Emily Kramer
Co-founder and General Partner at MKT1 Capital
Led and built marketing teams at Asana, Carta, Ticketfly, and Astro (acquired by Slack), now co-founder of MKT1 Capital investing in early-stage B2B companies and writing one of the most popular marketing newsletters.
Dimension Profile
Key Themes
Episode Summary
Emily Kramer shares concrete, template-driven advice on how to build a marketing function at a B2B startup, introducing her fuel-and-engine framework for thinking about marketing roles. She covers what to look for in your first marketing hire based on your business model, the different archetypes of marketers and how to match them to your needs, red flags that your marketing team isn't working, and how product teams should work with marketing effectively.
Leadership Principles
- → Think of marketing as fuel (content, messaging, design) and engine (distribution, ops, tracking) — diagnose which one you need most
- → Your first marketing hire must match your business model — don't hire a brand marketer when you need demand gen
- → It's even hard for marketers to hire other marketers — the sub-functions are so specialized that confusion is normal
Notable Quotes
"Forget product marketing, content, partner, demand and growth — forget all of it, and just think of marketing as you need a fuel and you need an engine."
— Introducing her simplified framework for how founders should think about marketing
"Where do you have the biggest challenge right now? Is it on the fuel side or is on the engine side?"
— On how to diagnose what kind of marketing help you actually need
"There's such a range from deep specialists — just deep SEO specialists or deep paid search specialists — to people that are very much generalists. A couple of mistakes I see is hiring people that don't cover the area you need most."
— On the most common mistake founders make when hiring their first marketer
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