For founders building something that hasn't yet found its shape
Most startups don't fail because their product is wrong. They fail because they run out of time before they figure out which version of the product is right. The early years of a business are an extended period of searching. For the right customer, the right proposition, the right business model. And under real time pressure and limited resources. Marketing in that period works differently from how it works in established businesses. The brief that would normally guide it doesn't yet exist, because the proposition it would describe hasn't been settled.
We've spent a long time working with businesses at this stage. Our view is that the marketing function in an early-stage business is not a thing to bolt on once the model is clear. It's part of what helps the model become clear in the first place.
Use us if
You're a founder or small leadership team trying to figure out what your proposition should be, who you're really for, and how the two connect.
You're between funding rounds and need to use the next twelve months to validate things that aren't yet validated.
You've launched and have early traction but no clear sense of what's working and why, or where to invest next.
You’re shaping a product and user experience research will make it work better
You're considering hiring your first marketing lead and want help shaping the role, the brief, and the early priorities before you commit.
You're a founder whose business has reached a moment where instinct alone isn't going to be enough to make the next set of decisions.
What we do
The shape of an early stage engagement depends on where the business is. Sometimes the work is foundational. Proposition development, customer discovery, brand positioning, the early architecture of how marketing and product will work together. Sometimes it's diagnostic. Looking at what's been tried, what's working, what isn't and where the leverage actually sits. Sometimes it’s about insight. UX or propsition research when it most matters. Sometimes it's structural. Helping shape the brief for the first marketing recruits or designing the operating relationships between founders, marketing, and product.
Across all of these, we aim to balance two things that often get treated as opposites. Building short term momentum the business can actually feel and laying the foundations of a marketing capability that will keep working as the business grows. Most early stage marketing advice focuses on one or the other. Pure short term thinking exhausts the budget without building anything that lasts. Pure long term thinking produces a strategy the business never has time to execute. The interesting work is in the discipline of doing both at once.
The approach is the same throughout. We work as a sustained outside perspective rather than a one off consultant. We're close enough to the business to understand what's actually happening, removed enough to see what's harder to see from inside.
How it works
Most projects start with a short diagnostic phase. Interviews with the founders, a look at existing materials and data, a working view of where the business is and what the most useful next moves would be. From there the shape of ongoing work is flexible. For some businesses it's a focused six to twelve week project to help make a specific decision. For others it's a longer fractional CMO style engagement with us functioning as the senior strategic marketing perspective the business doesn't yet have full time. Or it's something in between. A monthly partnership shaped around the rhythm of board meetings, decisions on the horizon and the moments where outside perspective is most useful. We work to whatever shape genuinely fits the business at the moment we're in.
What we bring
25 years of brand strategy experience, including senior leadership roles in growth businesses and direct work with early stage founders. The ability to think across product, brand, audience and category at the same time. And a willingness to engage at the level of the actual decisions in front of you, rather than working at the level of a recommendation deck.
Free start up guide
Get our working paper on marketing for startups. Written for the period when the product, the customer, and the business model are all still being discovered.
Most startups aren't failing because their marketing is bad. They're failing because they're trying to do established business marketing on a business that hasn't yet figured out what it is.
Steve Blank defined a startup as a temporary organisation designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model.
Two words there are important. Temporary: because a startup either finds its model and becomes a different kind of business, or it doesn't. Searching: because, unlike established businesses a startup is looking for its model rather than executing one. Marketing's role in that search is fundamentally different from its role afterwards.
Our 'Before you know what works' working paper is about how marketing needs to function in that early, uncertain phase. And how to build a marketing capability that develops alongside the business, rather than treating marketing as something to bolt on once the model is clear.
Inside:
A framework for adapting marketing to each of the five stages of startup growth
The case for treating marketing and product development as one practice, not two
A method for finding a niche before trying to find a market
A working argument for balancing growth hacking with growth nurturing
Reflections drawing on Steve Blank, Eric Ries, April Dunford and Bob Moesta