Product Marketing for Founders
Practical ways to fill the PMM gap while finding the right hire
Founders are the original product marketers for their company. In the early days of a new business, they’re the ones who identify a problem to solve, meet potential customers, and work out the ideal audience for the first version of the product. They likely write the homepage copy, track the competition, and hustle together the first sales deck.
Then, with time and scale (usually when you hit 30-40 people) things stop working. You can’t play that product marketing role anymore. There are bigger priorities. There are too many fires to put out. The company is getting too big to get everyone in a room and align on the target customer or what the narrative is.
So the cracks start showing. Product is building for one thing. Marketing is messaging to another. And the sales team is citing different reasons each week for why you’re losing deals.
These are some of the tell-tale signs you need to invest in product marketing (more signs in a previous article here).
But hiring a PMM takes time. (I’m a little biased, but I think it’s one of the hardest roles to fill in tech right now.) So I’ve put together a few tips for any founder who has identified a product marketing problem and needs to tackle the work while searching for the right full-time hire.
Product Marketing Advice for Founders
Positioning is a process
Don’t treat positioning as a loose conversation or a one-off decision. You don’t just get to say, ‘We’re positioning ourselves as _____.’ Or, I guess, you can - but it won’t mean anything.
PMM-led positioning has a distinct, defined process behind it, which should be followed step-by-step if you want to actually shift the strategy of your business.
Understand why product is building what it’s building
Sit down with your product lead and map each upcoming feature or release to a specific customer problem, revenue opportunity, or competitive threat. If they can’t articulate why it matters, challenge whether it deserves a spot on the roadmap.
Immerse the business in the customer
You might not have time to define ICPs or build polished personas without a dedicated PMM, but you can bring customer insights into the business every week:
Run a weekly ‘Voice of the Customer’ session where teams watch sales call clips, listen to user interviews, or run through priority support tickets.
Encourage sales and support to flag recurring objections and patterns.
Share one ‘customer of the week’ story in your company all-hands.
Be aware of the competition, but don’t obsess
Keep a pulse on what competitors are doing, but don’t lose sight of what your customers value most. Customer insight trumps comparing yourself to the competition every time.
Challenge your own narrative
You may still be pitching the story you told to investors when you raised your seed round. But your customer base, market dynamics and competitors have likely evolved since then.
Don’t assume what worked two years ago still resonates today. Revisit and refine your narrative, and pressure-test it with real customers (and your sales team too, if they’re comfortable being frank with you).
Use customers’ words, not your own
Review recent customer calls, surveys or reviews and highlight the actual words and phrases customers use to describe their problems and your product. Feed those back into your messaging instead of relying on internal jargon or aspirational, abstract language.
Enable your sales team
This is a key part of a PMM’s role, and something your sales team is probably feeling if you don’t already have a product marketer in-house.
Write a simple objection-handling one-pager based on what you hear from customers and how these concerns can be addressed, thanks to your unique oversight over the whole business. Even if it’s just the top three objections and how to counter them, it can improve sales confidence quickly.
Pick a primary audience (for now)
If you’re straddling multiple segments or ICPs, pick one to prioritise in your messaging and GTM - at least until you hire a PMM. That focus alone can improve alignment and speed up decision-making across the business. There will be time to place multiple bets once you have a product marketer in place, but it’s hard to pull off without one. So focus is key.
Track and learn from losses
Ask your sales team (or do it yourself) to record reasons for losses and wins after every deal. Even anecdotal patterns are better than nothing and will give your future PMM a head start.
Add quick wins while you search
A few low-lift things you can implement now:
Audit your homepage and sales deck for consistency.
Automate product reviews to come into a Slack channel or Notion page, for everyone in the business to reference.
Write down the top three customer problems you solve today and make sure everyone knows them.
If you’re a founder who sees these cracks in your business, I run a dedicated Product Marketing Sprint for early-stage teams.
It’s designed to immediately fill your product marketing gap, while helping you find and set up your first PMM for success.
Get in touch if you’d like to hear more about how it works.
Cheers! 👋
The Product Marketer is a London-based consultancy, helping ambitious companies across Europe - and the wider EMEA region - achieve world-class product marketing.