Lessons Learned: First Marketer Insights & Strategies with Lucy Heskins

Spyros Tsoukalas: Welcome everyone on this sunny at least in Greece morning, I’m having Lucy Heskins with us, who is a startup marketing and product advisor. And we are going to discuss the experience of being the first marketer at the startup. Lucy, welcome to the Growth Mentor Podcast.

Lucy Heskins: Thank you very much. Thank you for having me.

Spyros Tsoukalas: What makes you suitable to discuss this topic? I think that your experiences in the past are quite relevant to being the first marketing hire. Would you say a little more about your experiences?

Lucy Heskins: Yeah, of course. So, as a consultant working for Oh Blimey, I work with early-stage startups to help them find their ideal customers and to validate their ideas, and build marketing as a function. But previous to being a consultant. I was that person that joined a startup, and I joined as employee number one. And I happen to be the first marketer as well. This was a couple of years ago, I joined when the founder was still validating the idea and building the business model. We went through the highs and lows. And earlier this year, the startup was actually acquired. So I’ve kind of navigated that terrain. I set up Oh, blimey, because I noticed that there was a real gap in content for the person that joins a startup, and they’re the person that gets the stuff done.

Spyros Tsoukalas: Perfect. So let’s cut to the chase, would you share with us something that we don’t know about being the first marketer of a startup?

Lucy Heskins: Yeah, sure, of course. I don’t think that you can come in and replicate what you did at a previous business, you may have worked in a similar market, or you may have worked on a similar product. And you can draw on the learnings from those experiences. But when you join a startup, everything’s new, everything’s different. The way that an audience might respond, or a new bioproduct is going to be slightly different. There are external factors that can ultimately impact how someone derives value. So, I think that’s something to just definitely be mindful of, I think you need a level of sympathy with the audience, and you need to talk to kind of understand and get your bearings. And I find that sometimes when you, I’ve been in this position when you join in this capacity and something doesn’t quite feel right, you’ve got this feeling in your stomach, it’s likely that your knowledge of being a marketer is misaligned with the stage that the startup is actually at.

Spyros Tsoukalas: That’s, that’s really good to know. And I will comment on that later. But could we deep dive into the mistakes that startups do with their first hires, and their first marketing hires, like since you have this experience?

Lucy Heskins: Yeah, of course. So I think one of the most common mistakes that startups make with their first hires is selling this role to someone, and the person coming in thinking that they’re only gonna be working in one function. And I think when I joined the most recent startup, I went in thinking I was gonna be marketing. But actually, from a day-to-day perspective, I was doing customer success. I was doing product marketing but of sales. And I don’t think that you can necessarily be too precious about that. I also think that there’s a mistake that some startups can make by hiring some junior and just expecting them to come up with a strategy, though it’s kind of their first rodeo as well, I think a lot of pressure can kind of be put on that on that person. In terms of the first mistake, where are the mistakes when it comes to hiring the first marketer? And I’m aware that I’m saying this, but hiring a marketer way too early. I think that if you’re advertising and recruiting for a marketer to join you, there’s, there’s an assumption that you have validated your product, and you’ve got a few customers. So this market is going to come in expecting a budget, they’re going to be expecting that there’s some kind of go-to-market already set up. And when they join, there’s that that misalignment can happen, because they realize all of a sudden, it’s their job to come up with a lot of this, this process. And that kind of piece about the mistakes that you make with hiring a first marketer, bringing someone in and giving them the CMO title, like CMOs are typically used to joining organizations, we’re going to market sorted, and their role is to continue with growing, growing the brand and growing demand. It’s a very data-driven role, and it can be a lot more strategic, whereas that’s not what is needed in an early-stage startup kind of process.

Spyros Tsoukalas: So what should they be doing instead? And this is highly related to what you were saying earlier about the stages like so like, what steps would they follow, and that depends on their state as well?

Lucy Heskins: Yeah. 100%. So I think the first thing to kind of bear in mind is there is a framework by Steve Blank who wrote, or it’s one of the co-authors of the startup owners manual. And he says that there are four stages to growing a startup. So the first one is around customer discovery, then there’s customer validation, customer demand, and then a kind of company building. So I think you’ve got to understand where your startup is at, and then align the type of marketer that you’re going to be bringing in. So in terms of the kinds of activities, if you’re an early-stage startup, expect to be doing audience and customer research, expect to be doing some product marketing, a bit of brand, and then eventually growth. So at the kind of early stage, you’re looking at things like collective voice, a customer, understanding what message market fit is, product market fit is great, but it’s all the way down this end, you’ve actually got to focus on this, this kind of first input, you’re also going to be looking for someone that can kind of compliment a founder. So typically, founders will be engaged in founder-led sales, where they learn how to share their startup’s narrative and story and understand actually what messages are resonating. And as a marketer, you’re there to kind of come in and support them and understand what collateral they need. How can you help them to then support audience building as well? So hopefully, that gives you kind of a high-level summary of some of the activities.

Spyros Tsoukalas: In my opinion, what you have been describing is highly related to the jobs-to-be-done framework. Because it’s even applicable to the founder hiring a marketeer. And then it’s then applicable to the customers and based on the different stages, the team will be doing different things based on the job to being down a frame. And I know you’re experienced with that. Would you like to share your thoughts on this?

Lucy Heskins: Yeah, absolutely. That felt very method, by the way. So just in case, you’re unaware of what jobs to be done, is this a product innovation framework that was co-created by Clayton Christensen, and Bob Mester, of the rewired group and it assumes that people don’t buy things at random. People hire products to make progress in their life. And the idea of making jobs to be done work for your startup is to understand the struggling moment of a customer. That day, when somebody wakes up and goes, Do you know what I’m going to buy this product, I’m gonna go from this product to the other. And as marketers or as kind of product people, just startup people, in general, is really important, because that can form the basis of what features you develop, what your marketing strategy will look like, where you should actually be creating demand in the first from the first point anyway. Now, I do think that jobs to be done are applicable for businesses that do have customers because you want to speak to somebody who has recently gone through that experience to understand actually where that struggling moment is. But from a startup perspective, you can absolutely use it on a number of functions within the actual business. But you can also talk to people that have recently bought your competitor’s product and understand actually what process they were going through which channels they were using, and what kind of anxieties were going through their mind when they were switching from one product to the ever, I’m a big fan of jobs to be done. Just in case you didn’t notice.

Spyros Tsoukalas: I am a big fan as well. So, let’s say that we have a person in our audience who is willing to join a startup and probably the marketing team. So, how do they get prepared, given the labyrinth of stuff that they might be doing, as you said in the first part of the episode, how should they get prepared for that?

Lucy Heskins: Yeah, now 100%, I think if I was going to do it all over again, there are two or three things. So the first thing I look at is how are people currently solving the problem that this startup thinks it’s solving. And that can be really interesting because it can open up the kind of language that people use, and also the channels that they use to research and buy this type of product. I also think you should be familiar with the type of market you’re operating in. And I don’t necessarily mean whether you’re entering a product that serves B2B and B2C customers, for example, I also think that you should think about the market itself. So, is this startup creating a new category? I mean, that’s a conversation in itself, or are they actually re-segmenting an existing niche so they’re actually improving upon existing products or they’re making them cheaper? And again, I think if you’re familiar with the dynamics of the market that you’re going in, that absolutely impacts their marketing plans that you will create in the kind of information that you’ll be gathering as well. I think my kind of biggest tip here and I’m really impressed when I see marketers do this is when they asked to review transcripts of customer interviews, so they can already start getting familiar with the language and kind of the pain points as well, those are the three main things I would recommend to get prepared.

Spyros Tsoukalas: Thanks for those details. They’re really, really, really interesting. I have been coaching young people, and this was very useful to learn. Last question for today. What are your favorite tools? And I guess like they’re related to what we were discussing, like the ones related to what we have been discussing so far.

Lucy Heskins: Yeah, no, definitely. So it’s kind of a mixture. So from an actual do-your-job perspective, I love Intercom. And I love things like Airtable. And because they just give you the ability to create light. So collect live customer insights and store them and pause them. And once you are disciplined, and you grow that database, it’s only going to be something that will be useful. I think, also the reports from tools like ProfitWell. So, ProfitWell is an amazing subscription tool, but the reports that come out of it afterward as well, are really, really interesting. And I think that they can help you have good conversations when somebody walks into the room and goes general, I think we should run free, we should offer freemium. All of a sudden, you’ve got these kinds of insights in your back pocket you can get from there. And then the other tools that I would suggest are kind of access to things like mentoring. So, Growth Mentor, big, big tip, like learn from someone who is going through a similar experience, but they experienced it a couple of years ago. And I also really like recommending Forget The Funnel as well. I was never told that’s available for early-stage marketers and SaaS marketers as well, because again, it just offers that mentoring opportunity, which is really, really valuable.

Spyros Tsoukalas: Lucy, thank you very much for taking the time to share with us your experiences and I hope that people will learn new stuff as I just did.

Lucy Heskins: Excellent, thank you so much.