Introduction

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Fun fact: Before my fractional CMO days, my LinkedIn and resume tagline was “Marketer #1.” I carved out a very specific niche inside the enormous universe of marketing by choosing to work exclusively in early-stage startups as the first marketing hire. The skill set required to succeed in that environment is distinct, and while it isn’t widely recognized as its own specialty, it became mine. That focus eventually led me to shift my career into fractional CMO work. Here’s how and why it happened:

Early in my career, I touched almost every function in a marketing department: social media, SEO, content, events, demand gen, and sales support. I didn’t know exactly where I fit, but I wanted experience, so I took every opportunity offered to me and learned as much as I could in every role. As I grew, I stepped into management roles for positions I had once filled myself.

That’s where my strengths sharpened. Working every discipline gave me judgment and pattern recognition other marketers rarely develop early on. I loved mentoring teams. My creative side lit up when I brought new ideas and brands to life. My analytical side thrived on strategy and planning within constraints. And my competitive side loved building systems that actually win.

Emergent tech in San Francisco in the era of big data, web 2.0, and the mobile explosion was the perfect training ground. I was surrounded by entrepreneurs, big ideas, and rapid tech development. Following my own interests, I gravitated toward early-stage roles. That’s where I found my niche, entering companies as the first marketing hire, Marketer #1. 

Across my Marketer #1 roles, I noticed the same patterns. Some functions that were critical to scaling in later stages of development were often left undone too long. Certain challenges were near universal. I discovered that the earliest stages of company growth hinge on two critical functions that many startups skip or don’t take seriously: deep market research and foundational brand development. There is simply no way to build a winning strategy that scales without doing this work. So I became highly specialized in both, and to this day these are the highest-value, most ROI-generating aspects of my work.

I also saw the same challenges repeat. Marketing progress tends to outpace engineering, sales, and hiring capacity, creating bursts of momentum followed by frustrating pauses that burn capital and shorten runway. Sometimes marketing has to back up and pivot based on work in other departments stalling or speeding ahead. The challenge is that a company needs marketing leadership early on to ensure critical brand elements make their way into all aspects of the company as it grows. However, a full-time CMO will almost certainly reach a point where marketing is moving faster than other departments. This mismatch can cause tension and confusion and burns cash rapidly.

Early-stage companies need marketing that sets the stage for future growth, delivers results quickly, and grows in complexity as the business scales. These early decisions set the trajectory of the entire company, and missteps here are expensive and difficult to unwind.

The irony is that founders need senior-level strategic clarity the most at the exact moment they often can least afford or attract a full-time executive. That’s when I realized something important: the work I do as Marketer #1 delivers the greatest ROI when offered as fractional leadership.

Fractional leadership gives early-stage companies access to best-in-class executive talent for work focused on mission-critical tasks. As a Fractional CMO, my work scales as needed and is paced alongside product development, investment, and other areas of the company. It is also highly elastic, allowing for responsiveness to opportunities, pivots, or adaptation to periods of high growth. It gives startups the expertise they need without the overhead they can’t carry. A fractional CMO is simply the most cost-efficient, risk-reducing, strategically sound first marketing hire a startup can make.

Read on for the high-level view of why.

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What Founders Get Wrong About Their First Marketing Hire

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After working as Marketer #1 across many early-stage companies, I began to see the same truth play out again and again. Most founders believe their first marketing hire should be a junior generalist who can execute quickly across a wide range of activity. Someone hands-on. Someone inexpensive. Someone they can manage directly.

I get the instinct. Start slow with a low burn rate, get results quickly, and build from there. But without research, positioning becomes a gamble that usually requires multiple costly pivots further down the road. Without foundational brand work, every area of the company starts moving in different directions, resulting in a lack of coherence and resonance that early companies rely on to build momentum. The secret sauce of early-stage marketing isn’t execution-heavy. It’s strategy-heavy. Build a best-in-class roadmap for everyone to follow and you can move fast.

Ninety percent of early-stage marketing is internal work: understanding the market, defining the brand, aligning the team, shaping the narrative, and determining what the company is actually building toward. Crafting a company identity and understanding early-stage constraints is done most efficiently by someone senior with the experience to synthesize ambiguity and implement the best tools for the moment.

These early decisions set the trajectory for everything that follows. Your value proposition, positioning choices, competitive narrative, segmentation decisions, and early messaging become the foundation for product development and sales strategy. When they’re wrong, everything downstream slows or stalls.

The most effective way to scale early marketing is to build a detailed strategic playbook first, then hand it off to internal teams and specialist contractors to guide their work. Let the strategist who created the vision manage their work. This creates speed, coherence, and quality in the work produced.

Execution only works when the strategy behind it is complete and correct. Without that, you end up with scattered output, mismatched messaging, and wasted runway. The first marketing hire isn’t about doing more. It’s about achieving clarity, reducing risk, and giving the company a strategic map to follow.

A senior strategist sets your direction with precision when creating that map. The person who created the map is the best person to keep outside agencies and contractors aligned and on course. Once things are handed off, that strategist can go back and create the systems and architecture needed internally to hire the right marketing roles for the next stage of company growth.

This is the way. 

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How Startups Get Off Track Without the Right Marketing Leadership

Without the right marketing leadership, early-stage companies fall into predictable patterns:

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You hire a junior or generalist marketer who requires constant direction and founder time.

You execute on whatever feels urgent rather than what is strategically necessary.

You pivot too quickly because there is no strategic filter.

Messaging shifts every time a new idea emerges.

Content reflects the voice of the person creating it rather than the company brand.

A good portion of the brand is unspoken, and exists only in the minds of the founders. 

Brand assets begin to contradict each other.

You accumulate random tools, half-finished campaigns, and disjointed creative.

You start hiring contractors who each build in their own direction, making the inconsistency worse.

And eventually, the founder becomes the de facto CMO. Not because they want to. Because someone has to make decisions.

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This is where companies lose time, money, narrative consistency, and momentum. And once the internal marketing architecture becomes messy, it becomes incredibly expensive and time-consuming to unwind.

I’ve inherited this chaos in many of my leadership roles. First, I have to clean up the inconsistencies and rein in the tools and contractors. Then I have to create the strategy that should have existed from day one. Oftentimes, there are hard decisions that need to be made about contractors or agencies on retainer, and what to do with mountains of past work that ate up valuable time and capital to create. Sunk cost fallacy is real, and teams become attached to work that doesn’t serve the company. It slows everything.

The real work of a first marketing hire is defining what your company stands for, why it matters, who it’s for, and how you compete. It’s aligning founders, teams, and investors behind one coherent story. That takes leadership, pattern recognition, and the ability to build strategy from ambiguity.

Early-stage is the exact moment when senior talent makes the biggest difference. It’s also the moment when it’s easiest to lose coherence entirely and spiral in different directions.

And here’s the painful part founders underestimate: a junior hire can work hard and still build the wrong things. A capable mid-level hire improvises without systems to guide them. A full-time CMO is too expensive and is often underutilized before the company is mature enough to support a full marketing team. The result is the same every time: lost time, wasted money, and founders cleaning up preventable mistakes.

Don’t make these common mistakes. Consider hiring a Fractional CMO as your Marketer #1. 

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Get the Full Guide (COMING SOON)

This article shares the story behind how I became Marketer #1 and why I shifted into fractional leadership. But the deeper patterns, the operational realities, and the specific reasons a fractional CMO should be the very first marketing hire deserve a fuller breakdown.

I created a comprehensive guide that maps out everything I’ve learned across my career. It’s structured, practical, and designed to help founders avoid the costly missteps that stall growth and shorten runway.

If you’re building an early-stage company and trying to figure out when and how to hire marketing leadership, this guide will save you months of guesswork. I cover thirty-three critical levers in early-stage positioning and growth, from hiring the right contractors to pacing marketing with product development to making your company investor-ready from day one.

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This comprehensive guide is currently in development. Join the Founders List.

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