Day 78 - Marketing

Strategic Growth Planning

Today was all about setting our strategy for initial growth. We discussed our positioning, marketing approach, and the potential role of a Chief Marketing Officer (CMO). Determining when to onboard this team member, along with the ideal qualifications and terms, is a challenge. Should we seek a co-founder, employee, or intern? What skill set and experience level are required? How would this individual integrate into our team? These questions need to be answered soon, given our need for aggressive growth.

It's important to be able to generate momentum before our full platform is available, allowing us to test various features and shape it based on market responses. This demands someone with drive, ready to embrace the "fake it till you make it" ethos. Additionally, we believe that, especially in these early stages, co-location would enhance efficiency, facilitating seamless communication and brainstorming sessions. However, we did not come to a conclusion on our ideal candidate.

Candidates

We conducted interviews with two potential CMO candidates today, each presenting unique approaches to marketing and user acquisition. While both were promising, our lack of expertise in this domain became clear by talking to them. We requested written plans from each candidate to better compare their strategies. However, this process showed our need for deeper understanding, prompting us to consider postponing a hiring decision until after securing funding. This would give us a clearer timeline and provide additional time to evaluate our possibilities.

Interestingly, many suggestions seemed surprisingly simple, making us wonder whether initial user acquisition could be achieved without a dedicated CMO. Postponing hiring a CMO will make it easier to attract the right individual, when we have to scale our user base from thousands to millions.