The marketing hire startups often get wrong—and how to get it right

As a founder, the decision to make your first marketing hire is a pivotal moment. After bootstrapping your way through founder-led marketing and sales, you've reached that critical juncture where professional marketing expertise becomes essential. Your first marketing hire can set the trajectory for your company’s growth and success. The question is: what kind of marketer should you add to your team?

While many founders instinctively lean toward hiring a growth marketer or generalist, your best bet is actually someone with deep product marketing experience, ideally complemented by some growth marketing experience. 

Here's why.

The marketing landscape: understanding your options

Marketing isn't a monolithic function – it's a complex ecosystem of specialized disciplines. While each plays a crucial role in a company's success, not all are equally important in a startup's early stages. Let's break down the key disciplines and see why product marketing should be your foundation.

Marketing roles generally fall into three main categories. While they all have value, product marketing and growth marketing are the most critical for early-stage startups.

1. Product Marketing (PMM) - Your strategic foundation

Product marketers are the strategic storytellers and customer advocates for your business. They bridge the gap between your product and the market by deeply understanding your target customers, their needs, and the competitive landscape.

Think of product marketing as the compass that guides your entire go-to-market (GTM) strategy. These professionals are storytellers with a strategic bent, combining deep customer understanding with market insights to craft compelling narratives. They're not just marketers—they're the architects of your market presence.

A strong product marketer excels at:

• Defining the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and target segmentation with laser precision
• Conducting market research and competitive analysis to shape your product roadmap
• Developing your GTM strategy and approach
• Naming products and developing pricing and packaging strategies that maximize adoption and revenue
• Crafting positioning, messaging, and storytelling that makes your product irresistible to your ICPs
• Creating sales enablement materials and repeatable sales plays that actually move the needle
• Developing marketing content that’s product-, platform-, and solution-specific
• Managing product pages on your website and working with growth marketing to optimize self-serve capabilities

The best PMMs understand your customers, champion their needs, and consistently refine strategies to align with customer satisfaction and business growth.

2. Growth Marketing - Your amplification engine

Growth marketers—also known as demand generation or performance marketers—focus on acquiring and nurturing leads through paid and organic channels. They excel at analyzing the cost of acquisition (CAC) and return on investment (ROI), and constantly optimize campaigns for better results.

While product marketing sets the GTM strategy, growth marketing puts it into action. These specialists are the mechanics of your marketing machine, fine-tuning channels and campaigns to drive acquisition and retention/upsell/cross-sell. They're obsessed with metrics like CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) and ROI, constantly experimenting to find the most efficient paths to growth.

A strong growth marketer excels at:

• Managing paid and organic marketing channels (e.g., SEM, SEO, digital advertising, paid social etc.)
• Developing and optimizing lead generation and scoring systems
• Implementing sales and PLG funnel optimization strategies
• Running lifecycle marketing programs (upselling, cross-selling, churn prevention)
• Organizing field marketing and events
• Building a leveraging influencer and community marketing programs

While growth marketing drives awareness and acquisition, it relies on a solid foundation of target audience insights and messaging—areas where PMMs shine.

3. Brand Marketing and PR/Communications

These marketers typically focus on your company's high-level identity, including visual assets, positioning, narrative, and brand awareness. While important, this function can be handled by a product marketer or a contracted PR firm in the early stages of a smaller startup. 

Brand marketers are responsible for shaping and communicating a brand's values and reputation to its target audience. They work to ensure that the brand's messaging and market perception align with business goals and resonate emotionally with customers. Their focus is on building brand equity, fostering loyalty, and driving long-term growth by differentiating the brand in competitive markets.

A strong brand marketer excels at:

• Developing brand strategies that align with business objectives and audiences
• Conducting market research that informs branding and messaging decisions
• Maintaining a consistent brand identity, persona, tone of voice, and visual and editorial guidelines
• Managing press relations, organic social media, and internal communications
• Implementing brand campaigns to increase awareness, engagement, and loyalty
• Building and nurturing relationships with influencers, media, customers, and internal leaders to amplify the brand’s reach
• Leading reputation and crisis management to protect and strengthen brand image

Why product marketing should come first

Here's the crucial insight: Growth marketing efforts are only as effective as the strategic foundation they're built on. Many startup founders instinctively rush to hire a growth marketer as their first marketing hire, hoping for a quick fix to pipeline challenges or a fast injection of leads. Without clear messaging, defined ICPs, and a compelling positioning strategy—all core product marketing responsibilities—growth marketers can burn their limited budget on ineffective campaigns, and sales teams spend unproductive hours pursuing non-ICP leads. 

Before chasing growth, startups should prioritize product marketing fundamentals to ensure that demand-generation efforts resonate with the right audience and drive long-term success.

A strong PMM brings these critical skills:

• Strategic positioning: PMMs develop a clear and compelling narrative that resonates with your target audience.
• Go-to-market expertise: PMMs lead product launches and ongoing campaigns, ensuring your product’s value is understood. They also bridge the gap between product development and market needs.
• Sales enablement: They create foundational materials and strategies that empower your sales team to close deals efficiently and “ride along” to drive continuous improvement and sharp competitive responses. 
• Customer-centric insights: By advocating for the customer, they help shape your product roadmap and prioritize features that drive growth, adoption, and advocacy.

While growth marketing expertise is valuable, a skilled PMM can often handle initial demand-generation efforts while building the foundation for scalable growth—directly or through a paid consultant or agency.

What to look for in your first marketing hire

Aim for a product marketer with 5+ years of experience, ideally with some early-stage startup experience, who understands the fast pace and unique demands.

Key expertise to prioritize:

• Audience definition: Ability to define ICPs, personas, and customer contexts.
• Market research and insights: Skilled at leveraging competitive analysis and customer feedback.
• Go-to-market strategy: Expertise in positioning, messaging, product launches, and sales enablement. 
• Cross-functional collaboration: Experience working with product, sales, customer support, and leadership to drive awareness, acquisition, and retention.
• Analytics-driven: Ability to measure and understand KPIs and iterate based on data.
• Versatility: Some exposure to growth marketing, content development, and sales enablement.

Be cautious of candidates who:

• Have only worked in large companies with narrowly defined roles
• Lack hands-on experience across multiple marketing functions
• Can't demonstrate a clear impact on business metrics in previous roles
• Don't show strong analytical capabilities alongside creative skills

Optimizing the job description for your first marketing hire

Title: Consider using “Head of Marketing”  instead of “VP” or “Director” as it allows for flexibility to layer in leadership as your company scales.

Key responsibilities to include in the job description:

• Define and refine the company’s narrative, ICP, and go-to-market strategy
• Partner with sales to enable repeatable sales plays and collateral
• Lead initial demand-generation efforts across paid and organic channels
• Own key metrics related to awareness, acquisition, and customer retention
• Work with the product team to align product development and launches with market needs

In the early stages, you need someone who can do both: set the strategy and execute it. A product marketer with some growth experience fits this bill, giving you the best of both worlds as you build toward your next growth stage.

Essential hiring and leadership guides for startups

Here are some helpful blogs and guides to help you scale your teams—covering everything from hiring top talent to building a thriving company culture. Whether you're making your first key hires or optimizing for growth, these insights will help you hire smarter and lead better:

• How to make a startup hiring plan
• The essential guide to startup headcount planning
• Startup recruiting dossier template and examples
• How to create a startup Careers page
• Job description templates for startups
• SignalFire’s remote hiring guide for startups
• The startup employee journey guide: From onboarding to offboarding
• Beyond the office: A Market Map of 200+ startups transforming remote work

SignalFire aims to be a founder’s first call when you need help scaling and growing, not just when you’re raising capital. Our in-house marketing experts help you solve your unique go-to-market challenges, and our Beacon AI platform equips your team with the research you need to propel growth: competitive and cohort analysis, market research, lead lists, and more. From RevOps to scaling capabilities, strategize with the former CMO of Stripe and our team of mentors from Asana, LinkedIn, and TechCrunch. Power your growth with SignalFire's data, unmatched portfolio support, and deep sector expertise.

Visit our website to learn more.