How to build a powerful marketing machine

Emily Kramer, who built marketing teams at Asana, Carta, Ticketfly and Astro and writes the MKT1 newsletter, shares practical advice on hiring marketers for early-stage B2B startups. The conversation covers her 'fuel and engine' model, the archetypes of marketing roles, how product and marketing should collaborate, and how to tell whether a marketing team is impact-focused.

01Key learnings

• Think of marketing as fuel (the content, positioning and assets that add value) and engine (distribution, tracking and ops), then identify which side is your biggest constraint before hiring.
• Prioritize hiring for the business model, such as top-down sales versus product-led growth, over matching industry or audience experience, since good marketers learn the audience quickly.
• Your first marketer should ideally be a 'pie-shaped' generalist with deep expertise in one area, usually product marketing, plus working knowledge of others and the ability to manage contractors.
• Hire a marketer once you have some product-market fit and a clear sense of what they would do; hiring too early leaves them idle without positioning or budget to work with.
• Avoid hiring senior candidates who only worked at large public companies for a from-scratch startup role, since they often lack experience building foundations and being scrappy.
• Create a clear areas-of-responsibility list and a short creative brief (goals, audience, creative angle, channels, stakeholders) before big projects to align product and marketing early.
• Judge marketing by impact: look for conversion-rate tracking across the full funnel and big-bet initiatives, not activity goals like number of blog posts published.
• Angel investors with functional expertise can add value by clearly defining how they help founders, such as hiring marketers and referring candidates, and by delivering reliably.

02Frameworks mentioned

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.