What to consider in your first marketing hire
Talia Moyal on how she’s navigated being the first GTM leader at Gitpod, Airbyte, WorkOS and Lightstep
At some point as your startup grows, you may suddenly realize that you need a full-time marketer to drive and sustain growth. The tricky thing is, once this need is felt, every day that passes without that hire can feel like you’re giving up market share.
Talia Moyal has been one of the first GTM hires (product, marketing) at Gitpod, WorkOS, Airbyte, and Lightstep. She also advises a number of early-stage founders on their marketing journeys and has some fantastic lessons learned.
Today we’re digging into how to think about that first marketing hire:
How to hire and what to ask in interviews
What to avoid: common mistakes made by early teams
How to develop messaging for a startup for the very first time
How to evaluate the work, especially that of a product marketer
We’ve also got some bonus content around early stage marketing stack essentials and the ways Talia sees AI changing her work already. Enjoy!
Founders often come to you for help with thinking about how to hire their first marketer - what do you tell them? Do you go for a product or growth marketer?
Your first marketing hire should be a swiss army knife - someone who can help cover all the holes you have early on, especially if you’re a seed or series A stage company. I find product marketers are often best suited for this work because they are trained in how to understand something. A good product marketer will ask the right questions, deeply get to know their external and internal audiences, and give you a strong foundation to build up from.
When you’re building marketing at a startup for the first time, what works and what doesn't?
This last year has taught me a lot about what it means to be truly nimble. Early stage startups are not always set up to support junior, or even mid-level, people because you need everyone to sort of forge the path forward themselves.
The hard truth is that when you’re trying to scale quickly, you need people who have done the job before and really understand what they’re doing. You can’t repurpose everyone into marketing - you often see companies go through this when they move from seed to series A. Early hires join a company because they love the mission and are willing to do lots of different jobs. At a certain scale, you need these people to specialize and know what “good looks like.” But it’s even more important for them to know what “great” looks like with any guidance. Sometimes that includes your original team, and sometimes it takes a lot of courage to decide it’s not the best fit for you, or them.
How do you develop product marketing for a company for the first time? What do you tackle first and what does your process of messaging development look like?
While I haven’t always followed this to a T, this is my recommendation for all early product marketers. And if you’ve hired a product marketer, I would suggest checking that they are doing the following:
Watch as many recorded calls as you can. If people aren’t recording calls yet, fix that so that any external convo is available for marketing to review.
From those recordings, find patterns across pain points, reasons for buying, discussion about related tooling and competition–anything that runs through the conversations.
Spend as much time as you can researching your personas, this includes talking to them.
Do excessive amounts of market research. This looks like hours of searching things related to your persona and how they might try to learn about your space. ChatGPT is a huge resource in this process, it helps me uncover new ideas, gives me new questions to ask - it’s a great brainstorm partner. Gartner research is also a great resource for anyone with an Enterprise motion; especially on security and compliance, they’ll help you see how big analyst firms are framing problems and solutions to your buyers.
From there, refine and determine your product’s value pillars as part of a messaging house. Walk through the messaging house with your CEO.
Your CEO is the most important audience for anything related to messaging. If they don’t believe that you can tell the story properly, then you don’t have buy-in as a marketing leader. They are the vision holder, and everything you’re selling needs to fit their vision.
And remember, if your CEO is technical and writing isn't their forte, then your job as the marketing leader is to translate their idea into words.
Tell me about what you see founders struggle with when it comes to messaging?
A lot of founders default to feature or architecture based messaging over value based messaging. They will describe what they’ve built and what it does, rather than why it’s important or how it fits into a user’s existing mental model.
Mental models are something I talk with founders about a lot because you should generally assume that no one cares about your product, especially in the early days. Even if it solves a problem they have, they really care about how it fits into their view of the world to solve their problems, not how shiny your architecture is.
Many products I’ve worked on are category creation products. For instance with Gitpod, “cloud development environment” wasn't a category until the team created the term, and then Gartner wrote about it. When you’re category creating you think that novelty will help you win but in an enterprise deal cycle, novelty can be a deal killer. There is no existing budget for novelty!
As I've learned more about what it means to actually grow a business, I’ve realized that category creation is excellent in pitching VCs, working with analysts and talking to the broader market, but when it comes to selling, you want to exist within a world that people already understand and have budgets for. You need to replace something that exists so that people start paying for you immediately, rather than trying to find new budgets to allocate to your category.
When you’re the first marketer at a startup - what does the work look like?
You have to clearly understand your goals. And the only goal that really matters is the core company goal. Then you can figure out how you fit into it.
A lot of marketers want to generate leads, but focusing on generating opportunities gets you closer to making a sale. I’ve definitely done this wrong in the past and have focused on leads because lead gen was fully in my control, but I found that this mindset kept me and my team from thinking strategically. Focusing on opportunities requires you to get more leads, but also requires you to get the right ones.
Figuring out how to prioritize towards this goal can show up in unusual ways. For instance, you might need to spend a lot of time with BDRs as they could be a resource to drastically increase opportunities.
And the biggest mistake I see founders make is to simply not set goals! Many seed stage companies I advise don’t have a clear sense of what they are trying to achieve, or any time horizons they’re working within. Being able to clearly articulate, with metrics, where you want to be in one to three years, helps a marketer clearly plug into your vision and bring it to life.
How far in advance does GTM planning work at an early stage startup?
I have a dream of half yearly goals everywhere I go and it never happens. So, the team ends up setting quarterly goals with the caveat that every week I re-evaluate what's most important, because when you're at an early stage priorities change quickly. That doesn’t mean I'm staring at dashboards all the time, it just means that I look at my to-do list and team goals, and try to prioritize that week. That way, we can also make space to react to requests from our counterparts.
Another good learning is that goal setting is your opportunity to manage up. Most startups experience a good amount of thrash, so having a quarterly theme or channel strategy helps you clearly articulate why you would not take on a project that falls outside of your core focus.
My last tip related to goal setting and prioritization, especially early on, only do the thing that will have an outsized impact. For example, if you’re about to launch a product and you can only do one thing, do you pick working with an influencer agency that can amplify your voice to help you reach thousands more people and impressions than you could do on your own? Or do you spend time optimizing a blog post for HN? I always pick the one that I know will yield larger results with less effort.
Founders often perceive “marketing stuff” as being easy - so it’s useful to articulate that there’s creative work and then there’s execution work. Creative work, like any kind of writing, messaging, branding etc., takes a lot of brain space and energy. Execution is pretty straightforward. Your creative space needs to be protected. Having a clear focus area for a quarter that aligns with the business strategy helps you to protect that creative space and ultimately drive the most impact to the company.
When you’re hiring marketers what are your favorite questions to ask?
I really like vetting people on the questions they ask. I create a lot of deadspace in interviews because I find those moments of silence when people are uncomfortable show you a lot about who they are. I like to hear candidates ask strategic questions about the business. If a product marketer hasn’t asked me a single question about the performance of the business, then I know they either are not experienced enough to be an early hire or don’t care.
When it comes to business questions, I want to hear them ask about things like growth, how long our sales cycle is, average deal size, sales and marketing team sizes.
Lightning round!
Marketing stack essentials for an early stage company?
Claude, chatGPT, Google Analytics, something to send mass emails with (haven’t found anything I love yet at all), something to send targeted emails with (i.e. Apollo), Figma, data enrichment like Clearbit, Hex (dashboards), and ideally some sort of headless CMS.
Marketing leader you respect and follow?
I love Emily Kramer’s newsletter! And even though she’s not a ‘marketing’ leader, I feel like there are so many learnings that can be applied to GTM from everything Claire Vo. Also, anything about Apple’s advertising is a great lesson in simplicity.
Biggest misconception you deal with regularly?
That ‘being technical’ and knowing how to communicate with a technical audience means requiring an engineering degree :)
Place where you see AI changing your work daily/weekly?
I’ve become a content machine thanks to my intern Claude! Both Claude and chatGPT have changed the game for me and my team. ChatGPT is my research tool / insights aggregator and Claude helps with the actual writing.
Final tip for any aspiring marketing leaders?
Trust your gut and take up space! You will always perform better and have executive presence when you advocate for yourself and your team. This includes setting uncomfortable expectations or making difficult decisions. But my absolute favorite saying to get through this is to remember, “clear is kind”!
Huge thanks to Talia for her time and insights! You can follow her on LinkedIn.