Why we’re sharing all of our marketing frameworks with our favorite people
Early-stage founders are our favorite people to work with, but very few have a marketing background or the budget to hire an experienced marketer. But building a great product isn’t enough — people have to be aware of what you’re building, care about why it matters, and understand how it can benefit their lives. So we built The Founder’s Marketing Playbook.
Why we built this
Early-stage founders are our favorite people to hang out with. They are creative, resourceful, and tenacious — and best of all, they are willing to shun the status quo and sit through family gatherings where no one understands what it is they actually do.
Building your own business from the ground up means you not only have to develop a great product, manage cash, navigate legal and taxes, hire the right help — you have to market and sell what you’ve built. Very few founders have a marketing background and while there are tons of free Medium articles to read on the subject, it can be hard to sift through the noise and decide what marketing tactics you should tackle and how.
Sometimes marketing gets a bad rap — it conjures ideas of spammy emails and tall tales about “AI”. But great marketing impacts the mission, vision, product, and story of a company. And despite the fact that getting these things right is critical to building product and landing customers, there’s usually not much budget for “marketing” in the early days.
Marketing budgets are tight, but founders need help
Despite lack of budget, early-stage founders can’t afford to skip marketing — they just need to focus their limited time and resources on the right marketing. We’re not talking about splashy product videos and ad campaigns that do nothing but burn cash — we’re talking about the hard yet critical work of communicating who you are as a company, what problem your product solves, and how it does it better than everything else out there (or will soon!).
We at FMP have been working in the San Francisco tech scene for nearly a decade at or with companies including Intercom, Envoy, Sauce Labs, Aruba Networks (HPE), and Applitools. We’ve led product marketing workshops in San Francisco, New York, Boston, Chicago, and London with attendees from Looker, WeWork, Help Scout, and hundreds of early-stage companies that no one has heard of yet.
Along the way we’ve learned what works and the demand for our services outpaced what we could provide in a typical consulting arrangement. So we created The Founder’s Marketing Playbook.
What is FMP?
The playbook packages up our proven frameworks, tactics, and templates in a digestible, deliverable-driven format so founders have the tools they need to nail their marketing strategy from the very beginning. We’re also there to help along the way with office hours in Slack and 1:1 consulting sessions.
Who it’s for
This hybrid model of DIY and expert consulting is perfect for founders at the very beginning of their product development through small teams who’ve raised Series A.
We’re launching with 5 sprints, but are actively developing new content. You can see our sprint roadmap here.
How the playbook has helped founders so far
“Simple, easy to digest, and highly executable marketing strategy for scrappy entrepreneurs.”
— Jai Patel, Founder of JUV
“I walked away from my consulting session knowing that I had a strong mission and vision but was failing to communicate that through my messaging. FMP gave me the tools I needed to express my thoughts to the world. And the brand positioning template is gold. I’m basing all of my decisions on that now.”
— Adam Cockell, Founder of Native Current
“I discovered FMP at a critical point in my business’s development. The marketing concepts Rae and Ashley provide are a mix of both familiar and new frameworks, but their particular strength was how they distilled them in such a way to extract the most value and insights from each exercise. With help from FMP, I am very confident in the next stage of License to Drift.”
— Alexandra Carroll, Founder of License to Drift
Great products deserve great marketing
Great products solve real problems and push the boundaries of what technology can accomplish in our lives. Great companies connect us to build something together and create wealth for our economies.
Great marketing captures ideas, distills them to their most impactful elements, and communicates them to the world. With great marketing, you can ensure that people are aware of what you’re building, care about why it matters, and understand how it can benefit their lives.
