Startups & Scale-Ups marketing
Marketing against a runway, a board date and a number
A funded company is not buying marketing, it is buying evidence of traction before a date somebody else set. That biases everything towards paid, and the useful conversation is about sequencing: what to build now that still works in eighteen months, and what only rents attention until the invoice stops.
Search behaviour
What your customers are typing
Deciding what marketing to buy
Made by a founder who has just been told to produce a growth number and is working out what to do about it.
- fractional cmo for startup
- first marketing hire vs agency
- how much should a startup spend on marketing
- growth marketing agency for seed stage companies
- when to hire a head of marketing
Getting the first customers
Pre-scale searching. The company has a product and no repeatable way of selling it yet.
- how to get first 100 b2b customers
- signs of product market fit
- founder led sales process
- cold outbound vs inbound for early stage
- startup positioning framework
Board and investor metrics
Researched before a board meeting or a raise. It is the language the buyer will judge our work in.
- cac payback period benchmark
- series a marketing metrics investors expect
- how to present growth in a board deck
- ltv to cac ratio explained
- what counts as traction for a seed round
Fast-traction tactics
The shortcuts a company reaches for under time pressure. Worth answering honestly, because most of them rent attention rather than build it.
- is a product hunt launch worth it
- startup pr agency cost
- paid ads for a startup with a small budget
- growth tactics that still work in b2b
- how to get press for a startup launch
These are examples of how customers in this market search, drawn from keyword research and from the questions that come up on sales calls. They are illustrative, not a volume claim — the actual demand in your area is something we size before recommending anything.
Demand shape
When and how the demand actually arrives
The planning horizon is set by cash, not by the calendar, and it moves. A raise, a slower quarter or a hiring decision changes the runway and therefore changes which channels are available, which is why the plan has to be revisited at each of those events rather than annually.
Board and investor calendars create hard reporting dates. Work is judged at a meeting somebody scheduled months ago, so agreeing before the engagement starts what will be shown at that meeting and what would count as progress prevents a programme being cancelled the quarter before it produces anything.
Demand for the product itself may not exist as searchable behaviour yet. In a new category people describe the problem rather than the solution, so the honest early question is whether anyone is searching for anything, answered with research in a fortnight rather than assumed and funded for a year.
Fundraising creates a second demand cycle running alongside the commercial one. In the months before a raise, investors, their analysts and their existing portfolio companies research the business, and what they find is diligence input rather than marketing.
Hiring competes for the same attention. Early operators and engineers evaluate the company the way a customer evaluates a product, and in a competitive market the public presence is doing recruitment work whether anybody planned it or not.
Buying behaviour
How your customers actually decide
Strategy follows this, not the other way round. Everything on this page is downstream of how the decision genuinely gets made.
- The buyer is choosing against a deadline they did not set. Whether a supplier can show something meaningful before the next board meeting frequently outweighs whether the approach is the better one over three years.
- Founders test whether you will disagree with them. Having been pitched optimistic plans repeatedly, the signal they look for is a supplier willing to say a channel is not available at this stage or that the timing is wrong, because it suggests the forecasts are not decorative.
- Cost is assessed as a share of runway rather than as a monthly fee. A retainer that consumes an uncomfortable fraction of remaining cash is evaluated completely differently from the same number at a larger company, and pretending otherwise wastes everyone’s time.
- They want to know what happens if it does not work. Notice periods, what is transferable, who owns the accounts and the assets, and whether the work leaves anything behind all matter to a company that may have to stop spending at short notice.
- Relevant judgement beats process. A founder is choosing somebody who has seen this stage before and can say which of the four things they are worried about actually matters, rather than a documented methodology.
- The decision is frequently made against an internal alternative. The real comparison is not another agency, it is hiring a person, and the honest answer is sometimes that the hire is the better use of the money.
What usually goes wrong
Where startup and scale-up marketing tends to fail
A funded company does not have a marketing problem in the usual sense. It has a number due on a date, a finite amount of cash before that date, and a board that will decide something based on what happened in between.
Every reasonable recommendation follows from those three facts rather than from what works in general. The question is never which channel is best; it is which channels can produce evidence inside the time available, and which ones have to be started now and judged later.
- The plan is longer than the runway.
- A programme is agreed on the basis that a channel matures in nine to twelve months, while the company has cash into next spring and a board review before that. The work is not wrong; it is unavailable. The right response is to size the plan against payback rather than against best practice, to accept that some of the most effective channels are simply out of reach at this stage, and to start the compounding work at a scale the company can sustain rather than at a scale that assumes a raise.
- The positioning is still moving and the spend is already scaling.
- The company describes itself differently to two customer segments, has changed the homepage twice this year, and is buying traffic against both versions. Money spent scaling a message that is about to change buys the wrong customers, produces churn that looks like a marketing failure, and then has to be spent again to rebuild the pages, the accounts and the search coverage. Learning who converts is cheaper than amplifying a guess.
- Everything is rented and nothing compounds.
- Paid acquisition produces evidence quickly, which is exactly why it dominates early plans, and it stops entirely the day the budget does. A company two years in with no owned demand, no accumulated search coverage and no audience of its own is in the same position it started from with a larger burn rate. The sequencing argument is that the compounding work has to begin while the paid work is producing the evidence, not after it.
- The founder is the distribution channel and has run out of hours.
- Early traction usually comes from the founder personally: their network, their posting, their outbound, their willingness to do the unscalable thing. It is genuinely the cheapest acquisition the company will ever have, and it caps out at one person’s calendar and stops when they are raising, hiring or delivering. The transition to something that runs without them is a specific project with a date, not something that happens naturally as the company grows.
- Nobody can tell a channel working from one lucky customer.
- At low volumes, a single large deal makes a channel look excellent and its absence makes the same channel look dead. Companies then switch strategy every quarter on noise. The workable response is to agree in advance what evidence would justify continuing, to segment by fit rather than reading a blended number, and to accept that some questions cannot be answered at this volume and should be decided on judgement instead of pretending the data settled it.
Where the money goes
The channels that earn their place here
In priority order for this business, not a menu. Anything not on this list is something we would need a specific reason to recommend.
Settle the position before scaling anything
Who the product is for, what it replaces, and why somebody switches are the inputs every other channel consumes, and spending against an unsettled answer means paying for the same customers twice. This is a short piece of work, not a rebrand, and its purpose is to stop the company amplifying a message it is about to abandon.
Find out in a fortnight whether the demand exists
Before committing a year to organic, it is worth knowing whether anyone is searching for the problem, what vocabulary they use, and which incumbent tools they compare. That answer takes weeks and frequently changes the plan entirely, because a category with no searchable demand needs a different strategy rather than a bigger content budget.
Start the compounding channel now, judge it later
Organic is usually too slow to be the evidence a board wants this quarter and too valuable to postpone until there is time, because it is the only channel that keeps producing after the budget stops. The resolution is to start it at a sustainable scale immediately, weight it towards the pages that convert soonest, and agree explicitly that it is judged at a later date than the paid work.
A testing cadence sized to the cash
A defined number of experiments per quarter, each with a stated question, a cost ceiling and a decision rule agreed before it runs. That structure is what converts a small budget into information rather than into a series of things that were tried, and it produces the one thing a board actually wants between milestones: evidence that the company is learning at a rate.
Founder-led distribution, made repeatable
The founder’s own audience and posting is the cheapest and most credible reach an early company has, and it depends entirely on a person with no time. Supporting it properly — drafting from their actual thinking, keeping a cadence, turning conversations into material — extends the channel without replacing the voice that made it work, and it buys time to build something that does not need them.
The website
What the site has to do for this customer
- A homepage that states who the product is for and what it replaces, in language a customer would use rather than category language
- Pricing or a pricing model published, because a company nobody can evaluate quietly loses the evaluation
- Proof that is genuinely evidenced: real customers with permission, real numbers, and nothing that would embarrass the company in diligence
- A structure that survives a positioning change without discarding the URLs and the coverage already accumulated
- A careers section that treats hiring as an audience, since early operators evaluate the company the way customers do
- Enough company substance for an investor doing diligence: who is behind it, where it is registered, what it actually does
- Analytics and conversion tracking working from day one, because the decisions that matter here are made on small numbers
- A contact route that reaches a founder while the company is still small enough for that to be an advantage
Constraints
What the rules allow, and what they do not
Public claims about traction, customers, revenue and growth are read by investors during diligence, and a figure on a website that does not match the data room is a problem in a funding process rather than a marketing exaggeration. Anything published is evidenced and dated, and a number that was true nine months ago is either updated or removed.
Customer names, logos and quotes require permission that early companies frequently skip in the rush. A handshake agreement from a founder-to-founder conversation is not a licence, and larger customers commonly have policies restricting public reference. Permission is recorded with a scope and a date so it survives the person who arranged it leaving.
Marketing can outrun a licence in regulated categories, and that is a serious rather than a technical error. Health, finance, insurance, legal and employment adjacent products all have restrictions on what may be advertised and by whom, and the checks happen before launch because the alternative is withdrawing a campaign or worse.
Data protection obligations apply from the first customer, and retrofitting consent, tracking and retention practices is far more expensive than building them correctly on a site nobody has visited yet. Requirements differ across the markets a company sells into, and the cheapest moment to get this right is before there is any data.
Comparative and superlative advertising claims are subject to advertising standards in every market we work in, and a young company competing against an incumbent is more likely to make one carelessly. We flag anything that looks unsupportable, and confirming what your company may claim in each market remains with you and your advisers.
Questions
Questions we get from this industry
We have nine months of runway. What should we actually do?
Start by ruling things out. A channel whose payback is longer than the time before the decision point is unavailable, however good it is, so the plan is built from what can produce evidence inside that window: paid capture on demand that already exists, direct outreach, and the founder’s own distribution.
Alongside that, begin the compounding work at a scale you can sustain and agree explicitly that it is judged later. What you should not do is fund a twelve-month programme with nine months of cash and hope the raise lands.
Is it too early for us to hire an agency?
Sometimes, and we would rather say so. If the product is still changing weekly, if nobody has yet sold to a customer who was not a personal contact, or if the company cannot describe who it is for without changing the answer, then spending to scale that is spending it twice.
The useful work at that stage is small: finding out who converts, tightening the position, and getting the measurement right. If what you need is a person rather than a supplier, the hire is the better use of the money and it is worth hearing that before you sign anything.
How do we show progress to the board before the real results arrive?
By agreeing in advance what will be shown and what would count as progress, which is a different conversation from promising a number. Early on that means qualified pipeline, conversion by segment, activation, and experiments run to a conclusion.
Set the point at which the programme can fairly be judged on revenue at the same time. Most cancellations in this sector happen one quarter before the work would have paid, because nobody wrote down when to look.
Should we spend on paid or build organic?
Both, in that order, for different reasons. Paid produces evidence inside a quarter and stops the day you stop paying. Organic produces nothing useful for months and then keeps producing after the budget ends.
A company with a runway needs the first to survive the board meeting and the second to not be in the same position next year. The mistake is treating it as a choice and funding only one, which either buys a year of rented attention or leaves the company with nothing to show at the review.
Our category does not exist yet. Does that change the plan?
It changes what search can do for you, and the honest answer is that it cannot manufacture demand for a term nobody types. That has to be established with research rather than assumed, and it takes weeks rather than quarters.
What usually does exist is searching around the problem and around the tools people currently use instead, and that is the winnable ground. Anything aimed at establishing the category itself is a brand programme with a longer horizon, and it should be funded and measured as one rather than dressed up as demand capture.
Find out what is realistically winnable in your market
A strategy call is a working session on your startup and scale-up business specifically — your area, your competitors, the searches that matter and what it would take to compete for them. If we do not think we can move it, we will tell you.
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Last updated · Reviewed by Zubair Afzal