The startup founder's growth hiring guide

It doesn’t matter whether you’re making your first marketing hire or building out your growth team — you know you have to find the right people, with the right experience, who can deliver the results your business actually needs.

Let’s dive right in: we’re talking about how to think through growth resourcing and hiring, so you can get it right.

Figuring out what you need

So you’re a founder of a B2C startup who’s ready to start hiring for growth. The absolute #1 most important thing you need to do first is to figure out what you need.

Making the wrong marketing personnel decisions based on needs misalignment is shockingly common. “Marketing” in particular is such a vast umbrella term for so many different functional areas of expertise that it can be hard to know what to look for. It’s totally ok if you’re not intimately familiar with all the different factions of marketing — but you ARE intimately familiar with your business, and can identify where the gaps lie. 

So, how do you think through this?

It’s really hard to implement solutions if you haven’t defined the problem. And you don’t need to worry about defining the problem in a tactical sense — that’s what the expert you bring in will do — you just need to understand what part(s) of your business need the most support, so they can be tackled head on by your hire.

Some questions to ask yourself:

1. Is customer acquisition going well, but conversion or retention is a problem?

2. Are your site and product ready to go, but acquisition is where you need to step on the gas?

3. Do you feel like you have a great understanding of your costs and unit economics, but need help with a cohesive brand vision (or vice versa)?

4. Have you done any methodical testing of your existing marketing strategy and product (both digital and physical)?

5. Have you validated assumptions about your business with real data from real customers?

6. Is marketing pretty new to your org, or do you have a solid, battle-tested foundation you’re looking to grow further, or make more efficient?

7. Do you need someone who can drive strategy AND own execution of those plans? Or will strategy and execution be handled by two different people?

8. What type of person will be capable today of getting you to the next stage, and could even grow into the leader you’ll need in 2-3+ years?

9. Is the scope of what you need enough to warrant a full time hire today? What about in a year? Two years? On the flip side, is there too MUCH work right now for just one person?

Taking stock this way will help you determine the competencies and level of experience you need to look for, because no one marketer (or even agency) can do all of these things expertly. Great marketers typically have what are considered:

• T-Shaped skills, meaning they’re knowledgeable about many different areas of marketing (the horizontal of the T) but have deep strategic and tactical expertise in one or two areas (the vertical of the T), or

• π-Shaped skills, meaning they’re an expert in one functional area of marketing (the stronger leg of the pi), and proficient in another (the other leg of the pi). I first came across this concept in the excellent MKT1 newsletter, on this very same topic. MKT1 focuses on B2B marketing, but many of the same principles apply.

The part-time vs. full-time question

As a fractional growth lead myself, I deeply understand the value of part-time, medium-term marketing support, particularly for early stage orgs that need someone experienced to propel them but can’t yet invest in a senior full time hire. But I’m not here to toot my own horn and tell you the best thing to do is to always hire fractional support, because that’s simply not true.

The type of support you bring on largely depends on these few things:

1. The needs you’ve already identified (above)

2. The resources you have (both time and $)

3. What your existing team looks like (if you have one)

From there, there are are handful of different types of support you could bring on, ordered here generally by least to most expensive (see the table at the top of this post). Depending on specific deliverables, scope, experience, etc. your mileage may vary:

• Freelancer

• Advisor or consultant (For the sake of this breakout I’m using these interchangeably, defined as someone who’s providing purely strategic, advisory, hands-off expertise)

• Agency

• Fractional

• Full time hire

How to determine what kind of support is right for you

When thinking about a full- vs. part-time hire, consider what functions you absolutely need owned by someone who has total accountability, can work cross-functionally with your broader team, and will treat your brand like your own. This is where you should hire in-house or fractionally.

Think about the things you just need to get done well, so you don’t have to build these skills in-house or worry about them yourself. This is where you may benefit more from an agency or freelancer.

Additionally, think about the skills you already have in-house and the skills you need to complement. If your list of goals includes managing paid acquisition strategy, designing and building landing pages and ad creatives, building brand awareness with offline / OOH / organic marketing, affiliate marketing, and GTM strategy for a new product, I’m sorry to say you won’t be successful in finding a marketing unicorn who can do all these things well. Assuming you can’t go hire 5 full time employees, a balance of complementary in-house and external support is your best bet.

I’d also love to get on my soapbox a bit here too and ask that if you don’t think you’re going to need a certain skillset anymore 6, 12, 18 months down the line, please don’t hire a full time person.

If you’re not ready to commit to an employee’s career, livelihood, and benefits (our system is, in a word, bad!) being tied to your org, that is ok! Just be honest with yourself from the jump. Start with any of the part time options listed above — this is exactly the gap many are intended to fill — and grow into full-time support over time.

A note on agencies

Like with any of these job functions, there are some excellent agencies out there, and there are some less-than-stellar agencies out there. There are many cases where hiring an agency is absolutely the best move, like if you’re just getting paid media off the ground, expanding to a channel that’s more specialized, like TV or audio, or working on some large scale branding efforts.

If you’ve determined that’s your situation, there are some key differences worth noting about how agencies operate: