This week on The Review, a tech marketing maestro shares her reflections on founding and scaling the org at breakout startups.
Why Startup Marketers Should Be Diagnosticians — Advice from OpenAI’s and Stripe’s First Marketing Hire
Marketers may not have MDs, but according to Krithika Muthukumar, the best ones have a knack for puzzling out the needs of a business the same way doctors solve a medical case.
“The job of a marketer, especially in the early days of a startup, but on a constant basis, is that of a diagnostician,” says Muthukumar. “Depending on how you answer diagnostic questions, you’ll invest in very different hires, work streams and strategies.”
She’s found that the most effective marketer is someone who doesn’t just recite from the pages of a playbook based on a startup’s size or stage. Instead, they can come in and root out the biggest drop-offs and opportunities — and devise unique strategies to act on them.
Muthukumar’s impressive career is proof of her own talent for doing just that. Following product marketing stints at Google and Dropbox, she joined Stripe as the first marketer when the startup had only 60 people. At first, the job was to shore up the high-velocity product team, which was shipping things left and right. She stayed on for nine years as the startup grew to over 7,000 people, helping build out a 100-person marketing org.
She later joined Retool, which had strong product-market fit but needed to spark some more fire at the top of the funnel.
Now she’s heading up marketing at OpenAI — a company that needs no reinforcements on the awareness side, but faces a challenge in educating the public about the technology.
On The Review, Muthukumar unpacks how she’s tackled marketing in all three chapters. She offers up her own game plan for an early marketer’s first month on the job and shares advice for founders looking to bring one on board. She also pulls out lessons on scaling a marketing team from her nine-year tenure at Stripe. Here’s a preview of her wisdom:
- Get prescriptive about how customers should use your product. At OpenAI, the marketing challenge is to help people find a use case epiphany with ChatGPT. “I’m convinced that every company that wants to be effective at marketing their product has to have a really crisp point of view.”
- Borrow creative ideas you admire — as long as they aren’t from competitors. “At Stripe, we borrowed ideas from people who were doing things well, but very much from outside of our domain. We would steal copiously from domains as far ranging as healthcare to people who were launching new programming languages to the security field.”
- Think of internal reviews as brand stewardship. As startups scale, they run the risk of creeping toward bureaucracy with more internal reviews that slow down the work. But Stripe had a different philosophy around the use of a red pen. The marketing org actually relied on reviews to make sure every single project cleared Stripe's high bar for quality. “I don't think we scaled taste at Stripe. Instead, we invested in processes and systems that ensured that everything that went out the door had taste.”
Muthukumar’s insights aren’t just for marketers and founders looking to brush up on the discipline — there’s something in here for anyone curious for a peek into the making of brands like Stripe and OpenAI.
Thanks, as always, for reading and sharing!
-The Review Editors
Recommended resources:
-A follow-up read on scaling marketing orgs
-The importance of naming and framing internal teams
-Shreyas Doshi’s breakdown of the nebulous term “executive presence”