Justine HerlinGuides
The guides help founders understand the role, decide when and who to hire, evaluate the first marketer and build the system around the work.
The Founding Marketer role is starting to change because the economics of building a marketing function are changing. A senior marketer can combine their own judgment with software, AI, automation, reusable workflows and specialist expertise. That creates more ways to add capability before every new need becomes another permanent hire.
Understand the role
5 guides · about 58 min in total
Founding marketer definition: a Founding Marketer is usually the first senior marketer with function-level ownership, hired when a company still needs to build, connect or formalise its marketing function rather than simply operate an established one.
Decide when and who to hire, then evaluate the first marketer
3 guides · about 34 min in total
The signals that tell you it’s time, the signals that tell you to wait, and the cost of getting the timing wrong in either direction.
Criteria, red flags and a structured evaluation process for assessing Founding Marketer candidates before you make an expensive mistake.
To evaluate a first marketing hire fairly, you need to judge two things at the same time: is the marketing function becoming more capable, and is that improved capability beginning to create the business outcomes the role was hired to influence?
Build the system around the work
3 guides · about 52 min in total
A B2B marketing system connects business priorities, market and customer signals, strategic decisions, demand creation, sales conversion and measurement into a continuous learning loop. Its purpose is not simply to produce more marketing activity. It should help a company understand what is happening in its market, decide where to focus, turn those decisions into coordinated action and learn fast enough to improve the next decision.
Marketing stacks have become harder to design because the number of tools has increased much faster than the number of problems an early-stage company genuinely needs to solve.
The Founding Marketer role is starting to change because the economics of building a marketing function are changing. A senior marketer can combine their own judgment with software, AI, automation, reusable workflows and specialist expertise. That creates more ways to add capability before every new need becomes another permanent hire.