I completely agree -- but what I'd like to understand is what those risks are from the vaccine. In Canada, the risk from COVID is high, but not as high as that in the US.
Positioning, messaging, and onboarding are all really important to startups and need attention. But they shouldn't be the focal point right away. In my experience, positioning/messaging are more of an iterative process of evolution & refinement over time (via experimentation). Spending 80% of your time on this at the start will not solve the immediate problem of leads/demand.
From a strategic perspective, the focus at the start should be on organic performance, targeting the bottom of the funnel. Put most of your chips on what will drive leads, that are ready to buy, at the lowest investment possible.
Once the sales team is struggling to keep up, you can look at moving up the funnel and reprioritizing.
Edit: Not all niches are the same, so this is more of a generalization.
I was the first Head of Marketing for a high growth tech company (we raised USD $71 million last year). I've been here almost 3 years, growing leads by 11x and revenue by millions with a tiny team and budget.
My advice to those hiring HoM for a B2B startup:
1. Hire a performance marketer (i.e. leads, revenue focused), not a brand marketer. Your sales team needs leads to grow, not "brand awareness". Once you've got a nice flow of leads, that's when the softer side of marketing becomes important.
2. If they are focused on how big of a budget they'll get, that's a major red flag. The first channels should not be paid. Budget needs to be small to start -- once you prove ROI/traction, it's now a conversation about scaling quickly, and not about blindly throwing money away.
3. A quick look at their resume or LinkedIn should tell you everything you need to know... is it full of numbers/data, or is it a list of tasks & buzzword bingo?
4. Hire someone who can do everything themselves. Make sure they won't need to rely on agencies.
Edit: Regarding the article's recommendation about hiring ICs to perform smaller tasks. I personally would find this unappealing because it means I can't build my own initial team, and I'll need to investigate what those ICs have done so far -- have they made poor decisions I'll need to undo?
> IMO the challenge with marketing is the very high budget and lack of (visible) returns .
Modern digital marketing is focused on measurability and ROI. Even traditional marketing can be measured, it's just a bit harder.
When you hire your first head of marketing, make sure they are ROI and results focused. A quick look at their resume or LinkedIn should tell you everything you need to know... is it full of numbers/data, or is it a list of tasks & buzzword bingo?
If you're looking for startup ideas, the best way is to talk to people in your target industry. Setup as many interviews as you can and ask them about what they do and the "pains" they experience doing those jobs.
Undoubtedly true. Doesn’t change the fact that true SEO is about helping the searcher resolve their query. Google is evil, but they have the best search algorithm in town.
I’m an SEO person, and true SEO is about providing value and helping the searcher. Not about gaming it. Google does a great job at removing the black hats, and a pretty good job at removing the grey hats, but it’s not perfect.
Most analytics platforms will report on any straight direct line between spend and incremental revenue. The hard part is measuring the indirect part, as you mentioned, but it is possible.
> When a recession happen the first to go is marketing.
As a marketer, I have found the opposite to be true for some industries. For example, during 2007/2008 my digital marketing agency saw a big surge in business from companies who saw marketing as a way to grow lagging demand.
PDFium and PDF.js have only implemented a small subset of the spec. Other features they don’t support include certain image compression formats or colour management. It’s really only suitable for the simplest of PDFs...
PDF is a really complex format that Google and Mozilla don’t want to spend a lot of time maintaining.
PDFium is an an acceptable rendering engine for simpler PDF files, but doesn’t handle complex files very well (resulting in crashes or rendering inaccuracies). Same with PDF.js. Unless the browsers step up, these issues will continue to get worse.