When and how to hire your startup’s first growth marketer

In 2021, more than $329.5 billion was invested in startups across all stages, per Crunchbase. And a significant majority of that funding was spent on only one aspect: Growth.

I have worked in a wide spectrum of growth roles, ranging from a startup with Series A funding to the 30,000-employee Uber. I’ve witnessed every growth role imaginable, as well as their daily functions, expertise areas and scope.

These experiences have provided me with a solid understanding of how and when startups should hire in their early days.

Common growth roles

Let’s start by outlining the growth verticals most commonly found today.

Nearly every startup will eventually need helping hands with each of the growth verticals above.

Paid acquisition employees are responsible for managing and optimizing paid social channels (Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat) and search channels (Google, ASA).

Lifecycle requires the conversion of recipients of email, push and text communications into users. Organic refers to the overall management of non-paid mediums, such as social media and SEO.

Affiliate marketers form incentive-driven relationships with entities that have large or niche audiences. OOH covers offline media activities, such as direct mail and billboard advertisements.

Finally, influencer marketers are specialists in forming relationships and leveraging content creators to scale a business.

These are the most common growth roles, but you’ll find other growth specialties too, including for products, operations, streaming TV and podcasts.

How to hire

Once you’ve nailed down the type of growth hire you need, you must ensure that their resume doesn’t do all the talking. A few key principles that any growth specialist should know and be questioned on in interviews include:

• How LTV (lifetime value) and ROI (return on investment) work.
• Proper hypothesis testing frameworks.
• Incrementality testing.
• Steps on scaling a growth medium from zero to one.

It’s also a good idea to ask them questions outside of their specialty to understand how they think about growth. Do they have a broad understanding of growth marketing and how to scale a startup? It’s critical to ensure they posses a deep and broad understanding of some of the topics, such as incrementality and how testing will impact the allocation of efforts. The list above isn’t exhaustive by any means; merely one you can draw inspiration from.

I left out one key topic in the initial list that is extremely important nowadays: privacy. With iOS 14.0, CCPA, Google’s upcoming deprecation of cookies and more policy changes on the way, making sure your growth expert understands the implications of these policies and potential solutions is paramount.

Whom to hire

When hiring a head of Growth, you must keep an eye out for two critical traits: They must demonstrate that they are a generalist and already possess experience in the same or similar vertical.

To explain what a growth generalist is, I must first define what they are not. A generalist is not, for example, an employee on the growth team of Airbnb managing Google Search for the EMEA region. That is far too specific a role that requires knowledge that won’t be valuable for an early-stage startup that is only looking to grow to their first 100,000 users.

Finding growth generalists can be challenging, but the rewards are well worth the effort. They tend to specialize in a common growth vertical, such as paid acquisition, and also know and have experience in an additional one or two verticals. Such a hire can hit the ground running and work on their area of specialization, while still possessing the knowledge to hire or outsource for the rest of the common verticals.

Your first growth hire doesn’t need to specialize in every function of growth or posses granular knowledge of every vertical.

Which vertical is most important? This depends on the startup goals, and first hires are commonly paid acquisition specialists. These folks understand how to find product-market fit, run exhaustive copy and messaging tests, and find your first set of users.

Hiring a growth generalist who knows your vertical will expedite and increase your chances of success. They will come with an understanding of the space, the competition and the regulations that need to be followed.

When to hire

I believe that founders should achieve their first 100 to 1,000 users on their own, by any means necessary. This will quicken your understanding and iteration more than having someone take the wheel on growth right away.

It’s sacrificing early scale for future scale. The right time to hire will be once this point has been reached. I call it “The Missing Scale.”

The Missing Scale

The Missing Scale is the point in time when a target audience and product-market fit has been found. It signals that hiring a growth marketer will enable your efforts to be scaled much faster than without one.

You can consider hiring a consultant or agency if you can’t find a growth expert right away. A good partner will help set the foundations while you find the right person for the job.

The first 90 days

An experienced growth marketer should have a clear 30, 60, 90-day plan after they join. A good interview question is what they think are the highest priority tasks that they want to focus on after they join.

Priority tasks should consist of setting up a growth tech stack, creating a testing roadmap to find the most efficient growth levers, and robust creative and copy testing in the first 90 days.

A growth tech stack with proper measurement tooling is imperative so that everything can be measured, and that will allow everything else to fall into place afterward. The testing roadmap should include a priority list of growth mediums, channels and specific test hypotheses for each. In the testing roadmap, prioritizing creative and copy is crucial to improving conversion rates on every lever.

There are no silver bullets when hiring for a growth marketing role. However, understanding timing and putting in the effort during the hiring process will increase your chances for success.