Early-stage startup marketers have to walk a fine line: everyone is free to pitch in, and campaign budgets for pre-revenue companies are extremely tight.
The CTO can always brag about how many tickets their team closed and the release dates they met, but a growth manager’s key performance metrics might not show up for weeks — or months.
With that in mind, we reached out to several marketing experts and asked each of them the same question:
“If you only had a marketing budget of $25,000 for the first quarter of 2022, how would you spend it?”
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Use discount code TCPLUSROUNDUP to save 20% off a one or two year subscription.
Here’s who we talked to:
- Cam Sinclair, Director/Marketer, Ammunition
- Jonathan Metrick, Chief Growth Officer, Portage Ventures
- Tracey Wallace, Marketing Director, MarketerHire
- Jonathan Martinez, founder, JMStrategy
- Maya Moufarek, founder of Marketing Cube
- Peep Laja, CEO, Wynter and founder of CXL
- Lindsay Goldman, strategic advisor, MO Pros
The detailed suggestions we received included budget allocations, tips for developing minimum viable brand models, and tips on how to measure success.
Even if you don’t have a marketing person on your team, there’s still enough time on the calendar to hire a part-time employee by January 1st who can execute some of these strategies and tactics.
Thank you so much for reading,
Walter Thompson
Senior Editor, TechCrunch+
@yourprotagonist
TC+ Twitter Space: How to use zero-party data to personalize marketing campaigns
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Tomorrow at 3pm PST/6pm EST, I’m hosting a Twitter Chat about using zero-party data to personalize marketing campaigns with Ben Parr, president and co-founder of Octane AI.
We’ll discuss some tactics he shared in a guest post that can help you figure out the right questions to ask customers that can increase loyalty and conversions.
This talk is open to everyone, so please bring your questions!
Offer decks and other new startup hiring tips
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Most start-ups operate with a hybrid workforce, but that doesn’t guarantee that hiring processes have kept pace.
In a panel discussion at TechCrunch Disrupt, managing editor Eric Eldon interviewed Jaime Bott, talent partner at Sequoia, Tawni Nazario-Cranz, operating partner at Signalfire, and Doris Tong, founder and CEO of EQ Talent Group, to learn more about the shifts in last in recruitment.
It’s not just engineering talent that’s in high demand—with so many startups hiring, “there aren’t enough older people to hire in general in the world,” writes Eric.
Casper’s return to private life is not a canary for DTC companies going public
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Like many of you, my first exposure to Casper was through the company’s ubiquitous podcast ads promoting its mattresses a few years ago.
The company has had an interesting trajectory: Backed by ventures, it has “struggled as a public concern” since its 2020 IPO, reports Alex Wilhelm.
Yesterday, the company announced it was going private again, “and given that we’re seeing cash-hungry operations like Sweetgreen and Rent the Runway list, it’s worth digging into what happened at Casper.”
Lessons we learned from the last week of fintech earnings
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After a week of dynamic news, Ryan Lawler and Alex Wilhelm presented a Friday afternoon collaboration looking at “a string of winning fintech results from BNPL, consumer finance, proptech and corporate finance players”.
Their summary covered Affirm’s earnings, Zillow’s iBuying exit and lackluster earnings results from Robinhood and Square driven by a decline in crypto trading.
“It’s shaping up to be the year of fintech, both in the public and private markets.”
Utah-based Podium raises pre-IPO round, raising its valuation to $3 billion
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Podium, which provides software services to SMBs, raised a $201 million round at a $3 billion valuation, with one investor telling Bloomberg that the Utah-based company will “definitely” go public.
Podium declined to share much beyond that.
“The lack of hard financial results makes Podium’s upcoming IPO … even more curious,” writes Alex Wilhelm.
“Given that we’ll see results for Podium’s actual performance within its eventual S-1 filing, why not tell us now?”
A wave of LatAm fintechs are setting new global trade tracks
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To better serve consumers using at least 14 different currencies, Latin American online merchants are building innovative, robust fintech infrastructure that is benefiting global brands and SMEs.
“The key to increasing market share and loyalty for global merchants and service providers is eliminating the friction associated with payments and the online shopping experience,” writes EBANX CEO João Del Valle.
“In practice, consumers want this process to be ‘mindless’ so that there are no barriers to paying using the methods they prefer and to ensure that digital transactions are fast, easy, painless and safe.”
Faster deals, less hassle: The African startup market mirrors its biggest rivals
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African startups have already surpassed all previous years, meaning 2021 is sure to be one for the books, Alex Wilhelm and Anna Heim report for The Exchange.
They found that the situation in Africa looks a lot like elsewhere: investors are doing deals at a rapid pace and zeal is often burning.
To help make sense of the numbers, they spoke to Novastar Ventures West Africa director Brian Odhiambo and Lexi Novitske, managing partner at Acuity Venture Partners.
Accreditation as a service and the future of alternative degrees
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Edtech startup Woolf raised a $7.5 million seed round not to offer an alternative to education, but to legitimize those alternatives.
“Woolf University is not competing with the cadre of startups that offer non-accredited alternatives to education,” writes Natasha Mascarenhas.
“Instead, Woolf wants to make them future customers.”
Big deals are pushing more AI startups into IPO territory
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Alex Wilhelm and Anna Heim unveiled new data from CB Insights on venture capital investments in AI, noting that rising dollar amounts and deal volumes mean more AI-focused startups are heading to public markets.
They relied on Sapphire Ventures partner Jai Das and Glasswing Venture partner Rudina Seseri to help make sense of the numbers.
“If you raise $100 million in total, let alone in one shot, investors are betting on an exit north of $1 billion, and hopefully much more,” write Anna and Alex.
“Most of these companies will have to power their exit, rather than seek a soft corporate downgrade.”
Microsoft’s move to the cloud is a lesson in corporate evolution
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It’s no exaggeration to say that Microsoft’s move to cloud computing fundamentally changed the way the tech giant does business.
“Microsoft wasn’t just asking customers to make this change,” writes Ron Miller. “It also involved a massive internal change to everything from the way you build and deliver software — moving from a waterfall plan of months and years to an agile plan where you can update on a daily basis.”
Last month, at TechCrunch Sessions: SaaS, he discussed the transition with Jared Spataro, corporate vice president for Microsoft 365.
