NBT #1: The Top 5 Marketing Mistakes Startups Make

Plus, why I tell people not to hire me full-time.

Here are the top 5 marketing mistakes I've seen during my ~15 years advising, working for, and investing in startups. The first mistake is one that I often share with folks who are interested in hiring me.

Mistake #1: Hiring a CMO Too Early

After receiving early signals of product-market fit, startups sometimes think that a CMO can magically accelerate growth. However, the key to accelerating growth is having a strong understanding of what actually drives growth for your particular business. And you don't need an expensive or fancy CMO to do that.

Depending on your business, you may require a marketing leader who has deep experience in:

• Brand building

• Product marketing

• Editorial content

• Sales enablement

• Ads management

• PR

The problem is, you won't know which of these things will have a disproportionate impact on your growth until you try each of them to some extent. The best type of person to experiment across these different facets of marketing will likely be a mid-level marketing generalist who has the following qualities:

• Strong Generalist – Experience doing the actual work and executing on brand, product marketing, content creation, sales collateral, PR, etc.

• Ambition – hire someone who desperately wants to be running their own marketing team one day

• Courage – great marketers are not afraid to experiment, and they know how to stand up for their ideas. The best marketing campaigns are often the most polarizing (I'll save this topic for another post...)

• Collaboration – successful marketing is extremely dependent on partnerships with product teams, web developers, videographers, PR agencies, event managers, etc. You need someone who is extremely collaborative.

• Analytical & Hypothesis-driven – you'll need someone, especially in the early days, who can quickly identify bright spots and synthesize learnings

Alternatively, you can hire a fractional CMO at a more affordable cost who can later convert into a full-time leader once you both know that it's a good fit.

The downsides to hiring a CMO too early include:

• You'll waste money: Blowing through your budget on a high salary for someone who may or may not have the best background for what your business truly needs

• You may be over-indexing on strategy vs. execution: In your early days, you want to maximize execution. This doesn't mean you should hire someone who has zero strategic thinking skills. It just means you want to lean towards someone who will roll up their sleeves and get campaigns out the door vs. someone who will ask you to hire multiple agencies and contractors to get the actual work done.

• Wrong network: Depending on your CMO's background, you may not be able to properly leverage their professional network to hire the right type of talent under that person. For example, if you have a CMO whose network mostly consists of product marketers and ad managers, but you realize after 6 months that the marketing tactic that moves the needle most is educational content, you're going to wish that you had hired a CMO who has a deep network within the content creation community.

Mistake #2: Copycat Mindset

I once worked for a founder who constantly bombarded me, and other team members, with articles, videos, and emails about what other startups were doing to accelerate growth. This accomplished three things:

1. It distracted everyone on the team from the work they were doing

2. It stifled the team's ability to generate original ideas

3. It pissed everyone off and demotivated the team

Rather than focusing on what others are doing, focus on your own business, your own opportunities, and your own strengths as a team.

One of the greatest strengths of the Venmo co-founders was their ability to be steadfast in their own vision and execution strategy amidst a slew of competitors entering the P2P mobile payments space. At many different points in time, they could have panicked and said, "Oh no, look what Google is doing to promote payments over Gmail!" or "Oh no, look what Facebook is doing to promote payments on Messenger!" Instead, they reminded the team about what made Venmo special and why our users would choose us over much larger, much more well-capitalized competitors.

Mistake #3: Hiring PR without a Strong Marketing Counterpart

People complain about their PR agencies all the time. And yet, I have only had excellent results with my PR partners, and every company for whom I have managed PR can attribute a significant amount of increased brand awareness and success to PR. Why?

1. I always create an extremely detailed robust brief about the business, brand, and goals for any PR firm before I start an engagement. My PR partners know exactly what I am looking for and how I will evaluate their success.

2. I do recorded interview sessions between the PR agents who will be pitching and the company's co-founders so they know exactly what language to use when they describe us to reporters.

3. I do 1-2x per week check-ins with my PR partners to discuss the 3Ps:

   1. Progress (things that got done last week)

   2. Plans (things they're going to do this week)

   3. Problems (blockers)

4. I set up a dedicated Slack channel where PR agents can quickly secure quotes from executives of the company to relay to reporters who need insights in a pinch (this is an excellent way to build rapport with reporters)

You cannot just hire a PR agency and tell them you want to be in the WSJ next month. You'll blow through $10-30k monthly, and you won't see the desired results. PR is a partnership that requires active brand participation.

Mistake #4: Not Recognizing that SEO is a Long Game

Expect it to take years. End of story. Don't spend energy on this unless you're going to commit to generating valuable content, securing backlinks to your own site from sites with higher domain authority scores, etc.

Mistake #5: Starting Your Own Community

Community-building is its own marketing mechanism and often its own business model. Yes, it takes 30 seconds to start a new Slack workspace, Whatsapp group, or Facebook group. But it takes 2-3 years (of hard work and dedicated resources) to build a valuable, robust community that can drive revenue.

Unless you have solid proof that your business' key growth accelerator is community-building, I recommend leaning into leveraging and partnering with existing communities.