Hello Frens 👋,

Welcome back! Today’s issue is a sponsored post, which means I have been paid to write about the company.

This is the first time for me doing this. All feedback is appreciated. Besides helping to keep the lights on, I am finding sponsored posts align incentives with companies, I get more access to the team, and at the same time, they are willing to share as much information and insights as possible to try to make these issues as successful as possible.

I plan to do these sponsored issues sporadically, only with companies on a rocketship trajectory and dominating their fields! I believe there is so much to learn from these up and comers as there are from the Ubers and Spotify’s of the world!

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Every now and then, a company comes out with an elegant, intuitive solution to a widespread problem that takes the world by a storm. Everyone is left wondering how that solution did not exist until now.

Today I am the story of such a company, a company that came to dominate the world of hiring marketers in 3 short years. That company is MarketerHire.

Companies from Netflix to Allbirds to CHANEL have turned to MarketerHire for on-demand marketing hiring, scaling up their staff as the company grows with a press of a button.

MarketerHire is one the fastest growing B2B tech companies of the last decade. After spending time with Chris Toy in February 2022, I am confident their meteoric growth was no accident!

The MarketerHire magic

Ask 100 startup founders how many want help with marketing or growth, and I bet you would get 100 hands raised.

There are many reasons why that would be the case. At the very least, it is hard to compete with the likes of Google and Facebook for top-notch talent. 

However, I believe the bigger problem is that it is excruciatingly difficult to discern between who is an expert marketer and one who is just good at gaming the social algorithm.

To that end, founders and hiring managers often have to rely on weak signals that are not very indicative of a marketer’s true potential. For instance, they use a marketer’s personal brand as a proxy for being good at the job.

So many world-class marketers who don’t have an audience on Twitter or Tiktok and have the suitable skillset and experience to accelerate your company's growth. The opposite is also true. Many marketers with a large social following are not that great at the job!

MarketerHire is here to help you find the right talent for your company, blazingly fast. They bring top-notch talent to companies of all shapes and sizes. They find the best-fit candidate for your company, with relevant experience that can seamlessly blend into your company culture—all in as little as 48 hours.

How MarketerHire works

The Logistics

Hiring on MarketerHire is fast, efficient, and straightforward. Shifting through 100s of resumes, months-long interviewing processes are a thing of the past! The MarketerHire process consists of two steps:

1. You describe the project to MarketHire: What tools do you use, what specific skills do you need? What kind of a marketer are you looking for?

2. You meet your perfect marketer. MarketerHire matches you with a marketer based on your specific needs in 48 hours! If you are unsure about the match, they will set you up with more intros!

The Value Proposition

For The Talent: MarketerHire offers the opportunity to work on-demand on projects right up their alley. By joining their network, freelancers get to work on exactly what they excel at when they want to. They no longer have to build a personal brand to find clients and projects that align with their values, passion, experience, or needs. MarketerHire does all the heavy lifting!

For The Company: companies get the right person for the job, ready to get the ball rolling on day 1. Compare that to the months it can take to recruit a full-time hire, and the tens of hours wasted interviewing good on paper but not suitable for the job candidates

The MarketerHire magic comes from aligning both sides of the marketplace, finding the right fit for the specific company needs and the right company for the Marketer’s experience and preferences. What I found truly fascinating was how well this matching process works! Often companies make a hire from the very first match they get on the platform!

Sounds too good to be true? 

That’s precisely the whole premise behind MarkterHire’s go-to-market!

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The Too Good To Be True go to market:

When I asked Chris about the secret-sauce behind MarketerHire’s rapid rise, he had a bafflingly simple answer:

We build a product that is too good to be true for our ideal customers!

MarketerHire’s go-to-market can be replicated by answering these 3 questions:

1. Who is the product for?

2. Why is it a no-brainer for them?

3. What is the most efficient way to tell those people about your new product?

Identifying your ideal customers and the most efficient channels is challenging but doable. The critical question here is: how do you build something that is a no-brainer?

If the value delivered by a product is strikingly obvious, wouldn’t it stand to reason that there exist 100 different products on the market trying to provide that same value? And if that is the case, it would not be a no-brainer; one would have to weigh and compare the different options on the market.

As I learned from Chris, it turns out that one of the fastest and most-efficient way to build a product that is a no-brainer to consumers is by solving a hard yet obvious problem.

In MarketerHire’s case, that is finding the one perfect fit for your specific marketing needs in as little as 48 hours. Painstakingly hard to execute, yet an obvious problem to anyone who ever worked in the startup or corporate world.

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Getting the First 1,000 Customers

When Chris embarked on his journey to build one of the fastest B2B tech companies of this decade, he started targeting early-stage tech companies. Why? Two reasons:

1. It aligned with Chris’ network.
   During his 20-year career, Chris started or worked at marketing agencies that served dozens of startups.

2. Startups like to try new stuff.

The problem that MarketerHire solves is similar to the issues that every agency has to solve. The variability of demands and the ups and downs of running an agency means relying heavily on freelance and contract work. For a successful agency, finding the right contractors for every project in an extremely-tight timeline is simply a matter of survival!

Chris is armed with 20 years of industry experience; leveraging this know-how, he was able to bring (and scale) the rapid matching of freelance with relevant projects from the agency-world to the tech-and-beyond world!

The first 5-6 companies came from outreach. This was the validation phase.

After validating the idea, Chris started directing traffic from his agency. Instead of a company coming in and Chris turning around and finding the right contractor to execute on their work through the agency, Chris pointed them directly to MarketerHire.

After the initial traffic from his own agency, Chris and the team at MarketerHire rolled out a marketing mix based on best practices, mobile ads, mobile content, mobile email marketing, outreach over social, etc.

“From day one, you could have a seven-channel mix,” Chris said. “Digital channels have a very low barrier to entry and a very low attraction barrier.”

The importance of consistency

If you're trying to scale, you have to get that first 1,000 customers in a way…that you think you're going to get the next 1,000 customers.

Sure, do the things that don’t scale. But once you know you have something that people want, once you have something that works, Chris’ advice is to try to be as consistent as possible. This is especially true in businesses where the experience and quality of the experience can deteriorate significantly as you scale.

For Chris, the hard part of getting early customers was not convincing people of the product’s value or finding efficient channels to reach. The hardest bit was staying true to their roots and being consistent in how they treat every client, from a small 2-person startup to a multi-billion dollar corporation.

What Chris meant by consistency was that every customer was treated the same. It is easy, especially when selling to enterprises, to go down the rabbit hole of doing whatever it takes to close a deal. Offering different discounts and payment terms to different clients or, even worse, making significant product changes to please a client or win a deal is not unheard of.

Chris saw consistency as an enabler to scale. By offering the same product and experience to every client, MarketerHire could develop the best practices and playbook for scaling by doing the reps of selling precisely the same thing over and over again.

He may have lost a few deals along the way, but from everything MarketerHire has been able to achieve in its 3 years so far, I think he was probably right!

Until we meet next week,
Ali Abouelatta