Hire a Founding Marketer
Do everything, be excellent at one thing. Deciding which is most of the job.
Most marketing careers specialise, and your first hire cannot
- Retained recruiters.
- LinkedIn Recruiter seats.
- Keyword-matched resumes.
- Templated InMails.
Marketing splits into specialisms early: performance, content, product marketing, brand, lifecycle. By five years in, most people are deep in one and rusty in the rest, because that is what large companies reward.
A first marketing hire has to write the site, position the product, run a launch, set up analytics and produce something that generates pipeline, alone. Breadth is mandatory and depth in one area is what makes them worth hiring.
So the first decision is which depth you need, and it depends entirely on your motion. Self-serve needs a different person to enterprise sales, and hiring the wrong specialism wastes a year while looking productive.
How the agent runs a founding marketer search
It reads the work directly
Marketing is the most legible discipline to evaluate: sites they wrote, launches they ran, posts that travelled. The agent reads the output, not the CV.
It matches depth to your motion
Tell us whether you sell self-serve or through a sales team and the agent weights for the specialism that actually matters, while still requiring breadth.
Outreach that shows the product
Strong marketers choose by whether there is a real story to tell. The message leads with the product and who is buying it, not with the title.
Screening on solo execution
Your questions go out early: the last thing they shipped with no team, and the channel they killed.
Questions.
Answered.
Follow the motion. Self-serve usually wants content or performance, sales-led usually wants product marketing and positioning. Tell us how you sell and the agent weights the search.
An agency can execute a channel. It cannot decide your positioning or write the story from inside the company, which is most of what this hire is for.
Helpful but not decisive. Evidence of learning a technical product quickly matters more, and the agent reads for it.
By reading it. Sites, posts, launch copy and documentation they authored, quoted in the candidate write-up so you can judge it yourself.
Hire a Head of Sales
The leader who turns founder-led sales into a repeatable motion.
Hire a Founding Product Manager
An operator who owns roadmap, research, and launches, not a process manager.
Superposition for Dev Tool Startups
Hire engineers the way dev tool founders actually evaluate talent.
Find your first marketer.
Tell us how you sell and the agent will find people who have built that motion alone.