How to hire the right marketer at the right time for your startup — Mux & Segment’s Maya Spivak

 You have founders who are particularly creative and some of them are design oriented, and sometimes you have these already beautiful websites and really delightful brands kind of built out before a marketer even gets there. And that comes from the founders. That's wonderful. That means you don't necessarily need to find a marketer.

Super super spiking on the creative dimension because you already have that. You've solved for that internally. One of the founders has it. And so you can focus on a marketer. That's more analytical, which is great because that's like half the battle is figuring out where you want to prioritize your skillset search.

 Welcome to in depth, a new show that surfaces tactical advice, founders and startup leaders need to grow their team. Their companies and themselves. I'm Brett Berson, a partner at first round, and we're a venture capital firm that helps startups, like notion, roadblocks, Uber, and square tackle company building firsts through over 400 interviews on the review.

We've shared standout company building. The kind that comes from those willing to skip the talking points and go deeper into not just what to do, but how to do it with our new podcast. In-depth you can listen into these deeper conversations every single week. Learn more and subscribe today@firstround.com

today's episode. I am thrilled to be joined by Maya. Maya is the head of marketing at mocks, which is an API for developers to build video experiences. Maya recently joined mux after five years at segment where she was the company's second marketer and it's head of global brand marketing and communications.

And before that, she did a stint at wealth front as a marketing director. For today's conversation. She takes a magnifying glass to the core components of a startup's marketing organization. She starts by breaking down the three pillars of a marketing roles, product, brand, and growth. She explains the leading indicators that your startup is ready to hire folks within each of these pillars, which starts with analyzing your sales motion and sizing up the founder strengths and weaknesses.

Next Maya pulls back the curtain on how she architects interview loops for each of these different roles and the unique capabilities that separates good candidates from great must hire folks. Finally, she reflects on her experience as one of the earliest marketing hires, that segment and how she built the marketing org in the first couple years to keep up with the shifting needs of the growing startup.

Today's conversation is of course a must listen to for marketers and particularly marketing leaders and hiring managers that are trying to pluck out the best and brightest to join their or. But there's a ton for other folks to learn from this interview, which explains some of the nuances of startup marketing that you might not fully appreciate.

I really hope you enjoy this episode. And now to my conversation with Maya, thank you so much 

 So I thought we could start the conversation by talking at a high level. How you think about the different types of marketing roles or skill sets that a given company might need to hire over the course of its life?

 Well, when I get this question from founders, for example, the first question I lead with in return question for a question, not an immediate answer is. What is your sales process? And the reason I ask that is because that will determine the types of marketers that you want to consider hiring first, what might come later and thinking through the path that a marketing organization will take as it grows for your company, if a company.

Has product adoption that is led primarily by the sales team they're selling into the enterprise. They have to get prospects on the phone. They have to convince them that there's value there. They have to convince them that the product is worth buying. It's kind of a long sales process. It's a different type of marketing organ than one that you would assemble.

If you had a company. That was selling a product primarily directly to the end user. And that would be the whole product led growth oriented company that we're talking about in today's hype cycle, where product led growth is everything. So I would differentiate between the different sales processes.

That are necessary to grow the company and then talk about marketing. So let's go back to your question, regardless of the sales process, maybe you don't even know what the sales process is going to be yet. What are the different kinds of marketers that you might be curious about so that you can orient your knees or at least prioritize your marketing needs based on what you think a person's skillset might be.

There are. Different pillars of marketing, but if you really had to shake them through a sieve, I think the major differentiation would be these three pillars and the three pillars would be. Product marketing growth, marketing and brand marketing. Sometimes people call it corporate marketing. So those are the three big ones.

 So before we go into the three, I like sort of the framing of starting with like, ultimately, what is your go to market motion and maybe to dumb it down. I'm hearing you say what we might think of as more bottoms up oriented versus maybe more traditional or tops down being the two simplest dividing lines.

Maybe you can talk about. How those two different dominant motions would impact the way that you think about these three different pillars of a marketing 

 org? Yeah, totally. They're different because the fundamentals of what a marketing person or the marketing tactics that they need to orient around are from different skillsets.

So for example, product. Primarily you're selling directly to the end consumer. And so the number one thing that you need is for these people to be aware of the fact that you even exist, that you have a company that is trying to sell them a certain product and that they today can start using it to make their lives better.

So you need a marketer that is. Or knows how to, I don't know if they're able, but like they at least have the good ideas about how to reach these people and what marketing tactics to use in order to get your brand in front of these potential consumers. So sometimes these folks are more oriented towards growth.

They know, growth tactics, they know best practices. They're familiar with performance marketing, they buy ads. They have bought ads in the past. They do social media marketing. They do SEO and SEM. They have experience in email marketing, all sorts of tactical strategies to directly reach consumers. But if you're talking about a top-down sales motion where you need to go hunt and find people and convince them that their time is worthwhile to spend with you in the learning process to get to this place where, um, maybe they'll elect to get a demo or something of that nature, and you really need to spend a lot of.

In convincing mode and usually more times kind of a longer sales process. It takes longer to convince them. And throughout that time that you're spending convincing you need different marketing materials. A lot of these materials are going to be education oriented. Now you have to start writing papers, writing case studies, collecting testimonials, writing, fantastic website copy that comes across as genuine and authoritative and credible.

And finding, supporting evidence and finding customers or other users that are willing to put themselves out there for you and endorse your product. And maybe they'll join you in a webinar, or maybe they'll join. You live at an event and vouch for you on stage. And so they're spending a lot of time creating these types of materials and figuring out how to make use of these materials and these assets, these pieces of collateral.

And so there is a more product marketing oriented skill set where it's very content-based and it's very authoritative in that it takes a stance on your product and creates these definitions from scratch. And so you can see how this is a different type of person than the one who spends the majority of their time on growth marketing tactics.

One of them is kind of a systems thinker, and one of them is a creative. And so you can find yourself with two very different people and skill sets. So it's good to figure out which one you're actually looking for before you look for a marketer in general, do 

 you find that brand marketing and product marketing are quite different?

For example, somebody that's a product marketer and a top down enterprise, probably higher ACV type product world looks very different than a bottoms-up product marketer that has generally the purchase price is kind of more of a transactional sale, lower ACV, et cetera. 

 So the brand marketer might be a little bit of a bridge between these two pillars in general, where you find that a brand marketer can potentially be the more flexible one where they exist within both sides of the brain.

Right? Right. Brain left brain, the creative one, the analytical thinker. And then the brand marketer is somewhere in the middle where they're capable of. Creating campaigns that are oriented towards selling quickly, creating a campaign that's oriented towards generating awareness slowly, but over a long period of time, the reason the brand marketer doesn't necessarily live in one or either world, but a world of their own is because there's that creative component, which is a skill set onto itself.

They're able to guide the aesthetic creation of a lot of these materials of your website, of your assets and collateral that are the actual production of it. Like the difference between when it pops out of somebody's brain into a doc in the written word. And the difference between when it gets actually laid out into its proper form, the one that you distribute to the public, like there's a pretty.

Wide chasm that can be crossed when you have a good and creative brand team working on it. And so. Is one product marketer capable of being a brand marketer possibly is a growth marketer capable of being a brand marketer. Possibly. It really depends on whether they have that creative component and what type of person that they are.

It's going to come down to the individual, not to get into Ted lasso the show on apple TV, but all people are different people. So all marketers are different marketers. And so those three pillars are the broadest stroke differences. 

 So before we get into each one of those in, into a little bit more detail, how do you think about sequencing of hiring these roles?

Hiring these skill sets, hiring a generalist marketer that then hires these skill sets underneath him or her. I'm thinking that you spend a lot of time talking to founders who are maybe at a 10 or 15 person company. Maybe they have a million in ARR and they're going to build the marketing function for the first time.

And it's always a very tricky sequencing question, particularly when you're hiring one or two people early on and you're not hiring 10 people. And then you have obviously a marketing leader with these three functions that sit underneath them. And so I'm curious how you think about that sequencing question.

 You think about it in terms of its context. So. The majority of founders that I speak to are exactly at that stage. There may be 10 people in, and they're thinking about hiring their first full-time marketer and who is that person going to be? So the first thing that I caution with is find somebody who has done this before, but not so many times.

And for so long that they're very, very far removed from actually. Doing any IC level work. Now that's not to say that you're hiring a marketing leader and you expect them to do IC level work forever or even for a year, but they should just be prepared to do at least a little bit for at least a few quarters to get you moving and to get some quick wins for the company while they figure out who it is most necessary to hire next.

So the way I think about it is what type of marketer is most complimentary to the founder. Uh, to the other people that are in place at the company and to the sales motion. So why is it important to be complimentary to the founders? Well, at that stage, when there's five or 10 of you or 15 of you, you already know what skill sets are available and what are the.

Uh, the founders and what, there may be inner most fun selves love doing. You have founders who are particularly creative and some of them are design oriented. And sometimes you have these already like beautiful websites and really delightful brands built out before a marketer even gets there. And that comes from the founders.

That's wonderful. That means you don't necessarily need to find a marketer who is super, super. Biking on the creative dimension, because you already have that. You've solved for that internally. One of the founders has it. And so you can focus on a marketer. That's more analytical, which is great because that's like half the battle is figuring out where you want to prioritize your skillset search.

If you don't have that creativity in place, and you're struggling to explain your product. And maybe you're super technical and maybe your product is super technical. What you're looking for is a person who is technically adept, who is able to grok your product is excited by it. They don't have to be able to rebuild it.

They don't have to be that level of technical, but they have to understand how it works such that they can turn that understanding into creative and interesting analogy. That they use to represent it, because if you don't have any creative process already in place, you're depending on a person to bring that with them or find you, those resources find you the agency or the freelancer or the contractor, who's going to translate the brilliance of your product into a marketing website that you'll use to sell against and marketing materials.

Solve for what you already have, or figure out what you already have so that you understand what you need the most. The next thing as we talked about, what's the sales process. What kind of marketer do you need for their past experience to mostly be? Is it a consumer brand builder that you need, or is it a diehard product marketer who sold a couple of different super-technical infrastructure products before?

Or is it a growth marketer? Game to their way around various product led growth hypergrowth companies in the past, because that's what your company is going to be. That's who I would hire first. And then let them help you figure out what your quickest wins are going to be so that you can focus on those quick wins together with them while building out the rest of your team for the long run.

 When you hire that first person, do you find that it is important that you have confidence, that that person can build a small team around? And thus, they have to be somewhat T-shaped or it's better to focus on this very specific job to be done. The very specific gap that you currently have, and if they can figure out the rest of the marketing org or build and manage and hire the first two to three people, that's a cherry on top, but it doesn't really matter.

It's about whatever the next 12 months sort of job to be done in marketing. 

 I do favor the T-shaped marketer or someone who has extensibility. I think that so many things can change in the earliest stages of a product that it is much more likely that six months after hiring a person, you will decide to change your entire go to market motion, or you will decide to introduce or expand your product line, or you will decide to completely change your pricing and packaging that you will.

If you have committed to, to bring a person on board, full-time you want to be sure that it will not be difficult for them to adapt to whatever change that is happening, because it will almost certainly happen quickly. And so flexibility, resilience, extensibility in a marketer is what I would over-index on, especially in that first hire.

And yeah, that's the type of person that's going to be able to lead a team when it's time to build a team because. They'll know how to assemble the next folks in the ranks because they have enough flexibility and extensibility to know what positions need to be filled temporarily. Fill them themselves, pull back when it's time, when they can hire opportunistically or figure out what the right priority is to hire next and out.

 So let's flip back to the marketing pillars of product marketing, growth, marketing, and brand marketing. And maybe we can go in turn and talk about each one of those in a little bit more detail. And maybe, you know, when you're thinking about hiring these folks, what does great look like for each one of them?

 Okay. We will start with product marketing, a great product marketer. Well, let's talk about what a product marketer is. So a product marketer is a person that is the bridge between the product teams that are guiding the roadmap for your company of what it is that you're building and what you're trying to sell to the world and the sales teams, or directly the consumers.

In some cases, the folks that are actually buying it or trying to convince people to buy. What it is that you're selling and the way that they do this is they create the materials and they create the guidance and the education and the copy and the message that you use to explain what it is that you're selling so that the world understands it and finds it as valuable as you're trying to convince them that it is so a great product marketer fundamentally has the ability to understand what it is that you're building.

I know it sounds silly. I've met people in the interview process. It's not like it's common that they make it all the way through, into these organizations, but product marketing kind of has this broad name and so different types of companies do it just slightly differently. I think Google has become super famous.

Building the prototypical product marketer. In fact, like creating an Marissa Mayer, invented the entire program, product marketing as a philosophy and as an entire rotational program at Google's decade and a half. And that's great because that's what the entire industry has circled around as what a product marketer is.

But having that framework for understanding what their capabilities are doesn't mean that the person who does that job necessarily has the correct aptitude for the technical details of a product. So for me, a great product marketer has high technical aptitude, and that translates into these like complex ideas.

Sometimes yourself. Products that are super sexy. I don't know. There are product marketers out there who are selling self-driving cars, robots, crypto, and FTS. Right? So they're, they're selling. What's cool right now. And then there's product marketers who are selling stuff. That's not sexy at all.

Infrastructure data investment services. I'm naming industries that I've worked in before, because they're not universally sexy to all people. I was completely enamored with each one of them because the products made sense to me. So, so a great product marketer understands what it is that you're selling.

I can explain it back to you. And when you explain your vision of the future as a founder, the future of your industry, of your product, the company that you're building, they light up because they're excited about it. It's not just a person who knows the playbook of what product marketing is and how.

Build a go-to market plan. It's not that it is a fundamental understanding and excitement about the product that is being. Which gets translated in the copy, the messaging, how you sell the materials that you create to help sell. So there's that, and they're a good writer. That's a necessary component as well.

So do they light up when they talk about it and can they write, well, those are two absolutely important components. Everything else can follow from reading along what that Google framework is of what you should be doing 

 with that sort of context about what the role is all about or what great looks like.

What is your interview or assessment process, and maybe we can take it from the top down, how that maps to those different skill sets or disciplines 

 interviewing assessment for product marketing in particular, there's always, or I would encourage. And this is something that we did a lot at segment, for example, a.

Technical component. So it's not necessarily, it's not like a test. It's not like a whiteboard test that engineers do a live where they're coding live, but there's some exercise that you can figure out that's right for your company, which will help you to assess the level of technical aptitude that a person has.

So maybe it's something like you give them a vague outline of. Uh, product that you might release in the future, or you show them a page from your site. So basically like an under built page from your site and ask, what is it missing? What would you recommend changing about this particular product page or a one pager?

This is what we had at segment was we had a one pager about a particular feature and we asked a person to read that one pager and. Come back, ready to answer some questions about that feature. And so there was no tricks involved. It was really, if you read this one pager about this one particular feature in our product, do you understand what it is that makes that feature special?

And so I remember there's one question in particular to which the answer was the data has to have it's time series. It has to be stamped with the time or timestamp brother. Otherwise it just won't work. And so. You either get that or you don't, the answer is binary. And so that was like one test that made it really easy to not pass people through.

So there's something like that for every company. Maybe it's about your feature at Stripe in the earlier days. I don't know if they still do this, but they had everybody as part of the interview process read through. Uh, customer support question and try to answer it how you would try to answer at this point.

I mean, I think you have access to the entire repository of publicly available customer support. So it's not like you're flying dark, but it's on you to figure out the context of the answer that you're looking for so that you can find it where it is and recompose it. And they'll see if you understood the concept.

So there's something there where you're testing for aptitude at this beginning level where you've just arrived. Do you grok what's going on enough to comply? The correct answer. I think that's high up there in terms of an assessment of whether or not a person has the correct level of technical aptitude to be a product marketer.

And then the rest of it follows, which is if there's a written component, how well was it written if it's just verbal communication? Was it clear? Is there depth of thought that you can see demonstrated it's it's kind of like that, but it all follows from the technical assessment, which is probably key to the product marketing interview.

 Where does that fit in your interview process 

 is in advance or during the on-sites. So you're going to have this recruiter prescreen, then you're going to have the hiring manager screen and all of that takes place before a person advances to the onsite and the onsite I'm using that in the same context as the full-on zoom panel or, or whatever it is that we do in lieu of another.

Since everybody's working from home, but normally this would be your on-site standard panel for all product marketers who are invited to the office. And you might have a standard for who does this review at segment. It was for example, somebody from the customer success team would be. The person who does the assessment of that one feature that we gave the candidate a one pager about, they would ask a series of questions and the series of questions would be the same for everybody.

So it was very fair. Everybody got the same one pager and everybody got the same series of questions. So to the extent that nobody's figured this out over, I don't know how many years we were running. The same question for and posted on glass door is kind of amusing, but that's the way it was. Hopefully they changed it after this podcast comes out.

 You mentioned that the top of the process is sort of a standard hiring manager screen. In this case, a product marketer candidate. I assume you, over the years, you've done a bunch of those in as you're exploring the work that they've done. What are you looking for in those answers? 

 Understanding of the key criteria for success.

So what sold product? What was their category? How did they sell product in that category? How are they talking through their sales process? To me, you would actually be surprised how many times I've asked the question. So what is link company, whatever company that they're coming from or two companies ago.

I'm not familiar with that one. Can you tell me a little bit about it? And candidate will say something like almost completely unintelligible and that. A shame because that's your entry level way to win is your great elevator pitch of your company in the past or the one that you're still at. If it's obscure to explain still, I think that's a giant red flag is the product marketer or the marketer from any company shouldn't be able to have the easiest time explaining what it is.

 When you think about hiring criteria for product marketers, do you look for something different in your first product marketer versus your second or third or. Yeah, good 

 question. Probably a certain level of flexibility, sensibility, so process orientation, or just somebody who is very analytical and rigid with their playbook and has come from a larger company and has more experience with a very like rigorous approach.

Two things. Every step of the process has to go in the correct order and so on and so forth. It's a beautiful thing. And it's great when you find that person, but they're maybe not the ideal, first hire or better in the later stages because in those first stages, Like we briefly touched on before so much changes in the earliest phases of a company growing that you want your product marketer to have some level of flexibility so that it doesn't personally feel like a huge mental load or hugely stressful for them, for their like wellbeing when they're used to regimenting their.

Processes a certain way, their workflow around their product marketing and how they take a product to market. But your company is just not at that stage yet. So flexibility. I would look for first a certain openness to change constant change resilience. Before 

 we move on to digging into growth marketing into the interview loop that you developed for that and what you look for in a growth marketer early on.

We didn't really talk about the inverse of the process, which is selling and convincing really talented in this case, product marketer. Which at least in my experience in this market have many opportunities to join your company. And I'd be interested in, are there specific ways that you think about convincing great product marketing talent to want to join your company that you're working at or 

I think it's really incredibly important to show them the product demo demo demo. If your product is. And they are smart person. There is no better way to convince them that. Showing them how it works. I'm talking about behind the website. The website is ostensibly. The reason that you're looking for a marketer in the first place, it's the first place that I'm going to go to judge or try to judge whether or not the leaders.

What they're selling or how to communicate what they're selling, but if they don't and the website needs some work or it needs a lot of work. It's okay. I still have an open mind because I understand that that's what I'm supposed to do. Like that's why I'm getting on this call, so, okay. You haven't convinced me with your web.

'cause you need help telling these stories and making it make sense. And this makes sense to everybody involved in this interaction. So how are you going to convince me? Well, hopefully yourself as a founder are gregarious and interesting and empathetic and thoughtful, and you can relay all this on the phone.

Like that'll get you far. But nothing will get you farther than an actual demo. And I've actually seen people skip that too. So show me the product. I want to see how it works. And that is usually the most compelling thing. Do not skip that. If you have a good product 

 and if not go make a good product and then go hire a product marketer.

 Exactly. Baseline right that's foundation. So 

 that's a really good exploration of early product marketing, hiring. Let's flip over and talk about growth marketing. And you explained this a little bit at the start of our conversation, but maybe we could again go back to you're an early team you're hiring your first or second growth market, or what should you be looking for?

What does great look like in this second pillar of marketing? 

 So in the second pillar of marketing, you are trying to grow. Let's say from the bottom up, this is why you're looking for a growth marketer first. And so this is the person who tactically is aware of all of the ways to reach your audience and familiar with how to actually deploy these tactics.

I say familiar with, because at the very least, even if they've. Not personally done it for a while. They have freelancers contractors agencies that they know to be good, that they can deploy quickly. Cause the thing about hiring growth marketer is this is the type of work that you should be able to get off the ground relatively quickly.

On the one hand hiring a product marketer first is kind of this indication that you need to build your materials. Whereas if you hire a growth market, First you in theory already have materials because it growth marketers, not building them for you. A growth marketer is the one that disseminates. So, if you have your materials in place, meaning you have your website, you're relatively, or you have several pages of it, whatever that do the sale for you.

And it's easy to sign up, like then you have enough for a growth marketer to take and try to disseminate to the world and put money behind and try to get people. To convert and to use it. And once they do or don't convert the year of growth, marketer also has the ability to understand, or at least posit why they're not converting and all the different ways that they might hope to tweak the process for them tweak the entire journey to get them to convert a little bit better if they're coming in through this and this way, a little bit faster, if you give them this and that offer.

Maya Spivak is the Head of Marketing at Mux and former Head of Global Brand Marketing & Comms at Segment. She explains the three core pillars of the marketing org (product, brand and growth), how to know which one is right for your startup stage, and tips for hiring a rockstar. 

How to hire the right marketer at the right time for your startup — Mux & Segment’s Maya Spivak

Read the article inspired by this episode

How to Hire the Right Marketer for Your Startup