You’ve come this far without a head of marketing. You’ve pitched the vision, landed early customers, and maybe even closed a funding round. The team believes. Investors are excited. But when it comes to actually growing—something feels stuck.

When you’re running a startup, your resources are tight, your goals are aggressive, and your margins for error are slim. You know you need marketing—but you don’t need a full in-house team, five tools you won’t use, and bloated retainers that don’t align with outcomes.

If you’re like many early-stage founders in B2B or deep tech, marketing has been a mix of hustle, hopeful experiments, and a few solid wins that feel hard to repeat. At some point, intuition stops scaling—and you realize it’s time to build a real marketing function.

When you’re running a startup, your resources are tight, your goals are aggressive, and your margins for error are slim. You know you need marketing—but you don’t need a full in-house team, five tools you won’t use, and bloated retainers that don’t align with outcomes.