How to Build a Zero to One Marketing Foundation

Hi from New York,

I hope you had an amazing and productive week.

Founders are coming off from a hot summer of raising capital and kicking into growth mode. I’m getting tons of reachouts from incredibly talented people looking for direction:

These are all great questions. Each can be spun out into its own newsletter. That’s why you need to nail this strategy: get scaling marketing spend wrong, and you’ll kill your company before you even realize.

Today, I’m going to lay out the exact way you (and order) should think about marketing as a founder:

This foundation will be critical in guiding your decision making on the different levers you can pull to grow your business, make customers happy and build a legendary brand.

Before you even think about this, make sure you have a full picture on how to build your marketing team and allocate resources.

If your product sucks, no amount of marketing will save you.

This is a critical thesis to understand. If it seems complicated, you’re drinking unhelpful B.S. kool-aid. 

Before you even think about marketing, make sure your product is locked in. That means all of your top of funnel (and even the larger top of funnel once you start scaling) will hit the right setup.

Only master products even deserve your time thinking about a brand.

Let’s make sure you set up your product correctly:

Every time a customer hits your product, you want to have these basics set up. This will maximize LTV and your ability to retain + resurrect customers in the long term.

You can make a lot of these very fun for your customer to set up.

If I was building a network product of any kind, a good example would be to prompt people to “add the 10 most recent people you spilled secrets to” or “who was there for you most during your last breakup” vs. simply prompting the user to “add friends.”

Apply this same thought process to anything like B2B fintech used by team members and you can play with a fun prompt like “add any coworker you’d trust trading for you”. 

For B2B, you can even do cool branded links or push the recipients to create profiles on your platform. 

There is no reason to be boring, so stop making excuses. 

Product → Brand

Brand will make your product sexy. It’s like giving a person everything about them that makes them special and unique. 

You have the ability to breathe life into this product in a way that makes it totally sticky, memorable, and enjoyable.

This is where the magic all comes together; when you combine an incredible product with a fantastic brand. 

Sometimes I go through this exercise when I start working on products where I sit, close my eyes and think about the product as a living, breathing thing. It’s basically that right?

I want you to follow this thought process: 

How does your brand talk, feel, look, sound, interact?

Start to fill it in. Who are you picturing? How do they make you feel? 

Go through everything you love (and hate) about all your favorite people, places, things. They can be from all different industries and walks of life.

Then start to bring it all together. Make it relevant but make it feel alive when you bring it into existence. Are you proud of how you describe them? 

This is when you can really feel the energy of a product come to life. 

You and your team are collectively putting your energy into something. Other people use it too. You sell based on the product offerings and those feelings that are transferred into them.

All of this energy goes somewhere. It's your job to bring it to bring the brand to life, and once you start thinking of your product as more than just a software tool, everything begins to click. 

Before you begin to build make sure you give yourself a timeline and crush how to build a brand in 7 days.

Things to build here: 

You should be dreaming about your brand. It should be coming out of your body and mind. It should be so exciting that you can’t get it out of your head fast enough to breathe life into something. If you don’t feel this - keep trying. 

Brand → Growth

So now you’ve built a product and have the fundamentals of a brand down. 

What’s next? 

First, double check all of the above work. Before you slip into growth mode, you want to make sure you have executed on the above well – you’re going to need to. 

This means having things like PLG and Brand architected and locked. You want to nail the fundamentals before you spend money growing a product that isn’t ready. 

So, if you’re really ready for growth mode, here’s what it looks like. 

At the end of the day, growth is a trap when you make it about copying whatever marketing trend is hot.

It’s about being incredibly clear on what company objective you’re solving for (revenue, retention, or profitability), aligning your levers and budget to that goal, building to make it happen. 

If you can do that, growth will be your compounding engine.

Clarity is the most important thing in company building.

When people ask what I’m most focused on as a CMO, it always comes back to: is the company making money, and what will it look like when I shift into true growth mode?

If you’re missing core fundamentals in product or brand, that’s your sign to slow down and invest there first.

When you do spend to scale, make sure customers have the best possible experience, so they retain, expand, and ultimately help you grow.

I hope this framework of product, brand, and growth helps you see the levers you have to pull, and how to pull them correctly.

Have an incredible week until we talk again Sunday.

Julia