capable players for every role.
I learned exactly what unsustainable “blitzscaling” looks like. I saw the company churn through people: VPs had an average tenure of fewer than 6 months; PR agencies lasted only 4 months. What I learned is that you need to right-size the experience level and seniority of your team to where the business is at. Here’s how the composition of your marketing team should evolve at each stage:
Seed
Cash is tight. Each person is juggling several roles.
Consider hiring a very senior consultant in product marketing and PR who can help you test product-market fit, refine your positioning and messaging, ship V1 of your brand assets, and gin up some PR wins for your launch. I specifically suggest hiring a consultant here because you need someone senior, but even if you can afford to have them full-time, you likely don’t have work that’s challenging enough to keep them busy full-time.
Pair this product-marketing consultant with a quantitative full-time marketing generalist who can run paid ads, set up V1 of your martech stack, and be the glue. Here I’d look for someone who is hungry, has a chip on their shoulders, and wants their first shot at the “head of marketing” job. I wouldn’t title this person VP of Marketing, because you’ll want to hire a more experienced VP of Marketing later.
Series A
Congratulations. With great funding comes great responsibility. Now that you’ve raised, there’s pressure to deploy that capital and drive top-line growth. You need to have a strong quant marketing leader who can scale up 1-2 channels and demonstrate that the business can drive predictable growth.
A mistake I see many startups make at this stage is trying to support multiple go-to-market motions (i.e. both a sales motion as well as a PLG motion) or too many marketing channels with too small a team. Stay disciplined. Consider product-channel fit and pick just 1 go-to-market and at most 2 channels, then crush them.
Focus on hiring generalists who have a core talent. You need 4 core talents for a well-rounded marketing team:
Storytelling
Data
Technical Tooling
Brand / Visual Design
At this stage Brand/Visual design can be outsourced to a freelancer, but for the others, you really do need to start building in-house.
Series B
You now have proven product-market fit, you have traction with 1-2 channels, and you’re scaling. The conventional wisdom is that you should start hiring specialists—like going from having one Demand Gen person owning Facebook to having three, or having one demand gen person owning Facebook for each product. The conventional wisdom is that, at this scale, specialists will help you wring out the remaining inefficiencies.
I disagree. I would counter-propose that you actually want to break the team down into smaller atomic units that map to key growth levers like acquisition, conversion, and retention, and form teams or pods for each lever. You want to continue staffing these teams with generalists who are adaptable and can move fast and jump between channels and tools.
Why?
Startups tend to fall into this trap of over-specialization because they set up functional orgs, and the only way to justify growing a functional org is to continuously split generalist roles into smaller specializations. But the true gaps in efficiency invariably crop up at the seams between disciplines. For example, at many companies, it's the hand-off between demand gen and the SDR team where the engine loses the most leverage. A deeper specialization in Facebook won’t solve that problem, but a multi-disciplinary team working on conversion could.
Another shift at this stage is that the focus may shift from top-line growth to demonstrating some profitability. When that happens, your marketing team will need to build DNA more like a finance team. In addition to understanding how each optimization impacts top-line revenue, they’ll now need to be able to model the contribution margin of every optimization and make trade-offs. For example, the acquisition team might be very good at optimizing for CAC but have little visibility into which advertising audiences turn into the customers who cost the most to service.
Series C and Beyond
If you’ve made it here, huzzah!
At this stage, the system becomes very complex. There are big functional teams. There may be pods. There are OKRs. It’s easy to lose sight of the key levers that drive growth.
Don’t let that happen.
Keep coming back to what those levers of growth are. Organize OKRs around them. Organize pods around them. Report on those metrics in every big meeting, and put names next to each lever.
Of all these transitions in a startup’s life, the one I have the most experience with is the transition from startup to scale-up which happens somewhere between 100 and 200 employees. We’ll go deeper into that transition next week.