4 Steps to Build a Marketing Team for Startup Success [From My Experience as a Founder]

So, you're trying to sell your product, and it feels like a monumental task.
I'm with you, I've been there! I'm Biro, founder of jexo.io.

I have a technical background, and before starting Jexo, I knew nothing about selling activities or marketing responsibilities. But I had to learn and adapt, and I luckily managed to establish a talented marketing team.

Today I want to share my journey into hiring for marketing as a clueless founder, and I want to share some pointers that worked for me in hopes that it works for you.

And if you read until the end, you'll get a PRO tip on what roles to look for and where to find good talent. So if you're a technical or product founder with no experience in selling and you're interested in setting up a kickass team, keep reading. 👇🏻

Here's where we are with Jexo today, one year later, after starting to get into marketing:

• More than 10,000 visitors every month and doubled in the last four months.
• We managed to balance out channels in lead generation and not rely strictly on Atlassian Marketplace searches. In November last year, we had 85% of leads from Marketplace, whereas now this source is 3rd biggest.
• We just entered the 100k Alexa ranking were; less than six months ago, we were 3million ranked.
• We rank on prime google search positions for tens of keywords.
• Our social media presence rivals that of household names in our industry.
• And Atlassian talks highly of us as role models in branding and communication.

So how did I do it? Well, I didn't; as I mentioned earlier, I'm clueless. But the team we hired, along with my brilliant co-founder Nikki. They smash it out of the park over the past year.

So I want to talk about the steps to form a talented and autonomous team in the early startup stages, mainly because I know other founders who are struggling today that could benefit from this guidance.

[☞ Disclaimer: If you don't feel like reading, you can click here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-1beqwNOiw&t=64s
to listen to me talk about this subject over youtube]

There are four things that you need to make sure you do to succeed with this:

1. Learn how not to be utterly clueless about marketing
2. Start hiring entrepreneurs
3. Stop telling people how to do their job
4. Prevent bottlenecking and work dependencies

Let's look at each of these points individually with a few examples from our journey, and we'll start with the clueless bit: Learning about marketing.

☞ 1. Learning about Marketing

Now, I kept mentioning the word clueless, but the reality is I did have to learn a bit about distribution channels, generating leads, type of content, and so on. You have to have a rough understanding of the marketing engine to know how to assemble it correctly.

And I know what some of you might be thinking: "Well, Biro, if I wanted to learn how to do marketing, then I would do it myself and not read on how to hire a team for it."

And sure, you could hire an advisor to instruct you on who to get for your team or even pay a digital marketing agency to conduct all the activities, so you don't have to even think about it.

But if you want to set solid roots and, like myself, you see marketing and sales as a critical component of your business, you'd want to understand how that component works, so learning about marketing is the way to go. Also, the team's success reflects your confidence as a leader, and at least for me, that means understanding what my team is doing.

So back to the story!

I decided to read a couple of general marketing books, do research about selling for SaaS, and started watching Youtube snippets from household names like Dan Martell. And speaking of Dan, sometime early last year, I decided to register for his Growth Accelerator course, and man that really helped me understand some of the magic of generating interest around our products. Once I felt I understood enough, I spent some time on hands-on marketing tasks with my co-founder Nikki and only after this period I started looking for people to hire.

☞ 2. Hire entrepreneurs

Okay, let me give you an example of what I mean by that. We hired @Jenn_velazquez into the team as Digital Marketing Lead, and a vital factor in the decision was how she handled the first interview stage with me. You see, Jenn is not only a marketing nerd demonstrating that by comfortably talking about various practices and terminology, but she also made me feel like she was already working for Jexo.

Let me explain how:

1. First, she did pretty thorough research into our business, our backgrounds, the current positioning state, and our social presence. She went so far as to ask her friends in the Product Management space to explain our product to her. So over our introductory call, Jen listened to me explain our business and actively contributed with her understanding, giving me a weird feeling that it wasn't the first time we talked.
2. Secondly, she was already suggesting ideas for content and distribution to improve our exposure and growth. And I'm not talking textbook generic fluff but honest, tailored thoughts that she spent time coming up with.

So I labeled Jenn as an entrepreneur because she is a motivated individual full of initiative, with a creative mind and a great skill set that is also not shy of picking up other tasks like design, video editing, etc.

And if you're an early startup, you need people like Jenn, versatile entrepreneurs like yourself that care and act as you do. So structure your talent hunting activities and job interviews so that you highlight the traits I mentioned.

☞ 3. Empower your team

I think the word empower gets thrown a lot these days and slightly lost its meaning. But what I'm saying to you is to stop being a hard head and quit telling people how to do their jobs. I know it sounds harsh, but in all honesty, I'm telling my past self that as well, not just you behind this glass. Because like any entrepreneur parent that cares a lot about their baby startup, I was at times way too protective.

It is a natural feeling. After all, you put so much to get your business where it is today, and you want everyone to treat it with the same care. But what you fail to realize is that by babysitting and not trusting the team with taking their own decisions, you are stripping them from the feeling of ownership and responsibility. They're working to please you rather than to deliver real value to your company.

I stopped reviewing social media posts. They get published on a daily and most of them I see live. Like articles, I don't tell Sarah, our content manager, what to write and only review if she asks me. I only help shape the needs for growth, for example, increasing monthly conversion by 15%. I don't know how, but the marketing team does, so I let them do their thing.

Not every work needs validation from you, so instead, set the direction, establish a mission and goals, and only help when the team needs it the most. After all, if you take the previous point seriously and hire a marketing team formed of autonomous and motivated entrepreneurs, they will crave the opportunity to be creative and deliver value. So let them shine!

☞ 4. Prevent bottlenecking

When you reach that sweet stage where your marketing team deals with every task, and you don't have to be involved, your role should be to spot bottlenecks and friction dependency. I'll explain by giving you a handy example.

Nikki is a brilliant designer, and she created all our clever branding and visual assets. She was also putting together every single social media banner and article pictures using Adobe XD and Illustrator. But as soon as we had our first hire for the marketing team and accelerated generating written content, the visual work started getting sluggish because Sarah relied on Nikki for that kind of work. Nikki is also a PO, so she was spread thin. So it was then I realized I needed to make Nikki redundant. The marketing team needed an easier way to have all of these assets available on time, so we decided to use Canva.

When it comes to the Canva editor, apart from being intuitive, the two features I love are:

1. The background removed, you can throw any picture at it, and it does a crazy good job at cropping the main object or person. It's magic!

2. I find helpful the option to have multiple people edit the same banner in real-time. It means Nikki can come in and quickly make adjustments, and Jenn will see them as they happen on her end. Or even have a workshop where a group of us contribute our ideas for the next visual campaign.

This tool is crazy good, and we can't survive without this tool at this point. So if you haven't yet, give Canva a try because you're in your early startup days, and you need all the time-saving tools in the world right now.

PRO Tips and Conclusion

When you kick off in the marketing realm, you need two roles: content generation and distribution. Sure, you can hire one person to do both, but most often, you'll find that both these spaces are large to require dedicated focus. If you can only afford one hire and prefer content generation because you're worst at that, try to help with the distribution. The opposite applies; if you're good at writing about your product and teach others, then hire someone for content distribution first.

And here's a suggestion for finding someone for your marketing duties that has the kind of mindset explained earlier. Have a look at the Shapr app as you get to explore profiles of thousands of creatives and professionals in any country; you connect and chat in a more relaxed, non recruiting vibe setup. That's how I meet Sarah. And again, not a paid advert, just a suggestion. And if you're looking for remote in any country, look at the Spanish and South American market. I meet so many talented marketing folk in these areas, and it is super easy to list hiring ads on these markets.

Okay, that's all I got for you today; I hope there's some good advice you can take away. I know recruiting the right people can be difficult and extensive, and I don't claim to have the silver bullet. But overall, as a startup with limited resources, you want to hire entrepreneurship-spirited people like yourself, and you have to trust them.

If this was useful to you, consider taking a look at my YouTube video about How, When, and Why to offer Share Options to your Startup Team here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJDCtYFgtyA.