First marketing employee at a startup?
By: Sarah Vandersluis
Tags: Early Employee, Marketing, Marketing Stack, Mentorship, Startup

5 to-do’s to get you started

My first job out of business school was at a pre-seed startup as their first marketing hire. I had just moved to NYC and as they say, was ready to conquer the world. I was nervous, overwhelmed, while also feeling very excited to take on this new adventure!

These days, with a brand new definition of what it means to have time on my hands (thank you, quarantine), I wrote down some of my key takeaways from this experience. For anyone in marketing venturing out into the startup world, (especially, pre-seed companies), this is my take on how to approach the first few months.

1. Get yourself a mentor

Even though you may be the only marketing professional in your company, that doesn’t mean you’re SOL. Leverage the resources available to you. Join meetups of other marketing professionals, use your team’s network and reach out on LinkedIn to people in companies one or two stages ahead of you. You are not the first company to send out marketing emails or to build a social media strategy. People in the startup world are kind, generous and love to share their failures and successes. Take advantage of best practices that already exist.

2. Act like a consultant

A consultant must quickly understand the industry and come to the table with not only a problem they are trying to solve, but also a hypothesis of what is likely happening. As a marketer in an early-stage company, there are so many questions to ask and problems to solve:

Who is the right customer? Who spends the most money on our product? Which customer is likely to refer a friend? Who is the cheapest/most expensive customer to acquire? Where do we find that customer? Where do they live? What do they do? What other brands do they like? ….. I could go on

Start off by building a hypothesis of your best guess of a target persona. The testing starts there.

3. Know your data, clean your data and set goals based on your data…data, data, data

The success of every decision you make will be based on the reliability of your data source(s). To know your data means to understand what data is currently being tracked and more importantly, what’s NOT. To clean your data means asking yourself (and your developers), is the data that is being tracked accurate and/or important? Finally, you’ll need to set company goals and KPIs. These goals will be based on past data, industry standards and a very aggressive states of mind 😊. Remember that these goals are fluid and will need to be reviewed constantly. However, setting them from the beginning will provide a framework of what to work towards. To sweeten the deal, I highly recommend convincing your boss or founder to reward your team with a bottle of champagne when you hit those goals.

4. Evaluate your marketing stack (email, CRM, A/B testing platforms, analytics etc.)

Joining a new company means getting to know your team, your customers, the business. As well, all the software that they are currently using to keep the company going. If you are their first marketing hire, chances are that there was not much time spent evaluating the different SaaS platforms. Believe me, that’s a job in itself. Talk to your team and ask about the platforms that they use and the rationale behind it. A rationale might very well be, “it was the first one we saw and we needed to get going.” Great, this is where you come in! Be mindful through this process. Integrating a new software takes time, money and foresight. As you use the current stack, record all of your pain points. After a month and a half of heavy use, you’ll have a good idea of what you’d need to look for in a different platform.

5. Get to know your team, your direct reports and understand expectations

When you are working for a startup, it’s common for things to get a little too casual. Find a process that works for you and your boss to use to provide 360 feedback. Put 10 minutes in the calendar every week and don’t skimp out. Week one, understand his/her expectations of you and share your expectations of the role and your personal growth goals. Week over week, it’s important to get a sense of what expectations are being met and which ones need work.

Walking in your first day at an early startup can be very overwhelming. There are expectations from the founder, the team, yourself, not to mention the long backlog of things to get done. I hope this list gives you confidence in knowing how to approach the first few weeks….from there, well, good luck!