What Founders Get Wrong About Startup Marketing

“Tell me what brick wall you’re going to keep me from running into?” a portfolio company CEO asked me during our onboarding conversation.? “What’s the obvious mistake you consistently see founders make when they launch marketing?”

I have to admit that I didn’t have a concise answer for the CEO in that moment because after 20+ years of B2B marketing, I have a lot of lumps from running into brick walls that could have been avoided.??

Startups and founders face steep challenges when building their companies, and in the early stages, marketing is one area where mistakes significantly impact growth. After thinking hard about this CEO’s question, here are the most common pitfalls I see early-stage companies making about marketing – and how to avoid them.

1. Assuming Marketing is a Quick Fix

Many founders view marketing as a silver bullet, expecting immediate results. But marketing isn’t a one-time campaign or a quick hack; it’s an ecosystem that needs time to mature.

Building underlying assets like content, processes, and systems is akin to laying the foundation for a skyscraper — you need this stability to scale. Rushing or skipping these basics will lead to fragile growth that doesn’t last.

While your marketer shouldn’t take six months to plan your first steps, founders shouldn’t expect marketing to be running multiple channels or delivering 80% of the sales pipeline in a quarter or two.

What to do instead:

• Commit to 1-2 marketing channels and make sure everyone is aligned and focused on these channels for at least a couple of quarters.? Part of your role as the founder is to actually slow down the pace of the random ideas thrown at marketing to try and figure out so they can focus on the strategic goals you’re all agreed on.
• Set intermediate goals for the team – or break the activities into discrete deliverables that you can measure the output and effectiveness on.??
• Encourage rapid (and rational) experimentation so the team gets used to balancing the need for urgency with critical thinking about why they’re trying something.

2. Failing to Operationalize Your ICP

Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is more than a document – it’s the compass for your company’s growth strategy. Too often, founders create static ICP documentation only to let it gather dust or fail to integrate it into the day-to-day operations of the company organization.

Your ICP should inform product decisions, sales strategy, and marketing campaigns. If you’re not actively using your ICP, you risk spending time and resources pursuing the wrong audience.

What to do instead:

• Embed your ICP into every team’s processes — sales qualifications, marketing personas, product roadmaps, and customer support playbooks.? If you see an outdated ICP identified in a team’s strategy, there is a good chance their execution will also be off-the-mark.
• Treat your ICP as a living document. Regularly validate your ICP target through customer feedback, sales data, and market research to keep it sharp and relevant.

3. Overspending on Martech Tools

Founders often fall into one of two technology traps:?

1. buying too many disconnected tools across sales and marketing, or?
2. overspending on enterprise-grade platforms they don’t need.

Acquiring the wrong tech tools wastes money and time. Worse, poorly integrated systems lead to siloed data, making it harder to evaluate your progress, test different approaches or evaluate the relative performance of different strategies.

What to do instead:

• Start with the essential tools only. Ask: Does this tool solve an immediate problem, or am I buying it for a future I’m not ready for?
• Invest in your data model and hygiene to ensure all of the tools in your customer journey can talk to each other to give you an end-to-end view of the customer.
• Identify your “system of record” for each aspect of your customer journey and integrate that data feed into a CRM or centralized database accessible to all of your GTM teams and systems.

4. Underinvesting in Revenue Architecture

Revenue architecture – the definitions, processes, and data that align marketing, sales, and customer success – is the backbone of your growth engine. Many startups don’t invest in this foundational step, or allow each GTM silo to create fiefdoms of data.? While silos may accelerate the early steps, not investing in your comprehensive architecture will create chaos down the line.??

What to do instead:

• Define key operating metrics (e.g., qualification stages, pipeline velocity, conversion points) upfront to avoid ambiguity.
• Draft a lead scoring model early on and build a strong feedback loop from Sales to Marketing to refine the model – and maybe your ICP definition?
• Build an operating cadence around your revenue pipeline.? Have weekly meetings of your heads of marketing, sales, and customer success to make sure you’re having honest conversations about what’s working, what’s not, and – most importantly – what each function is learning in the market.

5. Waiting Too Long to Hire an Experienced Marketer

In the early days, many startups rely on tactical specialists to execute immediate needs, such as running demand gen ads or writing launch materials. While helpful, these junior practitioners may lack the experience to build a sustainable marketing function.? Often a seasoned marketer understands not just what to do, but why certain actions have to be taken — and can create a mid to long-term roadmap to help you get there efficiently.

Founders can become addicted to marketing activity and throughput, but as revenue scales, you may need to look for strategic experience, and not just tactical execution.? This includes being able to find someone who can lead both the team and function, not just execute marketing activities.

6. Relying too heavily on agencies and contractors

Agencies and contractors are invaluable for providing specialized expertise, quick execution and bandwidth, especially when your GTM team is small or lacks certain skills. However, over-reliance on them can create hidden risks and dependencies that can limit your ability to scale effectively.

While agencies and contractors deliver results, they are fundamentally transactional partners. They can fuel your growth, but you have to make sure they don’t become core drivers of your growth engine. You’re going to need an in-house leader who can integrate external and internal resources into a cohesive, strategic plan to make sure every dollar serves your company’s long-term objectives, not just the short-term priorities of a vendor.?

By definition, agencies and contractors are external to your organization and won’t have the same depth of commitment to your brand, culture, or long-term success as an in-house team member. Without strong internal oversight / partnership, you may find yourself overspending or misaligned on priorities with agencies focusing on what’s billable rather than what’s strategically important for you.

What to do instead:

• Bring Accountability In-House Early: Hire an experienced, in-house marketer who can act as the steward of your brand and budget. This person should be responsible for managing contractors, aligning their efforts with your broader strategy, and ensuring your money is spent efficiently.
• Balance the Staffing Mix: Use agencies and contractors for short-term needs or specialized tasks, but avoid outsourcing core strategic functions like messaging, ICP refinement, or overall go-to-market strategy. These are foundational and should be owned by someone who deeply understands your business.
• Set Clear Expectations: When working with agencies, provide explicit deliverables, timelines, and budgets. Avoid vague goals like “drive more traffic” and instead focus on measurable outcomes that tie directly to business objectives.

7. Equating Sales with Marketing

Sales and marketing are complementary but distinct functions. People generally understand that marketing generates awareness and opens doors, while sales converts leads into customers.? That said, I often see founders who expect sales teams to write messaging, and heads of marketing to close deals.

Conflating the two roles and skills sets not only sets unrealistic expectations, it can cause friction and unnecessary finger-pointing.??

Yes, you have to wear many hats at a startup, but do your best to define clear roles, metrics, and timelines for the sales and marketing functions.? Make sure to align goals so that sales and marketing know they have to work together to be successful.

8. Hiring the Wrong Type of Marketer for Your Stage

Not all marketers are created equal, and the type you need depends on your company’s stage and priorities.? A mismatch between your marketer’s skill set or experience can lead to wasted effort and slower growth.

In general, there are three core types of marketing roles:

• Brand Marketer: Builds awareness through campaigns, PR, and creative storytelling.
• Demand Generation Marketer: Focuses on pipeline growth through performance marketing, lead gen, and email nurture.
• Product Marketer: Crafts messaging, competitive positioning, and product launches.

In my experience, startups should start with a focus on product marketing to build the foundational messaging and content that can be used both by the sales team AND a demand or brand team later on.??

9. Neglecting Messaging and Positioning

Your messaging is more than your tagline – it’s a narrative that explains why your company exists and what sets you apart.? Clear, compelling messaging is the difference between someone instantly “getting” your value and scrolling past. Poor messaging creates confusion, weakens your brand, and wastes marketing dollars.

What to do instead:

• Spend time developing two tiers in your messaging framework:

1) Your executive vision can be more forward-looking and aspirational, but still needs to be grounded on the substance of what your company is delivering today in its positioning.??

2) Take time to practice these messages and train your staff on when each type of messaging is appropriate to use.

10.? Requiring marketing to justify every dollar spent

It’s natural for founders to want clarity on how marketing dollars are spent, especially when resources are tight. However, demanding every marketing investment immediately tie back to a quantifiable business outcome can cripple your team’s ability to operate and experiment.

Not all marketing activities yield instant or easily measurable results. Programs like PR, content marketing, SEO and employee branding often build long-term momentum rather than immediate returns. Forcing marketers to identify a hard ROI on every dollar spent discourages them from pursuing vital foundational efforts and fosters a micromanaging culture that slows down decision-making.

Worse, it creates a dependency on the founders for approval on every initiative, which bottlenecks progress and undermines the marketer’s ability to act strategically.

What to do instead:

• Set Clear Expectations Around Accountability: Focus on the outcomes marketing should deliver, not just the direct inputs and outputs. Make sure that your marketing leader understands that not everything can be measured, but that you’re going to hold them accountable for managing the spend and showing value where they can.
• Create an Experimental Budget: Allocate a portion of your budget specifically for testing and learning. Make it clear that this money is for calculated risks, and have your marketers define what “success” looks like upfront — but then let them work their magic and regularly report on the progress they’ve made.

Closing Thoughts

Marketing is an essential growth driver, but it’s also a long-term investment. Avoiding these common marketing pitfalls can help founders build a more scalable, sustainable growth engine. Being deliberate and consistent in your marketing development can create critical compounding benefits for your company over time.