Most technical founders, if things are going well, will run into a familiar predicament with go-to-market hiring: how are you supposed to hire someone to do something you’ve never done yourself before? In my experience this issue is most acute in marketing hiring, where technical founders don’t even really know what marketing is, let alone which type of marketer they should hire, how to evaluate them, or how to set them up for success.
Before starting YeshID (check us out), I led product and marketing teams at everything from early stage startups to public companies like RSA, Rapid7, OpenDNS/Cisco, and Fastly. Suffice it to say I’ve hired a few marketers at technical companies in my career. In this post I’ll walk through how technical founders can hire their early marketers with confidence. The TL;DR – talk to people who have done this before!
Talk to people who have done this before
No matter how much you read and learn, you’re not going to become a marketing expert overnight. The key to doing marketing hiring well – and this applies for all GTM hiring – is talking to people who have done it before, like me. As obvious as this sounds, you’d be shocked to see how many founders go through this process and treat it like engineering hiring, never bringing in an outside voice on how to evaluate marketing talent.
There are a bunch of different types of people who can be helpful to talk to. I would break it down into a few groups:
- High quality marketers who aren’t looking. A friendly conversation with someone who would be a relevant candidate, but isn’t interviewing, can give you practical insight into what they do and how to evaluate them.
- Early stage marketing leaders. They have done the most early stage marketing hiring. With these folks you will get just as many opinions as conversations when it comes to who you should hire. So make sure to filter through any of your marketing voices that are closer to the business and know your situation more intimately.
- Founders who have successfully made the hire before. They have literally been in your exact position, so figure out what they did to make it easier. I use the word “successfully” very intentionally here: many founders will make this hire, but the person will not be good and will not impact the business.
If you talk to 1-2 people from each of these groups, you’ll be in a significantly better position to figure out what kind of marketing you need and how to hire for it.
You probably do not already know several people in each of these buckets. So you will need to be resourceful in finding them. A good way to do this is a combination of warm connections (especially investors) and cold outbound, but each requires you to have a good story. Marketing is, in many ways, all about storytelling and to get a marketer interested in your business you’d better have a compelling one. Would you be more likely to respond to this email:
Hey Dana,
I’m PJ and I am the CEO and Co-Founder of a startup called GitHub. We provide developers with shared repositories and version control and recently raised a seed round. Would you be open to giving us some advice on marketing hiring?
Or to this one?
Hey Dana,
I’m PJ and I’m the cofounder of a startup called GitHub. We’re trying to help developers collaborate and build apps faster. My co-founders and I spent ~10 years working together on Ruby on Rails apps for some of the world’s largest media organizations, and kept running into the same issue: collaborating on a shared codebase is near impossible, and it costs developers billions of dollars a year in lost time and effort. We’re trying to change that, and need a first marketer to help us tell our story. Would you be open to giving us some advice on marketing hiring?
Take your time and care with it!
Structuring your conversations
To get the most out of talking to people, you will want to have an idea of the big picture questions you’re trying to get clarity on. Here are some suggestions for starting points.
Who is the right marketer to hire?
Most early stage startups will start by hiring either a Product Marketer or a Growth Marketer, and in practice usually someone who is specialized in one of these and decent at the other. You will want to get to an understanding of what both of these positions do and which one you need the most.
What kind of background should I be looking for?
If you are a technical founder building a technical product, chances are you will want to hire a marketer who has experience working on a technical product. But do they need to be actually technical? How senior should they be? What about early stage vs. big company experience? Should I hire someone who immediately wants to bring on a team?
Talking to people who have done this before won’t give you definite answers to all of these questions – especially since many of them will disagree – but it should give you more guidance towards figuring out the answers yourself.
How do I find them?
Like early stage engineering hiring, great marketers will not be knocking on your door trying to work for you. You’re going to have to go find them! And the channels you do that through will be different from engineering. So what does it look like to source marketers? How do you reach out to them effectively?
How do I know if they’re any good?
By now you’re probably very good at engineering interviews, and know exactly what you’re looking for when you bring on a member of your technical staff. But how do you evaluate a good marketer? What questions do you ask, and what outcomes are you looking for? Should you have a take home involved? What kinds of questions should they be asking?
How do I help them succeed?
Some founders will hire the right marketer, then proceed to drive them away by (pick two of three) micromanaging, not giving them what they need, or being a terror to work with. A great part of talking to successful marketers is understanding the relationships they had with their founders: what did they need, what did they provide, and what environment did the founders create so they could do their best work?
No amount of research or talking to people is going to make you a marketing expert. And for technical founders, hiring your first marketer (and beyond) is always, to some degree, going to feel like you’re in a dark cave struggling to make out shapes. But if you can put together a round of targeted conversations with people who have done it before, you’ll at least have a flashlight with you down there.