What should be the main focus of a startup’s first in-house marketer?

 https://techcrunch.com/2021/07/09/this-early-stage-marketing-expert-says-b2b-saas-is-actually-very-very-cool-now/

Having helped build a B2B FinTech SaaS startup from the ground up, my team and I have gone through the exercise of how best to gain visibility for our company in a crowded digital space. As we were building our marketing team, we went through many of the same exercises as Lucy Henkins outlines in the above article. A few key takeaways being:

• Hiring Too Early: As Lucy points out, hiring a Marketing Head/Manager before fully figuring out the product-market fit is likely not going to end well. This very often causes a disconnect since the CEO or Head of Sales might be relying on digital marketing campaigns to drive sales but the marketing expert does not yet have key metrics around value proposition, pricing etc which can make it difficult to execute precise pull marketing campaigns/SEO efforts.

• Replicating Previous Strategies: Regurgitating the same process that might have been deployed at an earlier company is not necessarily going to yield the same results. Reason being, customers, markets and GTM strategies vary from startup to startup and so a new marketing strategy has to be designed from scratch depending on the startup.

• Main Focus: From my experience and as Lucy points out, customer research and development should be a critical focus area for a startup's first marketing hire. i.e truly understanding what drives a customer to subscribe or buy your firm's product. Once this has been successfully done, the learnings will have a major impact in determining propositions, product pricing and traction channels.