Agency or in-house? Senior or junior? Generalist or specialist? Siloed or cross-functional? Building your first marketing/growth team or expanding a single person department can be a daunting proposition for start-ups and scale-ups.
Especially if they lack existing marketing leadership. In this talk, Bethan will talk through the decisions required to create a high-performing marketing team and walk through how to hire the right people, set-up consistent processes and build the right skills to ensure sustained growth.
Bethan will give practical examples of how different organisations optimised and organised their team structure sand provide actionable tactics that you can use to start building your marketing capacity from the moment you leave the auditorium.
Auto-generated transcript - may contain errors.
Tap a timestamp to jump the video.
Hey everyone. Hope you're all doing good. It is fantastic to be here in Edinburgh. I'm from York, so I love a good medieval city. I hope everyone's kind of sated after lunch. Our blood sugar levels are high because this is gonna be a fast paced talk.
We're gonna roll through a lot of stuff today, and we're talking about how to build your first marketing team. But before we get stuck in, I'm gonna do something I wish speakers did a little bit more often or a little bit more explicitly before they gave talks.
I'm gonna talk about my biases. Because when you come and you see people at conferences like this, they're giving you information, insight, tips, tricks, They're all coming from their own unique point of view, and they have their own unique experiences, their own unique kind of ways of working that shape their view of the world and their work.
And these are some of mine. So I've been doing marketing for ten years, started as a marketing assistant at university, worked my way up, found my way into tech about five years ago, got b to c and b to b experience. But actually, primarily for the past five years, I've really been indexing into b to b. So what does that mean?
My world has consisted of very long sales cycles, but high account values, so that's been quite good. And lots of fighting with sales about attribution as well, so that's been good fun. I've also been the first marketing hire a lot. That's what I've done a lot in my career, come into companies with no marketing department, and almost well, pretty much set one up from scratch, and I've never ever ever ever found it easy.
It's always been really, really hard because every company has its own problems, whether that's processes, people, stakeholders. So if you're someone who's built a marketing team from scratch and you found it really, really easy, please come and talk to me after the talk because I wanna know how you did it because it's always been difficult.
So my talk is really located in the point of view that being the first marketing hire is hard. Building your first marketing team is really difficult. And then finally, kind of related to this, I don't believe in repeatable playbooks. It just doesn't work, man.
Like, what this talk is not gonna be is a list of tips and tricks that if you follow my ten step process, you're guaranteed to have a high performing early stage marketing team. It doesn't work like that. Every company is unique. Every culture is unique.
Every audience, every market is unique. And, you know, if it really was that easy, I wouldn't be doing this talk. I'd be selling like a ten pound e book on Gumroad. So it's not that easy. So we're going to get stuck in with when do you hire marketing?
You're an early stage founding team. At what point do you bring a marketeer in? So what you're trying to do as a startup is you're really trying to get lift off. You're trying to get off the ground. You're trying to build enough momentum to break free from your constraints, and your constraints are time and money.
And the thing is you need to build that early traction as fast as possible to reach escape velocity where your constraints are no longer about to kill you. Because, you know, we've all seen the stats. What is it? Like, four out of five businesses die in their first kind of three to five years.
We don't want to be one of those businesses. So the thing is, as a startup, what you could do is you go could go to market and do a one on one sales process. So you could have a sales team, and what they do is they identify customers one on one.
They nurture them, prospect, outreach, engage with them, sell to them. That is a perfectly valid way of going to market. But the thing is, it's really time consuming, and it's really slow. You don't have time. You've got a headwind. You've got to achieve that escape velocity.
So there is a reason why marketing exists. There's a reason why marketing is not sales because marketing is about achieving scalability, reaching a wider audience with the resources you have. It's about being efficient with your resources. And also, you've got to remember, you know, we've all seen the stat that's been going around recently.
In your total addressable market, at any given time, only about five percent of that market is ready to buy your product. They're in that buying phase. So sales can only really deal with that five percent. What do you do with the other ninety five percent?
That's where marketing comes in because you're building those relationships. You're building that traction with those customers before they come become customers. So that's why it's really important to get marketing in from the beginning. It should be part of the holy trinity, product marketing, engineering, maybe sales.
I do love sales, but, you know, gotta have that friction there. There's a couple of other things kind of compounding your vision as well as an early stage founder or, you know, a founding team who is not a marketeer. Early adopters actually interestingly really make your road ahead look easy.
If you do something like a product hunt launch or an early launch to beta users, what you'll often find is your metrics around that early kind of adopter audience actually look quite healthy. Your sign up rate will be reasonably high. Click through rates will be high.
Cost per acquisition will be reasonably low. But once you've scooped up all of that low hanging early adopter fruit, that's when things become difficult. And I've worked with founding teams who have kind of got these fundamental metrics built off the fact that they've scooped up early adopters for a certain cost per acquisition.
As soon as they move into the early majority who are less motivated, less ready to buy, that's when stuff starts to fall apart. Acquisition gets more expensive. Your click through rates get lower. Your interaction rates get lower. So you need to have marketing from the beginning to anticipate the fact that you need to nurture that audience, you need to build affinity with them.
Also, we we know this, like, I'm not gonna leave at this point because we all know this. First to market is not a defensible moat. It kinda never was, it never will be again. The thing is there aren't many defensible moats left. What have you got? Okay. You've got product.
Features are easily copyable. You've got tech. You've got code. Easy copyable unless you have a really solid patent process. What's left? It's brand. Of course, remember my bias is I'm a marketeer. Of course, I'm gonna say it's brand, but it is actually brand.
That that's all you've got left to build around. That's the only way you can plant your flag, get that defensible moat to break free from your competitors, which are a constraint. So you need to invest in brand from the beginning. Start building that brand from day one.
And also, finally, speaking to the kind of founders in the room or people thinking about being a startup founder, you are too close to the problem, and you think the sun shines out of your product's ass. And you kind of have to. You have to have those rose tinted glasses on because, to be perfectly honest, if you took them off and looked at the road ahead and looked through you you your product through the lens of normal vision, you'd be like, I'm not doing this, man.
It's gonna be too hard. It looks too difficult. So you've got to keep those rose tinted glasses on, but the problem is you you won't be able to get into the mindset of the customer with them on. That's when you need people who can kind of own the customer voice for you on that kind of founding early stage team to speak for the customer and tell you, actually, you think this is a really good feature of the product?
No one cares. No one cares. They don't get it. It's positioned wrong. The messaging's wrong around it. And that's what marketing can do in conjunction with product and engineering as well. It's not marketing's job alone, so you do need marketing from the beginning.
Hopefully, I've convinced you of that. So we're going to come on to who should you hire. Again, a really interesting question. So a lot of founding teams get to the point where they're kind of like, okay, we we kind of we get we need marketing, but we know there's loads of different types of marketers.
You've got inbound, demand gen, performance. What type of marketeer do we get? And we know before we can kind of choose the type of marketeer we want, we need a solid marketing strategy. We need to know what the kind of tactics are we're gonna execute against.
Well, the thing is, unless you have marketeers on your founding team, you need the strategy from day one, and you need to hire someone who can help you build that strategy with a general awareness, a general kind of understanding of all of marketing threads available to you.
You need that ultimate generalist. Again, I'm not really saying anything new here. We've talked about the t shaped marketeer for years. This is Buffer's example. I think it's quite a good one. I don't know. I'm skeptical of some parts of it because, you know, you've got your baseline knowledge, you've got your marketing foundation, and all of those things, yes, you do want your marketers to understand.
You can actually bring in external expertise for those little specific parts as well very easily, I don't know HTML and CSS. CSS is really hard, man. It's so difficult. I I'm I'd just bring someone else in. I will break everything. So, you know, this is kind of valid in theory, but actually, there are some attributes on here that aren't represented that are, like, super important.
I've talked about the importance of someone who understands strategy, who can help you build that marketing strategy. Because again, we've talked about constraints. Your constraints are time, money, and actually resources as well. And the thing about building a strategy, it's about understanding your battlefield that you're gonna play on.
You only have so many troops. You only have so many resources. So where are they best spent? What is your competition doing? Where is the best ground to place them on? That's what strategy is. It's not a plan. It's not a wish list of things we need to do.
It's about using your resources really efficiently. So alongside the kind of strategic understanding, I also think your marketeer needs to have these things. Top one, get **** done, bias fraction. We'll come on to that in a little bit more detail. They've also got to offer insights, not data.
And to give an example of what I mean by this, it's really easy for me as a marketeer to come to you with a analytics dashboard, data studio dashboard, an Excel spreadsheet that says a load of numbers. You know, CPCs have gone up.
Cost per acquisition has gone up. Great. What does that tell me? You don't want someone to just give you reporting, they've got to give you insight. And what does insight look like? Okay. Cost per acquisition has gone up. Why? Most of our acquisition happens through paid channels, specifically Google Ads search, and we know CPCs have risen.
Why have CPCs risen in the last year? Well, ad inventory is fixed, and more competitors have entered into the auction, which has driven up those CPCs. That's insight. That's telling you why those numbers have done what they've done. But what's even better than insight is action.
What are you gonna do about it? And this is where the strategic mindset comes in. Okay. We know our cost back when the acquisition has risen because paid is getting more expensive, and we actually strategically kind of know with our future hat on thinking about it, that's only going to continue.
There's limited inventory. It's fixed. There's always going to be more competition. So what do we do about that? Well, actually, what we need to do is start really focusing on SEO. We want to own our traffic from an organic point of view. We want our acquisition to move over to organic, but we know there's going to be a period of flux where we still need to support things through PPC, because you know, SEO isn't overnight.
We're going to slowly shift our budgets away over to SEO over a period of the next six months, twelve months. That's action. That's what you're looking for. And then finally, you're looking for someone to be an excellent people operator. Because being a marketeer is really bloody difficult because everyone thinks they can do marketing.
Everyone thinks product thinks they know marketing. Engineering thinks they know marketing because they've got a Twitter feed. They've got Twitter, and they've got like two thousand followers, and like, they totally get it. Again, if it was that easy, I would be selling books on Gumroad for ten pounds, and I'd be a billionaire, and everyone would be a billionaire because we'd all be following really simple tactics.
It doesn't work that way. But the thing is, as a first marketing hire, that first marketing person, you can't say to product and engineering, like, just leave me alone. You don't know what you're doing. That's not gonna go down well. That's not gonna build a good stakeholder relationship.
And this is where being an excellent people operator comes in. It's having that negotiation of, actually, we're doing we're not gonna do what you think is the right thing to do because we're doing this thing over here. We've got limited resources. This is our strategy.
Also, your first marketing hire as well is someone you want to build out a team right, and that involves excellent people management skills. So they've got to understand coaching, mentoring, management. They've just got to all around be a good people operator. But to go into bias for action, because I actually think this is the most important thing, and it's sometimes the most difficult thing to hire for actually.
How do you know that someone's just going to execute? Because especially when you're in a kind of early stage startup or even a scale up that hasn't done much marketing before. It's almost like the world's your oyster. There are so many avenues you could go down.
Which one do you select? And that's where having a strategy comes in that helps you select, but there is a temptation to do nothing. And I I've been in those situations actually personally and professionally in my year my career where I felt like, oh god, like, I almost don't want to play my next move because I don't know where it's best placed, and like, is doing nothing better than doing something?
No, it never is. Like, you should always try and do something. And a lot of the things you will do as a marketer, you will fail. We all know about failing fast. I'm not going to labor that point. But you need to have that bias fraction.
And while I don't like their kind of ethics, Amazon actually have bias fraction as one of the competencies they hire for. And these are some of the interview questions that Amazon used to kind of draw out whether someone has bias for action or not.
I quite like them. I have lifted them from the interwebs. Please feel free to lift them from me. It's all a big sharing game here. But speaking of Amazon, this is a question. This is I do a Twitter space with Jason Bradwell from b to b Better, and we were chatting about this a while ago.
Essentially, should you hire someone from a big corporate as your first marketing hire, whether that's Fang or, you know, McKinsey, Deloitte, any kind of big consultancy. And I want to start off with the caveat that there are some amazing people who work in these places, are super, super talented.
This isn't me trying to be derogatory to them in any way, but I'm going to give you quite a binary answer. No. You shouldn't hire someone from these places. And I'm going to tell you for why. So firstly, if you worked in a big corporate, you have had a lot of resource to play with.
You've had a lot of budget to play with. You've had a lot of other teams to play with. And what that means is if you have a problem, you can go to your data analyst. If you need design work done, you can go to your design team.
There might be a bit of a wait, but they'll give you something back. When you are a team of one in a startup, you do not have that luxury. You are scrambling around. You're trying to find that little bit of budget to get a freelance designer, or you are going on Canva and trying to do it yourself and then thinking, I'm not a designer.
Why am I doing this? That's normally what I end up doing. But, you know, you never operated in the extreme constraints of a startup when you've worked in a large place. Also, you've probably never had ownership of strategy, and this is important because that first marketing hire, they need to own that strategy.
And I'd argue, you know, if you are someone from the the these types of companies who has owned strategy before, as in you've kind of directed it, you put it into place, you've got it going, a start up probably can't afford to hire you.
Right? So like I said, there are some amazing people who work in these places, but you probably don't want to hire them. There are exceptions to the rule, of course. You want someone who comes from a background of lean. They've had no resources, but they've still got stuff done.
They've had no strategy to play off. They've had to create it. They've had to kind of interface with product and engineering and do all of that kind of messy stakeholder management without really always a clear direction of where everything is going. Finally, on this section of who to hire, should you bring in external expertise?
So go back to my biases for a second. I am a consultant. I am bought into companies as a fractional part time CMO type person to help build this first marketing team function. So you would kind of expect my answer to be this to this to be kind of like, yeah, absolutely, you should hire an external person.
Hire me. Hopefully, I'm going to surprise you and say, ideally not. Ideally, you want to hire in house. We're going talk a little bit later on in this talk about why in housing your marketing function is really, really important, especially when you reach scale, but ideally in the beginning, you do want to bring in that first person in an in house capacity.
The challenge you've got well, there are a couple of challenges. Firstly, budgets. Good marketers are expensive, just like good product managers, good engineers, they are expensive. If you are expecting to bring someone in on seventeen k to run your marketing strategy, just like get out.
Seriously, like leave this talk. It's not gonna happen. You'll end up probably with a really ambitious, a really kind of good intern level person, but they just can't they haven't got the experience to own that strategy for you. So if your constraint is money, and you only have seventeen k to play with, sometimes it's better to bring in someone, you know, for one day a week who has got that experience.
That's a better use of your resources. Also, hiring takes a long time. You know, the average time to hire can sometimes be up to twelve months. I've been in places where it's been eighteen months, and as I said, you're trying to generate that traction.
You're trying to get escape velocity. You do not have time to waste to get bums on seats. You need them immediately. So sometimes bringing an external person in just helps speed things up. And finally, you want someone who's kind of done this before.
Even if they've not necessarily been the most senior person in the company, maybe they've been a really good marketing manager or someone in that type of position, but in a start up before, and they've dealt with that extreme resource scarcity, they're often quite a good hire, someone in that position, because they're quite hungry, and they've experienced it, and they've probably seen what a good strategy looks like as well in those kind of circumstances.
So to answer this question, ideally not, but sometimes you have to. For a second, we're going to talk about rules for single person marketing teams. So a lot of my talk has been kind of directed at first time founders, CEOs, even senior seasoned founders and CEOs, but are there any single person marketing team leaders in this room?
Yes. You are my heroes. You have a really tough job. It's hard. It's really hard. Like I said, I've never found it easy. It's bloody tough. And here are some of the things I've kind of learned along the way, some of my kind of tenants I operate to now.
Your job your job is primarily extreme resource management. It's to prioritize the best bets, and this is where having that strategy comes in. You only have so much time, you only have so much money, where do you best place that? Where do you play your moves?
And this should form the foundation of all of your efforts, because essentially, you're trying to generate that traction to buy yourself a bigger team, to buy yourself more marketing budget, but you've got to demonstrate results. You're getting people to pay, that is your ultimate job.
I don't want to see you reporting against metrics. I don't care about impressions. I don't even care about click through rate. I care about money in the bank. How many customers have you acquired, and have you got them to pay, and have you got them to pay market rate for your product?
That is what you should care about. And to do this, you've got to co own revenue. You absolutely have to co own revenue, whether that's with product, whether that's with sales, if you have a sales team you're working with. It's not up to someone it's not someone else's problem to convert customers.
It's your job to convert customers because the more money in the bank is the quicker you can hire, more people, expand your marketing team, and build that scalability. Because remember, marketing is cheaper. We're trying to acquire customers for cheaper. Sales can deal with all the nitty gritty.
That's what you're trying to do. And to do this, you've got to report into the CEO. I honestly now would not take a job, whether I was a consultant or in house, unless marketing had a position at the top table, even if that wasn't me, even if that's someone above me reporting into the CEO who represents marketing and marketing alone.
I don't believe these kind of combined sales and marketing roles really work, personally, from my experience. You know, it's misaligned incentives often. So you really do need a place at that top table. And if you are negotiating with a startup to be that first marketing hire, ask who you report into.
None of this marketing reporting into products, don't get that. Marketing reporting into sales, no, no. Love them. Don't wanna report into them. I've even seen marketing reporting into HR, that must have been interesting, but the most interesting was marketing reporting into engineering. How did that work? It didn't work, basically.
It's the outcome of that story. Speaking of engineering, one of your blockers as a single person marketing team is sometimes dev, is getting tech resource. And I honestly would have that conversation really, really early on because it will happen. You will need dev resource to change something on the front end of the site, to do some SEO work, to do some product marketing work.
You will need it. Have that conversation early on of, okay, so what happens when marketing needs dev time? The engineering team, the dev team are going to be focused on product. That's their job. That's their KPIs they're going to be aligned to, right?
So what happens when we need it? Is it we allocate five percent of engineering time to marketing? That's ring fenced. If it's used, great. If it's not used, that's fine. It goes back into them to use on product. Or is it we're not ever going to second the engineering team to marketing, we're actually going to hire external people, freelancers and stuff like that, to get marketing work done.
The worst thing to do is to ignore it and just be like, we'll deal with it when it happens. Because what happens then is you're waking six months, twelve months for SEO recommendations to go in. You're not building that traction. You're not reaching escape velocity.
You're harming the future of the company by not having these difficult they are really difficult conversations. I've had them. And sometimes the answer I've got is like, Martin does not get tech resource. No. No. No. No. No. We do. We just need to work out how.
So we're gonna go on to scaling the team. And remember I mentioned earlier, there's good reasons why you want to in house your marketing team. So there's kind of a trend I've noticed over the past couple of years, three to five years actually, more like maybe more like three years, where investors are now, in a way they never were before, requiring startups and scale ups they're investing in to have an in house marketing team.
Because actually, in the old world, like ten years ago, it was quite common for a startup to just be using an agency, so they might just have a performance marketing agency who took care of the whole marketing function. That's quite a brittle relationship.
You're relying on almost someone else's kind of like fundamentals. You have no control over how that agency staffs, their longevity, what happens if they lose their biggest customer and they go under. So investors really want that situation derisked, and they want you to have marketing in house.
And also, alongside kind of having bodies, bums on seats in house, what they actually are requiring now is a fully fleshed out marketing strategy. I think, again, one of the stats we see bandied about is fifty percent of VC dollars are put into marketing, primarily Facebook, Google, Amazon, and a lot of that is wasted.
Investors are very savvy about this now. It's no longer, okay, like, here here you go, marketing. Here's millions of pounds. Go and spend it. Acquire some customers, and we'll accept that a lot of that will be wasted. They're savvy, and they're like, okay, but tell me exactly how you're gonna acquire customers.
Tell me your marketing fundamentals. What is your cost per acquisition gonna be? How are you going to lower that or maintain that, especially when competitive forces come into play? So you do need a marketing function in house. And actually, when I work with clients, one the things we try and work to is if I'm bought in because of constraints around hiring budget, or they can't find the right person, we get them to a twelve month exit plan of where I'm like, Okay, we're going to hire you in house,
because that's the importance of it. I will pass over to in house person, You'll have your processes, structure, strategy laid out, and then it's kind of like your setup for investment, off you go. So also when it comes to scaling the team, obviously, I've said you need that team to be scaled in house.
One of the key positions, and I've I've never really understood why marketing teams don't get this, but one of the key positions you need is a project manager. Why don't marketing teams get project managers? Every other team bloody does. And what happens actually is when you don't have someone who is tasked with helping keeping almost the operational side of marketing running, is what you'll find is the marketing lead actually steps into that position, and they end up being the person who's tasking out to people, managing resource, all of that kind of stuff,
and it sucks up a lot of time and energy, and they don't have time to work on strategy. So really, getting a project manager in, it's not another cost to the business. It's actually going to save you money because ultimately, you know, marketing leaders I love project managers, I've got nothing against them, they do a fantastic job, but you know, it's about, do you want your person on a really high salary to be doing something someone can do on a lower salary?
That's the question you've got to have as a business. And also, you'll get to the point where marketing This is kind of when marketing reaches six, seven, eight people, and things become a bit of a production line because you've brought in specialists who own different parts of the marketing process.
So for example, if you're a team, you're working on a white paper, one of the things you might be doing is you'll have your content team, your writing team, then it might go through SEO, editorial, then design. And if at any part of that process, things kind of break down and don't move along, you're wasting time.
And remember, time is like one of your biggest headwinds coming against you. You don't have time to waste on crappy processes, on someone not owning those processes and making them better, and that's where a project manager can really help slick the operation, make things happen a lot quicker.
So do think about bringing them in as a standalone position. So we're going to kind of end up on this talk, you know. We talked a lot about when to hire, who to hire, scaling the team, some of the fundamental things you can do around that, but actually, how do you scale a marketing team?
It's a really interesting question, and I'm going to give you a really marketing answer, which is it depends. It really depends. It depends on your strategy, it depends on how you're gonna dominate your market, and it depends how you're gonna win. So this is Zendesk in twenty fourteen.
Zendesk were really kind of betting on the top of the funnel, very content leveraged effort. So what you see is they have kind of a lot of resource around content marketing, customer marketing, make sure they've got that content customer fit, country specific marketing, because obviously they've got to understand how content works in different geographies.
They've then got a very kind of strong brand pillar in the center, and then they do have a bit of product marketing on the side, but that wasn't where they were placing really their biggest bet. They were placing it on content on top of the funnel.
So similar story with HubSpot. We all know HubSpot's marketing strategy. It's excellent. It's inbound. It's content. And what's interesting about HubSpot, because content is so central to HubSpot's strategy, is they've got this kind of VP of content to the side with blogging educational resources underneath.
And within HubSpot, and this is twenty fourteen, it may have changed. I couldn't find anything to suggest it had though. That little content team essentially served as a mini content agency that then was used and leveraged by other teams like PR and events, influencer relations to produce content for their specific purposes.
It's the same actually with this kind of creative director position here. They were a little kind of creative team, creative director designers underneath, couldn't quite fit it on the side. But they were kind of used again within by different teams to help them kind of scale up their efforts in different areas.
And this was a really conscious decision HubSpot CMO made because content had to be at the heart of everything. So we're going to look at a company a little bit further on. I mean, HubSpot, and Zendesk are obviously now huge companies, but we're going to look at GitLab.
So GitLab's really interesting because they have a handbook which is available online that goes into basically the minutiae of the operations of the company. It's available for free. You can go and read it. And GitLab, you know, they're a very large business. I think they're about two thousand people, hundreds in marketing, and I mean, they they IPO ed a couple of weeks ago for fifteen billion dollar valuation, I think it was.
But they have really structured their marketing team around the different strategies they are leveraging to win. So for example, for GitLab, they know a really important part of their acquisition process is developer evangelism. It's developers within companies saying like, Hey, we've heard of Lab.
It's really good. You should consider using it at this company, and almost every company the developer moves to, they will advocate for GitLab. So that's why they have this really strong community relations foundation. Corporate marketing, that's brand. They know brand is really important to them.
Marketing ops actually serves as a operations function that supports all other divisions, because, for GitLab, speed efficiency is really important to them, so they recognize that. And that's another example of an in house acting as almost like a mini supporting agency or team for other divisions.
Demand gen, inbound, as you would expect. Field marketing is an interesting one. They do a lot of work in different geographies with different kind of regulations, so they have to understand how that works, and they've got to have boots on the ground speaking to customers.
Same with sales development, SDR, which is actually in house into marketing, which is quite interesting. And then finally, portfolio marketing, which is a really interesting one, because for GitLab, they know the almost perception of their product, and their thought leadership is so, so important to that buying decision and that customer journey, that portfolio marketing acts almost as a team that is their interface to the market.
So this is where they'll do things like analyst relations, publishing relations, so that they appear in the Gartner top test software companies of twenty twenty two type thing. The thing is, there is no perfect structure. For HubSpot, having that little kind of agency within the business style model, that will have trade offs for them.
And a lot of that trade offs will probably be around resource management because if they've only got a limited kind of team that can produce content, but loads of other teams are drawing on that, you know, how do they manage that? There is no perfect structure.
Everything has trade offs. But it's really the best way of doing it is to really structure around your strategy, and that's why it's so, so important to have a strategy from the beginning that understands your constraints, that gets you to the point of escape velocity.
So I'm just going to finish up with this slide. It's a slide that's often put at the end of talks on engineering teams in particular, and it's about shipping faster, iterating faster, but I really think it applies to marketing in exactly the same way.
Act quickly. Your first marketing team should be structured for speed above all else. Speed makes up for a lot of things. So thank you so much. I've really enjoyed chatting with you today. I'll be in the q and a, but obviously, if you want to take things, well, online, offline, whatever, it's all good with me.
