EP36: Hiring for growth

Hiring your first marketer is one of the most critical and confusing decisions an early-stage SaaS founder will face. It’s not just about growing your team, it’s about laying the foundation for how marketing will function inside your business.

In Episode 36 of the In Demand podcast, DemandMaven’s Asia Orangio and Kim Talarczyk unpack the challenges, mistakes, and best practices that founders – especially technical ones – face when making that hire.

Why hiring for marketing is so hard

Marketing is often one of the least familiar functions to technical founders. While they may have built and scaled engineering or product teams, they often lack firsthand experience in marketing – and that makes hiring tough. Asia emphasizes that if you don’t know what great marketing looks like, it’s hard to know who to hire or how to evaluate them.

As a result, founders often compare potential hires to visible marketing personalities or influencers – people like Gary V. or Seth Godin – not realizing that these professionals are often working in very different capacities than what a small SaaS company needs. The reality is, many of the best marketers are doing the work quietly, behind the scenes not promoting themselves online.

This disconnect makes it difficult to set reasonable expectations. Marketing is frequently misunderstood because its outputs – brand presence, content, campaigns – can take time to show ROI. Founders without direct marketing experience may underestimate the effort it takes to produce meaningful results.

From budget to role: foundational decisions

The first question to consider: what is your loaded marketing budget? Not just for tools or ad spend, but for people. This includes salaries, contractors, freelancers, or agency fees. Understanding your budget helps determine whether you can afford a full-time hire or need to assemble a marketing function through external help.

If the budget is too limited for a full-time employee, you might want to invest in your own marketing education or utilize contractors and freelancers. Asia points to bootstrap founders like Alex Turnbull of Groove and Arvid Kahl as examples of technical leaders who learned and executed marketing themselves until they were able to hire help.

The next question is: do you need a generalist or specialist? That depends on what your company needs to achieve. If your biggest opportunity is in SEO or content marketing, it might make sense to hire for that skill directly. If paid acquisition is key, then a demand generation marketer may be the right fit.

Founders also need to assess their own strategic capability. If you can define marketing strategy yourself, hiring a tactician or specialist can work well. If not, it may make sense to hire someone more senior or bring in help to guide your strategy.

Use the Skills, Experience, and Characteristics Framework

Asia shares a clear and actionable framework for defining a role: Skills, Experience, and Characteristics.

1. Skills – What are the specific capabilities you need? Do you need someone who can run Google Ads? Write content? Manage email campaigns? Make a list of tangible tasks this person needs to perform.

2. Experience – What kind of environments has this person worked in? Have they taken a product from your current stage to the next? Have they worked in a bootstrapped SaaS business before? Founders often overlook this – but someone coming from a large enterprise or VC-backed company may not thrive in a lean startup environment.

3. Characteristics – What kind of person will thrive in your culture and with your leadership style? For example, do they need to be highly iterative, comfortable with ambiguity, or analytical? Asia notes that great demand gen marketers often show a pattern of constantly refining and improving, rather than sticking to one approach.

It’s worth a reminder here: If you don’t know what you’re looking for and if you don’t know what good or great looks like, hiring is going to be difficult. That’s why even founders who aren’t hiring yet should talk to experienced marketers, just to understand what strong candidates sound like and how they describe their work.

Hiring process and role clarity

The hiring process itself can either clarify or complicate your search. Asia and Kim stress the importance of clear expectations. Don’t just say you want a “Head of Marketing” and expect that person to run paid ads, manage content, do branding, and write copy all at once. Be realistic: no single person can do everything.

Job titles also mean different things in different contexts. Some candidates may have been called “Head of Marketing” but worked as a junior-level executor. Others may have held less prestigious titles while doing high-impact, strategic work. You can’t evaluate someone on title alone. You need to have conversations to dig into their real responsibilities and results.

Interviewing for the right experiences – such as stage of company, price point, or team size – is more important than prestige. You should also clarify whether you’re looking for a strategic leader or an execution-focused hire. These are different roles, and mismatching them can lead to disappointing results.

The Bootstrap vs. VC context

Asia highlights an important distinction: bootstrap vs. VC-funded companies attract different types of marketers. VC-backed companies often require 10x growth and have large budgets to chase aggressive KPIs. Bootstrap companies, on the other hand, may focus on sustainable growth with leaner resources.

Candidates coming from VC-funded backgrounds may find the pace or constraints of a bootstrapped business frustrating. Conversely, some marketers are explicitly looking to leave high-burn environments and are attracted to more sustainable, values-aligned work. Understanding this dynamic will help you evaluate candidate fit beyond skills alone.

Salary expectations are also affected. Asia points out that Head of Marketing roles often start at $160K+ in the U.S., which may be out of reach for many early-stage founders. She encourages exploring international or remote hiring if the company is remote-friendly, as this can broaden the talent pool while maintaining affordability.

When to hire – and when you’re not ready

So how do you know it’s time to make your first hire? Asia looks at a few signals:

• You’ve hit $1M ARR
• You’re spending too much time managing marketing tasks outside your zone of genius
• The business is profitable and can afford the role
• Your current growth rate and profit margin (e.g., the “Rule of 40”) suggests you’re under-investing in growth

She also cautions that hiring a marketer won’t fix everything. If your product, retention, or onboarding aren’t working, marketing alone won’t turn things around. Marketing is one cylinder in the engine – it needs the rest of the system to fire, too.

Final thoughts: Be strategic but realistic

Hiring your first marketer isn’t just a talent decision – it’s a business strategy. Early marketing hires have the potential to change the trajectory of your company. But first, you need to know what problem you’re solving, what kind of person can solve it, and whether your company is ready to support that hire. 

Use the Skills/Experience/Characteristics framework. Talk to marketers even before you’re hiring. Be clear about expectations. And most of all, be realistic about what one person can do.

Then you’ll be ready for the next stage of hiring: crafting a good job description, posting to the right places, and getting the best candidates in the door. There’s so much to dig into, we’re already working on another pod to make sure we’ve covered everything. Stay tuned!