When to join Marketing at a startup

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Dan Hockenmaier wrote a fantastic essay titled “When to join a startup”, that I highly recommend, and it got me thinking:

When should a Marketer join a startup?

While the risks Dan talks about apply, there’s a deeper level that a Marketer must think about. “What is the job to be done?” and “Am I good at doing that job?”.

Note: The first part of this essay will be paraphrasing Dan’s essay and then I’ll share my perspective.

Start of paraphrasing Dan's essay

YC’s famous motto is “make something people want”.

That’s true when you’re first trying to find product-market fit. There will be a small niche that companies must focus on, but it’s a lot more complex when they want to grow past that and survive in the long term. The YC motto becomes, as Dan eloquently writes, “Make something people want and sell it profitably to many of them in perpetuity”

Every successful business faces (and ideally overcomes) 5 key risks:

1. Technology risk 

2. Market risk 

3. Scaling risk

4. Business model risk

5. Defensibility risk 

These risks are not always linear and especially in Series B - Pre IPO, companies oscillate between business model risk and scaling risk.

Technology risk

“Can we get the product to work?”

A company might have a brilliant idea, but the first hurdle is whether the solution is technologically feasible. In SaaS and consumer tech, this risk is easily mitigated because the technology is available, but that’s not always the case in Deep Tech and Hardware.

Vertical Take Off and Landing (or VTOL) is a good example of where the biggest risk is the technology.

Market risk

“Can we build something people love?”

Solving market risk is often called finding product-market fit (PMF), and it is the holy grail that early stage founders are searching for. There needs to be concrete evidence that customers love the product, are willing to tell others, and want to use the product for a long time.

Scaling risk

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