Fuel and Engine: A Practical Playbook for Hiring Your First B2B Marketer

Host Lenny Rachitsky introduces Emily Kramer, who built marketing teams at Ticketfly, Asana and Carta, writes the MKT1 newsletter, and now runs a small fund investing in early-stage B2B startups. Kramer says marketing hiring is confusing even for marketers, because the field spans deep specialists in areas like SEO, paid search or long-form writing as well as true generalists. Founders often do not yet know what their big marketing levers will be.

The first common mistake, she says, is hiring someone who has not done the thing the startup needs most, even though the person seems smart and experienced. She also pushes back on insisting on audience-specific experience, such as someone who has marketed to HR or construction. In her view that narrows the pool, and great marketers learn an audience and product quickly, sometimes bringing a useful fresh perspective.

What matters more is business model experience. Whether a company sells top-down to enterprises or uses bottom-up product-led growth with a free tier changes the set of marketing activities enormously. She therefore starts every conversation with founders by asking what the company actually needs rather than which job title to hire.

Kramer tells founders to forget the sub-functions and think of marketing as needing fuel and an engine. Fuel is everything you create that adds value: website copy, blog posts, templates, webinar recordings and positioning. The engine is how that fuel gets to the right people, including distribution channels, email segmentation rules, SEO technicalities, and the marketing ops work such as setting up HubSpot and reporting.

The failure modes are symmetrical. Some teams build an engine first, sending lots of outbound email with nothing valuable in it, while others produce lots of content and never distribute it. A sales-driven company with SDRs already has an imperfect engine and may need fuel, whereas a product-led business with poor conversion rates and weak lifecycle emails probably needs engine work. Many activities, such as a well-run community, are both fuel and engine.

To diagnose which you have, she asks simple questions. If a founder cannot name their top-performing content or explain who the product is for, why it is better, and how it compares to competitors, that is a fuel problem. If they wrote a great piece but only shared it once on social, or the marketing-to-sales handoff is a shared list of names, that is an engine problem. She also says content should include tools and resources such as calculators, not just blog posts.

Founders often say they need a product marketer, yet each one defines the role differently. Kramer recalls Asana's COO asking candidates "What's product marketing?", which she calls the scariest question for a product marketer. In her definition, a product marketer understands the product, audience and market, then works out how to communicate the right things at the right time, handling messaging, launches and some copywriting.

Product marketers straddle fuel and engine but are generalists rather than specialists in writing, ops or SEO. She therefore frames three typical archetypes: content and community, growth or demand, and product marketing. For a first marketer or even the first several, she prefers generalists, supplemented with specialist contractors such as an SEO contractor or a writer.

Instead of the usual T-shaped marketer, she wants a pi-shaped one, like the symbol with two vertical legs: expert in one area, proficient in a second, able to set strategy and hire contractors across all three. She notes that content and growth are rarely found in the same person, since one is a creative skill and the other a data skill. The realistic combinations are product marketing plus growth, or product marketing plus content.

On growth versus demand generation, Kramer says that in top-down sales businesses the growth marketer is a distinct role from a product growth person, and demand gen is typically more top-of-funnel. In product-led companies the roles can sometimes be one person, with the marketer handling inbound acquisition and the product-growth person handling what happens inside the product.

Kramer says the most common profile she recommends is a product marketer who also understands growth marketing, and who can genuinely write, short and long form. She tests writing ability in the hiring process. Sometimes she suggests hiring the growth person first when a founder already has strong contractors and content that just needs distribution.

She looks for candidates who worked somewhere early enough that they were not siloed, because at large or public companies product marketers may only run launches where positioning and channels are already set. She also wants someone who has seen what great looks like, whether at a standout startup or by holding a high quality bar. A candidate does not need to have come from a Series A company, but should have had exposure to a growth-stage environment.

The mistake she sees all the time is hiring a very senior person who has only worked at a public company, often referred by investors outside the niche. Marketing something with a known brand and built-in customers is a very different motion from building from scratch, and a first marketer must be a doer as well as strategic. On timing, she says it is typically Series A, with perhaps one junior person at seed, and ideally with some semblance of product-market fit rather than founder-led discovery with pilots.

Product-led companies often need marketing earlier because there are no salespeople. Her rule of thumb is to ask what a marketer would do, and whether you could handle the people they bring in if they did it all well. If the product or business model is not settled, a hire may just sit on their hands.

Asked about brand marketing, Kramer says it combines work from product marketing and content or community, with a design component, and can mean many things. In B2B, positioning and story usually belong to product marketing and design to designers, and a dedicated brand person typically appears once the team reaches about 10 to 15 people. At Carta, her brand marketer ran a large data study that spanned all of marketing.

For product-led startups, she wants a marketer responsible for getting people into the product, using inbound channels and website conversion, and a person with a product skill set running product experiments because they know how to work with PMs and engineers. The gray area is onboarding and the signup flow, which needs heavy collaboration. She stresses the marketing-to-product handoff, because users notice if marketing drip emails and product transactional emails feel disjointed.

Kramer calls "product-led growth" something of a misnomer: it really means less sales and therefore product plus marketing, and she expects a bigger marketing team early, not a smaller one. Product uses the product as a channel, while marketing is good at one-to-many communication. She believes the website should live on something marketing can easily edit, such as Webflow, and that product teams should not own the whole website and top-of-funnel messaging.

Drawing on Asana, Kramer credits a list of areas of responsibility, tracking who is the directly responsible individual for each thing regardless of job title. It meant a PM knew exactly which marketer to approach about a launch or onboarding copy, instead of skipping marketing because the right person was unclear. The list also gets longer and more granular as the team grows.

Asana also ran a roadmap week before every quarter, with cross-functional planning meetings that marketing leaders could sit in on. She adds that clear review processes helped, and once an areas-of-responsibility list exists, it largely runs itself. People are eager to claim new responsibilities.

She also recommends a marketing brief she calls GACCS, completed before any big project: goals, audience, creative, channels and stakeholders. Sharing it lets a product manager weigh in on audience, channels and the highest-level messaging before work starts, instead of reviewing a finished blog post that targets the wrong audience. Collaboration depends on a good planning process, information shared at the right level, flowing both ways, and respect for each team's skills.

Rachitsky notes that product teams are often skeptical of marketing because its effects are hard to measure. Kramer jokes about a talk titled "content splatergy" versus content strategy, meaning a lot of marketing is throwing things out to look busy. The best teams, she says, can say which core work drives steady growth, which big bets might produce a step change, and which foundational pieces are still broken and slowing them down.

A red flag is activity goals. Writing ten blog posts a month is a tactic, while the goal should be traffic and the conversion rate or signups that result. She wants teams to track a number together with the conversion rate that follows it, such as signups with an activation rate the same or better than now, because it is easy to drive low-quality signups.

If a team does not look at conversion anywhere, or only at the funnel stage it owns, that is a serious problem. She adds that marketers are often good at communicating to an audience but weaker at communicating internally, where they must explain what marketing does, drop the jargon, and pick the right level of detail. In larger companies a creative brand leader may need a partner who acts like a marketing PM.

Asked how to become a successful angel investor, Kramer says there is a shortage of investors and advisors with functional expertise such as marketing, and founders increasingly lean on angels for that help. She makes her value-add explicit: helping build the marketing function, shaping the job description, referring candidates and working with the hire on strategy. A clearly articulated niche also makes it easier for others to bring her into deals.

She warns that you must deliver on that promise, and that reputation matters. Because she has the same conversation about hiring a marketer repeatedly, helping costs her less time than founders might expect, and a list of candidates from her newsletter makes referrals easy. Rachitsky adds that having invested in over 150 companies, he finds most founders ask for help rarely.

Referring a candidate who gets hired is among the most valuable things an investor can do, Kramer adds, because the founder remembers it. She closes by noting her fund allows lower minimums for marketers who want to become angel investors.