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InsightHunt

Hunt the Insights

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Emily Kramer

Episode #92

Co-founder & General Partner

MKT1 / MKT1 Capital

🎯Product StrategyExecution👥Team & Culture

📝Full Transcript

15,220 words
Emily Kramer (00:00:00): Forget the product marketing content partner, demand and growth, forget all of it, and just think of marketing as you need a fuel and you need an engine. And goal is like all the things that you're creating. I mean this should be obvious, but it's the content, it's the word, it's the design in some regard. All the things that you're making, all the things that are going to add value. An engine is how you get it out to the right people. And all of the tracking of that and sort of the ops work I put under engine, everyone needs an engine. Emily Kramer (00:00:28): And the question is, where do you have the biggest challenge right now? Or where do you think if you did more, you would grow faster? Is it on fuel side or is on the engine side? Lenny (00:00:37): Welcome to Lenny's Podcast. I'm Lenny, and my goal here is to help you get better at the craft of building and growing products. I interview world class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard one experience building and scaling today's most successful products. Today my guest is Emily Kramer. Emily led and built the marketing teams at Asana, Carta, Ticketfly and Astro, which was a startup acquired by Slack. She's one of the first marketers to be hired at all four companies, and has been instrumental in helping these companies build their marketing function, grow their products, and build their brands. Lenny (00:01:11): She also writes my favorite newsletter on marketing, MKT1. And the best compliment that I can give her is that she's a marketer that thinks like a product manager. In our chat, Emily shares a ton of concrete advice on what to look for in your first marketing hire, what the different archetypes of marketers are, and who you should look for based on your business model. How to work with marketing effectively as a product team, and also what red flags to look for that tell you that your marketing team is not doing a great job. Lenny (00:01:39): Emily is s...

💡 Key Takeaways

  • 1Diagnose growth issues by categorizing them as either 'Fuel' (messaging/content) or 'Engine' (distribution/ops) problems before hiring.
  • 2Avoid hiring senior marketers from large public companies (e.g., Salesforce, Google) as your first startup hire; they often lack the 'builder' muscle required for 0-to-1 work.
  • 3For PLG companies, the 'Marketing-to-Product' handoff (signup to onboarding) is as critical as the traditional 'Marketing-to-Sales' handoff.
  • 4Stop measuring marketing success by activity (e.g., 'wrote 10 blog posts'); measure by impact (e.g., 'traffic generated' or 'conversion rate maintained').
  • 5Use 'Roadmap Week' to invite Marketing into product planning early, preventing the 'throw it over the wall' launch dynamic.
  • 6When interviewing marketers, ask them to explain a complex topic simply; if they can't do this, they cannot effectively position your product.
  • 7Product Marketers are often the best first hire because they straddle the line between understanding the product/audience (Fuel) and launch mechanics (Engine).

📚Methodologies (3)

🎯 Product Strategy

Instead of getting lost in marketing sub-functions (demand gen, brand, content), view marketing as a system requiring two components: Fuel (value creation) and Engine (distribution). Growth stalls when these are unbalanced.

Core Principles

  • 1.Step 1: Audit 'Fuel' - Do you have high-converting copy, clear positioning, and valuable content? If users land but don't convert, you have a Fuel problem.
  • 2.Step 2: Audit 'Engine' - Do you have the ops, automation, and channels to get content to the right people? If you have great content but no traffic, you have an Engine problem.
  • 3.Step 3: Hire for the deficit - If you lack Fuel, hire a Product Marketer or Content Lead. If you lack Engine, hire a Growth/Demand Gen Lead.
  • +1 more...

"Just think of marketing as you need a fuel and you need an engine... Fuel is all the things that you're creating... An engine is how you get it out to the right people."

#engine#diagnostic#strategy
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The GACCS Launch Brief

by Emily Kramer

Execution

A structured brief format that Marketing shares with Product (and vice versa) before any creative work or launch execution begins. It forces clarity on the 'Why' and 'Who' before the 'What'.

Core Principles

  • 1.Goals: Define the specific metric impact (e.g., signups, feature adoption), not just 'launch the feature'.
  • 2.Audience: Be hyper-specific about who this is for. 'Everyone' is not an audience.
  • 3.Creative: Define the 'hook' or unique angle. What makes this stand out from competitors?
  • +2 more...

"GACCS sounds more fun to say... but this is just a marketing brief that I recommend you do before you make anything big."

#gaccs#launch#brief
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👥 Team & Culture

Rather than looking for a T-shaped marketer (broad knowledge, one depth) or a specialist, early-stage startups should hire 'Pie-shaped' (π) marketers who have broad knowledge but *two* distinct spikes of deep expertise.

Core Principles

  • 1.Spike 1: Usually Product Marketing (understanding the customer/market).
  • 2.Spike 2: Either Content (creating the fuel) or Growth (building the engine).
  • 3.The Bar: The horizontal line represents ability to set strategy across all areas and manage contractors for non-spike areas.
  • +1 more...

"You want to hire Pi-shaped marketers... like the Pi symbol has two vertical lines... an expert in one of those three areas... and proficient in another one."

#pie-shaped#talent#team
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