We don’t hire marketers. We do marketing, just not with marketers.

Why don’t you hire marketers?

Because at the end of the day they can’t make anything. In order to do their job they have to hire someone. So instead of hiring someone to hire someone else, we just hire the creators, analysts, and developers who can do the work that the marketer was going to hire anyways.

But I don’t know anything about marketing, don’t I need marketing people to advise on marketing?

No. The reality is that everything you do is marketing. Whether you are servicing a customer, making a product, or running an ad…it’s all marketing.

Yes there are different tactics that can bring in more new customers, but at the end of the day every dollar you spend is going towards ideas that bring in new customers. That’s marketing.

At Moment we’ve grown from zero to over 1M followers and hundreds of thousands of customers. We didn’t advertise our way there and we didn’t hire any marketers.

Here is how I think about marketing without marketers.

Start With One Person

Marketing begins the minute you start your company. It looks like a product, but in reality it’s about to become marketing as soon as you tell anyone about it.

Therefore from the beginning I like to take one person, often a founder, and give them the sole purpose of figuring out our marketing plan. I call that plan Delivery. It’s actually deeper than a marketing plan because you have to figure out the paradigm you’re going to compete on.

We started Moment with four people. Three of them worked on the product and I worked on Delivery. We used friends as contractors to fill in the minimum functions we needed to launch our first product on Kickstarter. From there I started testing a variety of tactics to figure out what worked. And what didn’t work.

This process took about 24 months. Over that time we hired, arranged teams, re-arranged teams, and repeated this cycle until we figured out that our Delivery would be Content to Commerce. Now we have a complete Content team and a separate Commerce team. Each are focused on how they compete against other content and commerce offerings in the market.

Find People Who Live Your Market

Figuring out your delivery isn’t about hiring function specific people. Early on you don’t know what’s going to work so hiring specialists can get you into trouble if you later realize that their specialty isn’t working for your business.

Instead you want to build a team of people who can do multiple skills well. Such as designers who can shoot photos. Or writers who can create community. Or engineers who can handle SEO. You want combos that give you the most amount of flexibility in these early years.

But of everything you do in building this initial team it is critical that they live your market. You can’t teach an early employee who the customer is. Therefore you need people who are the customer and/or have spent a lot of time serving your customer. When hiring, this experience isn’t on the "nice to have" list. It is #1 on the list.

At Moment this was easier because we could tell if someone was into photography or not. All we had to do was look at their Instagram.

You need to find your own version of "look at their Instagram."

Build One Team Per Delivery

Another way to think about Delivery is uncovering the 1-3 strategies that work to differentiate and grow your business. And as you figure out each strategy you then build a team around it.

Early on we thought community was working, so we built a team around it. Only to find six months later that strategy really wasn’t working to profitably reach new customers. This mistake forced us to go back and re-look at our own Delivery, to then realize that within community it was the content that was working.

Therefore we re-arranged the team from Community to Content. We even swapped team leaders upon this realization. Thankfully the community team we hired were all creatives, therefore the switch to content was easier. If we had hired a community marketing team and then needed to become a content marketing team, we would have been in trouble.

It’s important to realize that you will arrange and re-arrange the team based on what you learn. You need to build your culture around this realization so you don’t lose anyone as you pivot your way through finding your Delivery.

Be Amazing At Campaigns

New is what drives startups. Whether it’s a new offering, service, or form of delivery, something new is the engine that drives everything else. Therefore your team has to get exceptional at launching the new. I refer to each new introduction as a Campaign.

You want to see your team improving with each campaign they ship. This doesn’t mean each campaign has to get larger, just better. Your team should get faster at the process, the details should get tighter, and their analysis of the results more insightful. Marketer or not, this process will take time.

Important to remember, your process to create and launch a campaign should become the same over time. The contents will change but the internal process shouldn’t. The process we use is A Brief and it took us several years to be great at it.

Develop Team Leads

Once you get delivery teams working your biggest challenge will be team leaders, especially if your teams are cross functional. Traditionally marketing is considered one organization and functional leaders work with in that, such as community, advertising, or events. These functional leaders get great at running a team that executes a single tactic.

But in order to win at Delivery you end up building teams around strategies versus tactics. This means you need team leaders who can lead functions they previously only collaborated with.

For example, lets say one of your Delivery strategies is to win on service. This means you are trying to be the best in the world at service and therefore your examples will be anyone else who wins on this paradigm. Think Les Schwab Tires employees running out to your car. Or Nordstrom taking back products they don’t sell or having people on the floor to help you pick the right shoe. This is winning on service and it’s much bigger than the marketing tactic of service.

You would need a team leader who can win at service across every company touch point. That could be service through social, or stores, or email, etc. You will even market why your service is so amazing. The end result will be a cross functional team of creatives, developers, operations, etc to deliver the best service on the planet.

How to develop your team leads is an entire post in itself, just know that in order to win at Delivery you need to find and develop these cross functional leaders.

If you have questions dm me @marcbarros.