You've been doing all the marketing yourself. Social posts between product meetings. Blog posts at midnight. A Google Ads campaign you set up six months ago and haven't touched since. You're drowning, and you've decided it's time to hire someone.
This is the moment where most founders light money on fire.
The Classic Mistake
Here's what usually happens. The founder thinks: "I need help with marketing. I'll hire a junior marketing person. They'll be affordable, eager, and they can figure things out."
So they hire a recent graduate with a communications degree and a nice Instagram aesthetic. They hand them the keys and say some version of "go do marketing."
Six months later, the founder is frustrated because nothing has moved. The junior marketer is frustrated because they have no strategy, no budget, no mentorship, and no idea what success looks like. They quit. The founder goes back to midnight blog posts and concludes that "marketing doesn't work for us."
Marketing works fine. The hiring strategy didn't.
When to Hire
Not "when you need marketing." You always need marketing. The question is when you can support a marketing hire effectively.
You're ready when:
- You have product-market fit. If you're still figuring out who your customer is, a marketer can't help you. They need a target to aim at.
- You know what's working. Even if it's scrappy, you should have at least one channel that produces results. The first marketing hire should amplify what works, not discover what might.
- You can articulate your positioning. If you can't explain who you're for and why you're different in two sentences, you're not ready. You'll just be outsourcing your confusion.
- You have budget for tools and spend. A marketer without a budget is a writer with no pen. If you can only afford salary and nothing else, wait.
What Role to Hire First
This is where it gets counterintuitive. Your first marketing hire should NOT be a specialist. Not a social media manager. Not a content writer. Not a paid ads person.
Your first marketing hire should be a generalist with 5-8 years of experience. Someone who has run marketing at a similar-stage company and knows how all the pieces connect. Someone who can build a strategy, prioritize channels, set up measurement, AND execute when needed.
Yes, they're more expensive than a junior hire. They're also roughly ten times more effective.
Here's the math. A junior marketer at $55K/year who spins their wheels for 6 months before you realize it's not working costs you $27,500 in salary, plus 6 months of opportunity cost, plus the cost of re-hiring. A senior generalist at $110K/year who starts producing results in month two is cheaper by every measure that matters.
The Job Description That Actually Works
Most marketing job descriptions are wish lists that describe three different roles. "We need someone who can build our brand strategy, write SEO content, manage paid campaigns, build our email program, run our social channels, and manage influencer partnerships."
That's not a job description. That's a fantasy.
Write a job description focused on the one or two things that matter most for your stage:
- Pre-revenue or early revenue: You need demand generation. Someone who can build and run the engine that turns strangers into leads.
- Product-led growth: You need a growth marketer. Someone who understands activation, retention, and expansion metrics.
- Service business or high-touch sales: You need a brand and content marketer. Someone who can build authority and trust at scale.
Be honest about what the role actually involves. If 60% of the job is writing blog posts and managing social media, say that. The right candidate will self-select in, and the wrong ones will self-select out.
Red Flags in the Hiring Process
Watch out for candidates who:
- Talk in buzzwords. If someone says "synergistic omnichannel engagement" in an interview, they're hiding a lack of substance behind jargon.
- Can't show results. "I managed the social media accounts" tells you nothing. "I grew organic social revenue from $5K to $40K/month in 8 months" tells you everything.
- Want to rebuild everything. A good first marketing hire builds on what's working. Someone who wants to scrap everything and start over is expensive and risky.
- Don't ask about your customers. The best marketing candidates are obsessed with understanding the customer. If they spend the whole interview talking about channels and tactics without asking who they'd be marketing to, that's a problem.
Setting Them Up to Win
Hiring the right person is half the battle. Setting them up correctly is the other half.
- Give them 90 days and a clear goal. Not "do marketing." Something like "build an email nurture sequence that converts trial users at 5%+" or "establish a content engine that produces 3 qualified leads per week."
- Give them access to customers. Let them sit in on sales calls. Let them read support tickets. Let them talk to your best customers directly. Customer insight is the raw material of good marketing.
- Get out of their way. You hired an expert. Let them be one. The fastest way to waste a good marketing hire is to override every decision based on your gut feeling.
The Takeaway
Your first marketing hire is one of the highest-leverage decisions you'll make. Get it right and you build a growth engine. Get it wrong and you waste a year convincing yourself that marketing doesn't work.
Hire senior. Hire a generalist. Give them real resources and real autonomy. Then watch what happens.