The Playbook for Hiring the Right Marketer at the Right Time for Your Startup

In a startup's earliest days, the marketing org often plays second (or third or fourth) fiddle — stepping out of the spotlight to make way for the most pressing challenges when it comes to engineering the product, testing it with customers, and establishing a sales process.

That's not necessarily the wrong approach to start — after all, most startup founders favor a product or eng background, and nearly all conventional advice is to play to your strengths when trying to get a nascent startup off the ground. But as your startup moves from playing in the garage to booking some gigs, it's time to bring marketing out on stage, rather than leaving it to the founders to pick up all the instruments.

Marketers can craft much-needed content to answer FAQs that crop up during the sales process. They can finesse your website copy so that it stands out, and architect experiments that boost sign-ups. Marketers can bring a Rolodex of contacts to make sure your next launch makes a splash in the press. But one mistake too many founders make is thinking that just one marketing hire can do all of these things (and more) well. That's why we turned to Maya Spivak to dish out some advice.

"To borrow from “Ted Lasso,” all people are different people, and all marketers are different marketers. Figure out which kind of marketer works best for your startup," she says.

Spivak is a former marketing leader at Wealthfront, the second marketing hire at Segment, and the current Head of Marketing at Mux. Over the course of her career, she's interviewed hundreds of marketers from all sorts of specialties, and counseled founders on how to pluck the right hire for their startup.

In this exclusive interview, her advice for founders starts with honing in on the marketing pillar that best aligns to their startup — product, growth or brand? Next, across each pillar, she unpacks her favorite interview questions and exercises for identifying stellar candidates (or uncovering red flags), and shares her tested tips for sealing the deal with your dream candidate.

Whether you’re a founder making your first-ever marketing hire, or a marketing org leader looking to brush up on your interview playbook, there are tons of tactics you’ll want to borrow. Thanks, as always, for reading and sharing!

-The Review editors

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We'll just let Lenny Rachitsky describe this: "Bet you've never seen a rap about product management before."

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