“Who should I hire first for marketing?”
It’s the question founders ask me most, and for good reason. The market is full of titles that sound alike and mean very different things.
Head of Marketing, VP Marketing, CMO: At a seed-stage startup, “Head of Marketing” might be the only marketer: writing website copy, running the launch, and reporting straight to the CEO. At a growth-stage company, the same title might lead a team of 10+ across demand gen, content, and events. A CMO at scale may never write a word of copy; the job is budget, org design, and a seat at the leadership table. Same seniority on paper, very different days.
Growth, demand gen, performance. Growth can mean running experiments on onboarding flows and pricing pages, building pipeline for sales through campaigns and webinars, or managing paid spend across search and social. Early on, one person often covers all three. As the company grows, they split into separate roles, because each one gets deep, fast.
Product marketing. This might be the widest and most amorphous of them all. It spans the entire customer journey: understanding the market and the buyer, defining positioning and messaging, pricing and packaging, launching new products, equipping sales to win, tracking competitors, and then, once someone becomes a customer, turning them into case studies and advocates, and driving renewals and expansions. Early on, one person does the foundational version of all of it. At scale, each of those becomes its own role.
Brand. Brand might be the most elastic word in marketing. It spans strategy and craft: defining what the company stands for and how it’s different, shaping its voice and personality, building the visual identity, creative direction, integrated campaigns that bring the story to life across channels, content, events, and making sure every touchpoint - from the website to the sales deck to the booth at a conference - feels like the same company. Early on, one person sets the foundation and builds the first version of most of it. At scale, it’s a team of strategists, creative directors, designers, writers, and producers.
Which makes it very easy to hire the wrong version of the right title, especially when it’s your first marketing hire.
At the early stage, I see founders make one of three classic mistakes:
They hire too big. A VP or CMO from a scaled company - brilliant at leading a team and managing a budget - who arrives to find there’s no team and no budget.
They hire too narrow. A demand gen or performance specialist who can fill a funnel, before there’s a story worth funnelling anyone toward.
They hire junior. A coordinator to “do marketing” with no one to tell them what marketing should actually be doing.
None of these people are wrong. They’re just wrong for the stage.
What early stage actually needs.
At the earliest stage, marketing isn’t a department yet. It’s a set of foundational questions:
Who exactly is this for? What problem are we solving, in their words? What category are we in, and who are we being compared to? Why us, and why now? And with limited time and budget, which levers do we pull first?
Until those are answered, every campaign, every hire, and every dollar spent is a guess.
That’s why I believe good marketing is ultimately a business development function. It starts with a real, deep understanding of your market, your customers, and what’s actually standing between you and your goals. Then it packages and positions the company to meet that market.
The person who does that well at this stage needs four things:
(1) Strong business instinct.
Marketing decisions start from the business objective - not the channel.
It’s not about executing a laundry list of activities (events ✅, email ✅, social media ✅, webinars ✅…). It’s busy, visible, and easy to report on. But activity isn’t the same as progress.
Business instinct means understanding how the company makes money, where the next stage of growth will come from, and what’s actually standing in the way. Is the bottleneck awareness, or is it that prospects don’t understand what you do? Is it pipeline, or a sales cycle that drags because there aren’t enough case studies? Each answer points to completely different work.
(2) Comfort operating in ambiguity.
At a larger, more mature company, a marketer usually inherits a brief, a budget, a brand guide, and a team that’s done this before. At an early-stage company, there’s usually none of that. The product is still evolving, the ICP is still coming into focus, and this quarter’s priorities may not survive the next one.
Some people find that paralyzing. They wait for the strategy to be handed to them, for the product to stabilize, or for data that won’t exist for another six months.
The right person doesn’t wait for clarity. They create it. They make the best call with what they know, set up ways to learn quickly, and change course without ego when the market tells them something new.
(3) Strategist + Builder
A strategy that lives in a deck is useless. Activities without a strategy are just busy work - lots of motion, no direction.
At scale, those can be different jobs: a strategist sets direction and a team carries it out. At the early stage, splitting them is expensive. You can’t afford two hires, and you can’t afford the handoff either. Too much nuance gets lost between the person who decides and the person who builds.
So someone has to write the playbook (the positioning, the messaging, the go-to-market plan) and then build against it (the website, the sales deck, the launch materials). The best early hires sharpen the positioning on Monday, write the homepage copy on Tuesday, and sit in on a sales call on Wednesday to hear whether any of it lands. Then they go back and refine.
(4) Breadth, with depth where it counts.
Early on, you don’t need an expert in every channel. You need someone T-shaped.
The breadth matters because one person may need to cover the full marketing function: brand, product marketing, content, events, sales enablement, the website, and the basics of growth. Not as a master of each, but well enough to see what’s missing, recognize what good looks like in each, and know when to bring in a specialist.
The depth matters because a generalist who does everything a little moves nothing very far. The right hire goes deep in the levers that matter most for your business - for some it’s brand, for others demand gen or product-led growth.
For me, that depth is brand and product marketing. Performance marketing isn’t something I run hands-on, so when a company needs it, I bring in a specialist. Knowing the edges of your breadth is part of the job.
A rough guide
Every company is different, but the shape is usually similar:
Pre-seed to seed: a builder-generalist with business instinct, or a fractional partner. The job is the foundation: positioning, messaging, and the first assets.
Series A: A first full-time marketing lead, adding specialists as channels prove themselves.
Series B and beyond: a leader of leaders, with deep functional expertise across the team.
Where fractional fits
Sometimes the right hire for your stage isn’t a full-time hire at all.
If you know you need marketing but not yet what kind, a fractional partner can build the foundation - positioning, messaging, a GTM plan, the first assets. So when you do hire full-time, you know exactly who you’re looking for. And they inherit something to build on, instead of a blank page.
Hire for the stage you’re in. Build for the one you’re heading toward.
