If you joined a startup thinking it’d be all ping-pong tables and free lunches, only to find that the VC money had dried up, the ping-pong table got sold, and what’s left was the obsessive data-driven neurosis that every action must be measured and quantified, you’ve probably felt the pain of attribution.

Suddenly you “need” a watertight, multi‑level, CAC‑optimised, board‑ready, AI‑native, cross‑functionally aligned attribution model, and your entire marketing strategy has been handed over to some analyst who hasn’t spoken to another person outside work in a year and thinks marketing is a cost centre.

All of this is made worse by the fact that it doesn’t paint the picture you intuitively know to be true as a talented and, frankly, attractive marketer who is great at parties and speaks to people outside work all the time.

The promised land of attribution was a seductive idea. A perfect dashboard that tells you exactly where to spend your money?

Just wire it all up, Tom, and I’ll take it from here. Shhhh, shhh. There you go.

The real cost of overly-engineered attribution, ironically, is the very thing it’s designed to solve.

The problem with attribution

Attribution is the flattening of a marketing strategy. It takes every micro‑interaction, trust‑building moment, incentive and message and squashes it all down into one thing that gets credited for your sale.

Any attribution method does this to some degree. You can’t avoid flattening completely. But there is a way to do it without wrecking your strategy.

Brands that obsess over perfect attribution end up bending their marketing to fit the model, rather than building a model that gives them enough direction to guide what they already know about how their customers actually buy.

In that world, last click actions will win every time. And while these clicks are useful, they shouldn’t be driving your strategy.

When you focus all your energy on what brought someone to your website, you slowly cut out all the things that help to control acquisition cost, capture mindshare, build trust and drive longer‑term growth. Without those, you have to serve more ads, more often, to convince someone to try your brand. That gets expensive.

Strategy comes from user journeys

Real journeys are messy. Someone hears about you on a podcast. A week later they see a LinkedIn post from a friend. They Google your brand and click an ad because it’s at the top. Two days later they come back via a referral link. A month later, they finally sign up on a laptop they found under a bridge.

When you map a journey properly, you care about where people first hear about you, what finally gets them to the site, what they see on that first visit, and what has to happen before they’re ready to buy. You care about the stages and the jobs: who we’re trying to reach, what they believe now, what has to change, and which moments actually move them forward.

The job of strategy is deciding which parts of that journey you’re going to invest in, and how.

User journeys and research should dictate where you want demand to come from and which bottlenecks you’re trying to relieve. Sensible attribution can nudge you towards or away from those bets, but it shouldn’t get to define them.

Clicks are for operational credit

Click data sits underneath strategy at a tactical level. Shoutout Bitly.

At Yonder we used Bitly as our analytics hub for every campaign – the very first referral program I built at Yonder was built on Bitly. It’s how we managed affiliate placements and new creator partnerships. We used QR codes on printed handouts, or for one‑off landing pages. It gave us one clean view of how those individual assets behaved. But importantly, they didn’t tell us whether to run the campaign or not.

Clicks are tactical. If we’d promised an affiliate they’d get paid per click or per signup from their link, Bitly made it easy to see whether we owed them money. Clicks give operational credit - did this specific partner, link, or asset do what we agreed?

Where teams get into trouble is when they allow that same click data to give strategy credit. Not good. They look at the last link someone clicked and treat it as proof that “this channel created the demand and converted customer”. Which is extremely unlikely.

They move budget based on whichever URL happened to be at the end of a very messy chain. It’s how marketing budgets become skewed towards Paid Social, Paid Search and affiliates – because they’re often the final triggering action or step before a conversion.

Use clicks for operational credit and for debugging your journeys – are people seeing and using the things you’re putting into the world?

How Did You Hear About Us (HDYHAU) is still the best directional attribution

The humble “How did you hear about us?” is absolutely goated.

It’s simple, quick to implement, and still one of the best ways to get a directional sense of where customers are coming from. You’re asking the only person who was actually there.

Granola, WisprFlow and loads of other companies still do this in their onboarding flows and they’ve got millions of customers. You are not too big, too sophisticated or too complex to ask.

HDYHAU still flattens the story. People can misremember. They anchor on the most salient touch, not the first one. There will be noise. No attribution model is perfect.

The difference is how. Click‑based attribution flattens the story to whatever got tagged last. HDYHAU does it around the customer’s own memory – what they believe was important in discovering you. It’s more likely to surface podcasts, communities, friends, and content – the things your dashboards underweight – and less likely to reward whoever happened to be at the end of the chain.

It’s easy to implement. On your checkout or sign-up flow do this:

First, you ask about the medium in broad strokes:

“Where did you first hear about us?”

Social. Podcast. Newsletter or email. Search. An event. A recommendation from a friend or colleague. Website content. An integration or another product.

Then, only once they’ve picked the medium, you ask the specific follow‑up:

“Which one?” or “What website?” etc.

If they say social, you ask which platform. If they say podcast, you show a short list of your main shows plus an “other / don’t remember” option. If they say website content, you name a handful of flagship pieces they might recognise. You’ve separated the type of touch from the specific surface. Basically mapping to Source and Medium from typical UTMs.

This sits alongside your understanding of the journey and either reinforces it (“yes, people do seem to discover us through creators and one specific guide”) or challenges it.

There is no perfect end to this story. HDYHAU is still a best guess. You need to let go of the fantasy that any attribution view – even a good HDYHAU setup – can fully explain why growth is happening. At best, it nudges you towards or away from the bets you’ve already made about your customers and your category.

Keep CAC blended and optimise channels on inputs

Most of the pressure to over‑index on attribution is really pressure about CAC.

If you can’t say “this channel brings in customers at £X”, how do you argue for budget? A best approach is to just treat CAC as a blended goal for your whole marketing strategy instead.

Every month, add up your total sales and marketing spend and divide by the number of new customers (or qualified opportunities) you created. That’s your Blended CAC. Not “paid CAC”, “content CAC” or “field marketing CAC”. Just the cost, on average, of acquiring a customer given the system you’re running right now.

I’m not saying you should never look at channel-level CAC. But just be careful not to treat that channel as if it did all the work. Every other touchpoint subsidised that conversion. Invest in brand and content, and your paid CAC drops. Strip it back, and paid gets more expensive.

Give each activity a clear job in the journey, and judge it on whether it’s doing that job well. A paid social campaign whose job is to introduce the brand to new people should live or die on whether people actually stop scrolling and pay attention. Long‑form content is about engagement and movement into product pages.

This is where Bitly comes in so you can standardise how you track links into your site and see whether people are interacting with the things you publish. Then you can just build a dashboard in their tool and track it all with their Weekly Insights or just chat with their AI-chat Bitly Assist to find out what’s working. You’re using clicks to keep yourself honest on inputs, not as the sole measure of output.

You don’t need a detailed attribution model

You don’t need a Marketing Mix Model. You definitely don’t need to be debating multi-touch vs data-driven vs time decay in a company that’s still trying to get from 200 to 2,000 customers.

Keep it simple. User research sets strategy. HDYHAU tells you where demand is coming from. Blended CAC tells you whether the system is getting better or worse.

Do that consistently and you’ll be much less likely to wake up six months from now staring at a rising CAC chart, wondering why “doing what the data told us” somehow made everything worse.

While I’ve got you…

My name is Tom. I’ve launched and grown products at some of the UK’s most loved consumer brands like Monzo and Wise and was part of the founding team and VP Marketing at Yonder.

If you’re a senior marketer at a startup, this Substack is for you. I write about what actually works in startup marketing (and what definitely doesn’t) for marketers on the verge of breakdown.

Subscribe now

Take my short reader survey so I can learn more about who reads this so I can write more useful stuff. I know you ask your customers to take surveys, so one won’t hurt you. Thanks in advance.

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Most “research” inside startups is a survey sent out every few months.

All good? Still happy? Tell your friends about us?

At best it’s owned by a UX team that pumps out a slide deck twice a year and at worst it’s just some product manager looking for ideas to include in their Q3 planning.

This is not what good research looks like.

Under the stewardship of the inimitable Craig Fitzgerald, Yonder’s Head of Design, I was lucky enough to have a front row seat to what proper user research can do for an organisation.

This article is about how serious founders and marketing leaders conduct proper user research, how they use it as the foundation for everything, product decisions, ICP formation, positioning tests, campaigns and brand inspiration, and how to actually run that kind of research well.

Craig wrote a hugely successful guide to research, “How to build a killer product proposition with user research”, that’s been passed around the internet and read hundreds of thousands of times. He is the final boss of research‑led design and most of what I’m reflecting on here are his values and principles dressed up as my own.

Research doesn’t need to just be a product thing. Done well, the same research that shapes the kind of product proposition Craig talks about can also be used in your marketing team, and honestly all over your organisation.

But this is a marketing Substack, so we’ll focus on how research can give you confidence on your target customer, your messaging, your brand story, and even half your campaign ideas.

So read on, or don’t, and keep sending that quarterly NPS email.

Your call.

What most teams call “research”

When teams tell me “we’ve done research”, it often means they’ve done a survey.

Which is technically true. In the same way Sebastian Sawe running a 1:59:30 marathon and you jogging round the park both count as “going for a run”.

Surveys can be helpful. They’re generally best for collecting basic information about your customers or quantifying things like Net Promoter Score.

But people who fill out surveys are inherently biased. They’ve opted in, which usually means they’re very happy, very unhappy, or really want a voucher. That’s true of all research to some extent, but at least on deep user research calls you can go far enough to find something useful.

Some companies don’t even send surveys. They’ve paid a research group £50,000 to pull together a market analysis report that they handed off to an intern, who stuck it into Claude and pasted some bullet points into a deck.

Neither is great.

I won’t pretend I always prioritised research. When you’re busy, speaking to customers falls down the list. But every time I was stuck in a painful positioning or creative hole, talking to a few customers would have made all the difference. I’m writing this so you don’t have to learn that the hard way.

Most people in a company, marketing included, consume research as a static artefact. A deck of charts and quotes, totally detached from the conversations that produced them. Just as removing engineers from the people they’re building for results in worse products, removing marketers from them results in worse marketing.

User research calls give you all the stuff the survey strips out. The follow‑up questions. How they scroll your website. What they read back to you. The in‑between small talk about what they’re doing at the weekend.

It’s all useful.

What proper research actually looks like

Most of the best research I’ve seen, including Craig’s work, follows a simple pattern.

1. Start with a clear project and a hypothesis

Pick a question related to some problem you’re having, like:

• “What job are people actually using our app for?”

• “What brands do our customers associate us with?”

Then write down your best guess before you speak to anyone.

• “Customers use our product to keep track of X and avoid Y.”

• “Customers will say we remind them of X, Y and Z brands.”

That’s your hypothesis you should aim to prove or disprove in research. Next step.

2. Recruit 5–6 people who roughly fit

Start with your own customers or people who look like the ones you want more of.

Reach out directly. Ask for 30 minutes and offer something small as a thank you, a voucher, a discount, a donation.

This doesn’t have to be “statistically significant” for all the data nerds out there. Five or six conversations are enough to see patterns. If you can’t learn anything useful from six, you won’t magically learn it from sixty.

3. Structure a simple 30‑minute interview

Half an hour is more than enough if you don’t waste it.

First 5-10 minutes, just warm up. Ask about their role, their day, how they currently solve the problem you think you solve. Get into their world before you show them anything.

Next 20 minutes, go deep on the problem and your product. Show them a mockup, a prototype, a campaign idea, or your current marketing site. Or stay in their workflow and talk through where something like you would fit.

Depending on what it is you’re testing, the questions you ask might be different, but here are a few starters:

• “How would you describe this to a friend?”
  Great for seeing how your product proposition is landing.

• “What brands does this remind you of?”
  One of my favourites to test your brand positioning.

• “What would you expect this to do for you?”
  Gets you out of your head and into theirs.

At Yonder, when we were trying to solve positioning for new products, we’d show people rough website designs and ask exactly those questions.

If they stared at the screen for a while then said “I’m not sure”, that told us the concept wasn’t landing. If they looked at it and said “Oh, it’s a bit like Monzo but with travel rewards”, that told us we’d landed where we wanted.

4. Always have two people in the room

One person leads the interview. The other takes notes and watches for patterns. That way the interviewer can actually listen instead of frantically trying to scribble down every word.

Take more notes than you think reasonable. Any minor thought or quote they said and jot it down. Better to have more than not enough.

Having different disciplines involved in research also means they’ll naturally hear different things. Product hears the friction. Marketing hears the language. Engineers can see exactly what bug is causing the problem.

5. Stop after 5–6 interviews and actually assess

It’s tempting to pick apart each interview as it happens, but it’s better to wait until you finish all of them.

After five or six interviews, sit down with the notes and synthesise them into one write‑up. Check the findings against your hypotheses.

• ✅ Hypothesis #1: Users could find our app on the app store and download it

• ✅ Hypothesis #2: Users could explain the app back to us after just seeing the sign‑up flow

• ❌ Hypothesis #3: Users were happy to, and could easily, connect their bank account

Great. There’s your learning. Now go away with your brilliant team and work out how to turn that red cross into a green check next time.

It might not be the product that needs to change. Change your hypothesis. Change your ICP. Change the homepage. If nothing you heard would change anything, either your questions were bad, you didn’t go deep enough or this wasn’t a real problem to begin with.

Craig’s article goes deeper into how to plan a study, write questions, and synthesise properly. It’s worth a read if you want more structure around that.

One small project, many decisions

The reason I think of user research as “the foundation” is that a single well‑run project can feed half the decisions you’re stuck on.

Product decisions

You see what people are really using you for.

Maybe everyone uses your clever new feature for a completely different job than you expected. Maybe the thing you thought was a minor UX tweak is the moment they decide to stick around.

That tells you far more about what to build next than any internal scoring model.

ICP and segmentation

You notice who lights up when they talk about your product and who sounds bored.

That’s your ICP. Not the persona you wrote in a workshop or the customer with the highest budgets.

Real people are usually messier than the slide. Interviews let you see the patterns, the triggers, the jobs they’re trying to get done.

Positioning and messaging

The best copy lives in your transcripts.

“It’s like Monzo but with travel rewards.”

You’ll get lines like this all the time that you can use in creative, on your website, or as inspiration for your next big idea. You can basically build your messaging hierarchy from how people already think, using the language they use.

Brand and campaigns

Interviews also tell you which stories to tell, which visuals make sense, which jokes you can make.

One research interview told me once that Amex “felt like their dad’s credit card” and we used that in our brand messaging a lot. You’ll hear rants you can turn into campaigns, throwaway lines you can turn into taglines, identity cues you can build whole platforms around.

Again, none of this required an extra project. It all came from the same six calls you had.

This is what I mean when I say research is the foundation. You do one small piece of work, properly, and it can solve a lot of problems you’ve been trying to tackle separately.

You should be doing research monthly, or more

If you lead marketing in a product‑led company and you’re not in user research every month, you’re leaving a huge amount of customer insight on the table.

A good baseline is one focused project every month. Pick a question that matters, run six interviews, ship changes off the back of it.

Marketing should help define the questions. Be in the room when someone explores your website. Be the one asking “how would you describe this to a friend?”

Craig’s way of structuring research is a great template here, from clarifying assumptions through to testing propositions. Your job is to make sure those same studies also feed your ICP, your messaging and your brand, not just the roadmap.

It’s also way easier now than when we first started this.

You can record and transcribe the calls with one of the million transcription apps. Store them somewhere sensible. Then use Claude to search across them when you’re working on a new campaign or a strategy document.

You’re running out of excuses not to speak to customers properly.

Also I hear Craig is available for some design and research consulting. I’d highly recommend sending him a DM if you think you could benefit from better research.

While I’ve got you…

My name is Tom. I’ve launched and grown products at some of the UK’s most loved consumer brands and I’m part of the founding team and VP Marketing at Yonder, a modern-day rewards card. Since starting at Yonder, I’ve written about all my marketing learnings along the way.

If you’re a senior marketer at a startup, this Substack is for you. I write about what actually works in startup marketing (and what definitely doesn’t) for marketers on the verge of breakdown.

Take my short reader survey so I can learn more about who reads this so I can write more useful stuff. I know you ask your customers to take surveys, so one won’t hurt you. Thanks in advance.

Here are some of my most popular reads:

I took a year off recently so I could go backpacking. It was as simple as that really. No existential crisis, no falling out of love with marketing. Just fancied bed bugs and ramen at 34. I’m happy to report it was everything I hoped it would be. But when I got back I realised that my time at Yonder was probably over.

I started this newsletter right at the beginning because the kind of marketing help I wanted didn’t exist. When I became Yonder’s first marketer, I had experience from Monzo and Wise, but those were different companies at different stages. Yonder was pre-everything.

So now it’s over it feels like a nice time to reflect on everything I’ve learned there over the years. So here it is, the ten things I wish someone had told me on day one.

1. Start with the customer, not the product

When we started Yonder, we didn’t know what we wanted to build. We just knew who we wanted to build for.

The founding insight was that expats moving to London couldn’t access good credit products. They got locked out of some of the best financial products on the market. So we built this profile:

Late twenties, probably from Australia or New Zealand. Professional career, planning to be in London for two or three years. Travelling around Europe several times a year, trying to see as much as possible, one or two big international trips. Exploring London the rest of the time. New restaurants, weekends with friends, ordering Deliveroo more than they’d like to admit.

And then we spent the best part of the rest of the year just talking to people. Yeah, we asked about their financial lives but that almost came secondary to understanding what the rest of their lives looked like. We learnt so much about how they felt about other credit products and it gave us laser focus on what we needed to build.

Most startups have the product in mind already. And it’s the reason that so many vibe-coded apps never get used by anyone. They skip the most important bit.

Read → How To Launch A Startup

2. Your product has to be better or cheaper

I started my career working for a non-profit in San Francisco. Part of our fundraising model involved taking equity in startups that used our cause in their marketing. “This chocolate fights human trafficking.”

People bought once, out of guilt usually, then never again. The chocolate was crap. People buy things for two reasons and two reasons only: it’s cheaper, or it’s better. That’s it. You can layer values and mission and all your brand storytelling on top of that, but it won’t make them choose a worse or more expensive product.

‘Better’ can also mean different, which makes it better. For us that meant offering rewards points to use at nice restaurants or on gym classes or massages. It was better than Amex, because it was different.

When I’m advising startups now, this is the first thing I ask. No amount of marketing brilliance can solve this problem. Get this right first. Then do the rest.

Read → No One Cares About Your Cause-Driven Product

3. Say one thing well

The more features a product has, the more pressure there is for a marketer to talk about all the things it can do.

We packed Yonder full of features in an attempt to satisfy every need of our comically-specific target customer. Epic rewards they could use when they were in London and amazing travel benefits like comprehensive insurance no FX fees when they went abroad. Plus a light sprinkling of how Yonder could help to build their credit score provided they paid it off monthly and on time.

Eventually we stripped it down to one key message – epic rewards where you live. It’s never easy telling the product team who built that great feature that you don’t plan on sticking it on the website. But the more you try to say, the less you’ll cut through. It’s important to say one thing really, really well. Then layer on the other messages over time.

If you’re struggling to explain what your product is or you’re running out of room on your website. Then you’re trying to say too much.

Read → Say Less Better

4. Strategy is simpler than it sounds

Strategy used to terrify me. It was the one big thing I felt I’d never wrangle, inevitably holding me back from more senior roles. It always felt like trying to predict the future in a document that would definitely be wrong.

What I eventually worked out, after a lot of overcomplicating it, is that good marketing strategy is just aligning your budget and resources to how your customers actually make decisions. It really is that easy.

At Yonder we learned that financial products take a lot of touch points before someone commits. People don’t impulse-buy a credit card. They research, ask friends, check Trustpilot, then do it all over again. We mapped those moments and came up with a long list of comparison sites, forums, influencers, and other channels we could then prioritise.

Then you just split your spend roughly around how much of your audience is in market or not. Growth Now, capturing people who are actively comparing and deciding or Growth Later, building awareness and preference with the people who aren’t in market yet but might be in the next twelve months.

Read → How To Write A Marketing Strategy

5. Marketing doesn’t drive growth (alone)

This is probably the most important lesson we learned as an organisation.

When most people talk about growth, they’re actually talking distribution. More ads. Better targeting. Funnel stuff. That’s really just one part of it.

There are, in fact, just three ways to grow.

1. Better distribution, which is the stuff above and the one marketers spend all their time on.

2. New products dropped into existing distribution, which is how we doubled our growth overnight when we launched the free Yonder credit card without changing anything else.

3. And new markets, where you take your existing product and your existing understanding of distribution and show up somewhere fresh, which is how we grew when we opened up Manchester and Bristol.

If you want to become a CMO, you’ll need to have a point of view on all three levers. More A/B tests isn’t going to get you there, pal.

When everyone in your company understands this, it takes the pressure off in a healthy way. Marketing doesn’t drive growth by itself. Growth is an outcome of everything an organisation does: the products you build, the market you exist in, the channels you distribute through, and how you show up in all of them. Marketing is one part of that system.

Read → There Are Just Three Ways To Grow

6. Brand vs performance is a debate for idiots

Whenever I read a LinkedIn post about “the great debate of which is better, brand or performance” I immediately know they don’t know what they’re talking about. Might start dropping links to Ritson’s MiniMBA.

But while the theory is well established, there’s little evidence on what the right split looks like at early-stage startups.

Finding the balance was hard. After years of trial and error we landed on roughly 50/50. Half of our marketing budget into things that drive customers in the next 30 days. Half into things that drive demand in the next 6 to 12 months.

Is that right for your business? Probably not. But the process for figuring out your split is the same. What percentage of your target market is actively looking to buy right now? Work backwards from that. If only 10% are in market at any given time, you probably shouldn’t spend 80% of your budget on them.

Read → Difference Between Brand And Performance Creative

7. Creative is the only way startups can actually compete

You can either win on media spend or creativity. Are you really going to outspend a gigantic conglomerate with a bigger marketing budget than the GDP of some small European countries? They will outspend you indefinitely.

We made a deliberate decision early on to compete on creativity rather than spend. We didn’t have the budget to buy our way in front of everyone. So we had to earn attention instead.

Most financial education is dry and forgettable. We knew people needed to understand APR and we knew they’d scroll past anything that looked like a leaflet from their bank. So we put our 39-year-old founder in a bubble bath, explaining interest rates.

The creative hustle you build when you have no money is one of the most valuable things a startup marketer can develop. Money will arrive eventually. The instinct to make something genuinely interesting, rather than just buying your way in front of people, is harder to hold onto than you’d think.

Read → You Have To Make Time For Creativity

8. Nobody in the room understands marketing

I assumed that the people around me had a working model of how marketing actually works. That the CEO understood why brand building matters. That the finance team got why we weren’t measuring everything on last-click attribution. My ego took a beating when I realised they didn’t think about marketing at all really.

But the more I explained things, the fewer questions came back. I’d say the same things over and over. I don’t think you’ve over-shared on marketing enough until you’re absolutely sick of the sound of your own voice.

People are busy. They don’t retain the context for why you made a decision two months ago. They won’t remember the brand rationale when the CPA spikes and the pressure is on to cut spend. If they don’t get it, that’s your fault.

Maintaining a shared understanding of how marketing works across the whole organisation is part of your job. CEO, finance, product, everyone.

Read → How To Write A Marketing Update So You Don’t Get Fired

9. The job changes as the company grows

The skills that make you a great individual contributor, like a strong instinct for creative or a feel for what resonates with customers, aren’t the same skills that make you good at running a marketing function.

Running a function means building a team, allocating resource across things you’re not personally doing, reporting up, managing sideways, and holding a lot of decisions in your head at the same time without doing all of them yourself.

Brand marketers know how to build something people love but can struggle to show it in the numbers. Growth marketers know how to make the graph go up but sometimes find it hard to make anything that isn’t being optimised. Product marketers, and this was me, tend to think the product will do the marketing’s job for it if it’s good enough. Spoiler, not true.

The best marketing leaders I’ve seen have one thing in common: they know what they don’t know. They build teams that cover their blind spots instead of hoping those blind spots don’t matter.

Read → What Makes You a Good Marketer Could Make You A Bad CMO

10. Bigger budgets are a test, not a reward

When our budgets went up, decisions got harder, mistakes got more expensive, and there were a lot more people who needed to be in the room when I was about to spend money.

Money makes you lazy. When you have no budget, you have to think. You write better copy because you can’t afford to run mediocre ads at volume. The creative hustle you develop when you’re skint is genuinely valuable, and it starts to atrophy when you can solve problems by spending more.

Opportunity cost explodes and the big calls need more people. Early on at Yonder I didn’t speak to the finance team much about marketing decisions. Towards the end we’d need everyone in the room on big marketing bets.

The skill that keeps you in the seat as the company grows isn’t your creative instincts. It’s whether you can manage risk, trade-offs, and stakeholder buy-in at bigger and bigger numbers.

Read → More Money, More Problems

While I’ve got you…

My name is Tom. I’ve launched and grown products at some of the UK’s most loved consumer brands and was part of the founding team and VP Marketing at Yonder, a modern-day rewards card.

If you’re a senior marketer at a startup, this Substack is for you. I write about what actually works in startup marketing (and what definitely doesn’t) for marketers on the verge of breakdown.

Subscribe now

Take my short reader survey so I can learn more about who reads this so I can write more useful stuff. I know you ask your customers to take surveys, so one won’t hurt you. Thanks in advance.

When I first became Head of Marketing at Yonder, I had no idea what I was actually supposed to do.

I kept asking our CEO Tim what he thought, and naturally, he’d say that was the reason he hired me. He did share one useful piece of advice though: go speak to people who know what they’re doing.

So I fired up LinkedIn and started messaging other marketing leaders, asking them how they were thinking about budgets, channels, growth, the whole lot.

The answers were… mixed.

One person told me, very confidently, that our little pre-product startup with about £50k in the bank should do TV ads. Great idea. Why didn’t I think of that? I don’t blame them. Most growth advice is useless, as I learned.

Things got interesting when I chatted with another CMO at a fast‑growing startup in the US who said something that stuck with me. Her biggest problem was working out how to spend her $100m marketing budget.

At the time, that sentence didn’t make sense to me. I’d spent my entire career begging managers for a few thousand pounds for anything. The idea that having trouble spending £100m hadn’t even crossed my mind.

Marketers fantasise about bigger numbers. But bigger budgets actually mean you’re being asked to grow the business faster than before. Any idiot can spend £5,000,000. How you acquire 100x more customers, and still make the economics work, is why they pay us the medium bucks.

Since then, my budget at Yonder has grown a lot, and I’ve spent plenty of time thinking about what actually changes when those numbers go up.

The higher your budget gets, the less the job is about finding things to spend money on, and the more it becomes about managing risk, opportunity cost, and buy‑in.

Mo money, mo problems.

Tiny budgets are actually the easiest ones

If you’re a marketer of any meaningful repute, you will have, at some point in your career, complained to literally anyone who looks at you twice that you don’t have enough money to spend. This is the way.

But when you have no money, you can focus on just a few ways to make an impact – typically through organic social, guerrilla or stunt PR stuff, and through amplifying growth through your own customers and community.

I know it can feel frustrating. But it’s also safe.

When you have almost no money, the downside of being wrong is tiny. You can throw ideas around without asking anyone’s permission and see what happens. And when things don’t work out, it’s never career‑defining. You just wake up the next day and make another TikTok or whatever.

I think this is an important part of any marketer’s development.

You learn a lot at this stage. You get good at making something out of nothing, building the skill of saying “we’ll just try it and see” because the worst‑case scenario is you annoyed ten people on Instagram and wasted your morning.

When you don’t have money, you have to actually think. You have to write better copy. Come up with weirder ideas. Squeeze more out of channels everyone else has written off. A lot of the ambition and craft you admire in other marketers was likely forged when they were skint, not when they had huge budgets to produce big ideas.

You’re not calling the finance team to ask permission for anything. You probably don’t even have a finance team.

What changes when the numbers get bigger

Things get more interesting when there are a few extra zeroes added to the end.

When we raised our Series A, the reality set in. I had a budget maybe 20x bigger than the year before, but I needed to use it to acquire 20x more customers. The expectations grow just as fast as the budget does.

Here’s what I noticed when I started managing bigger budgets.

The downside gets very real

At the small end, a bad decision is an embarrassing Slack message and a lesson for next time. We spent £1,000 on leaflets once and it got us absolutely nowhere. I shared a photo of someone using them as an ashtray. We all had a giggle, then I got back to work.

At the big end, a bad piece of marketing activity ends up on a board slide.

Every piece of marketing activity you ever do will fall somewhere on a scale between TikTok video and Super Bowl ad.

Most of us will never do a Super Bowl ad. But you’ll have your own version of it – a sponsorship, a TV campaign, an out‑of‑home burst – it’ll cost you a lot of money and will likely define how the company feels about marketing for the next year.

Whether we like it or not, these big marketing moments carry huge opportunity and risk in equal measure.

The opportunity cost explodes

When we ran our first big out‑of‑home campaign at Yonder, it took up a meaningful chunk of our budget. The timing made sense. We could afford it. It was a good opportunity.

But we still sometimes talk about what else we could have done with that money. The opportunity cost of those big marketing moments is just so high. That doesn’t happen when you’re printing leaflets.

When your budget is small, the decisions are more or less “do we do anything at all.” There are plenty of free things to keep you busy. You don’t really have to think in trade‑offs. You’re saying yes to whatever seems vaguely sensible.

At £100,000, the questions change. Ten thousand on a podcast, or ten thousand on an influencer, or ten thousand on Meta? How do you decide between them?

At £1,000,000 or more, every big decision comes with the weight of ten other things you could have done with that money. Spending money in the right way is just so difficult.

Back in 2022 I was about to sponsor the Taste of London food festival. The fee was in budget but would have been one of the big bets of the year.

The brand exposure would have been nice. We literally positioned Yonder as the credit card for foodies so we knew there would be almost perfect alignment with the audience.

But we sat down and thought about what else we could do with that money. Suddenly, it wasn’t “is Taste of London good or bad.” It was “does Taste of London beat the ten other things we could do instead.”

You think bigger budgets give you freedom. They rarely do. There’s probably an important life lesson in there somewhere.

Money makes you lazy

Big budgets change how you think. It’s so easy to solve your problems with money. Instead of working hard to find the best creative idea, you’ll pay an agency to do it or buy your way out of it by forcing reach through coverage.

Money makes you lazy. The creative hustle muscles you built when you had no budget, the ones that made you do interesting work, start to atrophy if you’re not careful.

Efficiency is supposed to get better, not worse

Bigger budgets come with harder targets.

If your CEO gives you £100,000, they’re not expecting you to acquire the same thousand customers you did on £10,000. They’re expecting you to acquire ten or twenty times as many. It’s bigger numbers, more efficiently.

Every pound still matters at scale. Every line in your budget still has to pull its weight in customers. Ultimately your job is solving the puzzle of finding the optimal way to acquire a lot more customers for less, without blowing the whole thing up.

The big decisions take a village

Early on at Yonder, I don’t remember speaking to the finance team much about our marketing activity. We’d spend a few thousand here or there. My judgement was enough.

By the time we were into seven figures, that changed dramatically. The bigger the number, the more people need to be in the room:

• Finance, because cash flow and payback now matter in a way they didn’t before

• Your CEO, because big swings shape the story they tell to the board and investors

• Sometimes other leaders, because your ability to handle budget affects hiring, operations, and the rest of the business

Compliance wants to know what the legal and regulatory risk is on a big campaign. Ops want to know how a big campaign might drive more inbound to customer support. Finance literally needs to make the cash available.

For our out‑of‑home campaign, we worked through it with everyone. We were explicit about the size of the bet and what we’d be giving up to do it.

And when we later looked back and wondered whether it was the best use of money, it was always through the lens of “we took a big swing together.”

Turns out “I don’t want to be alone in this” is a very healthy instinct when the numbers get big.

How things change as your budget goes up

Every company is different. These aren’t precise rules. But if I think about the stages we went through at Yonder, it looks roughly like this.

Up to £10,000 a year

“Budget”, lol.

You’re doing scrappy, obvious things. A bit of content. A few small experiments. You’re trying stuff and seeing what sticks.

You don’t need permission for anything, because there’s nothing serious enough to require it.

If something doesn’t work, your main loss is time.

Up to £250,000 a year

Now you can afford to do a couple of things properly.

Maybe you put most of it into one performance channel and one brand channel. Maybe you hire a freelancer. Treat yourself and test a small sponsorship.

You’re probably not calling the Head of Finance to ask how they feel about a £20,000 test. But you are starting to notice that if you put, say, fifty thousand into one thing, that leaves less for everything else.

The decisions matter a bit more. They’re still reversible.

Up to £2,500,000 a year

This is the first time it really feels like a budget.

You’re making deliberate decisions about:

• how much goes into Growth Now and Growth Later

• whether you try above the line for the first time

• how many creators or sponsorships you can realistically support

• where headcount fits into all of this

You’re having more grown‑up conversations with finance and your CEO. You’re starting to show them what you’re planning rather than telling them afterwards.

If you get something wrong here, people notice.

Over £2,500,000 a year

A single decision at this level of spend can easily be six figures. Get a couple of those wrong in a row and you feel it for a long time.

You’re no longer just asking “does this sound good.” You’re asking:

• how does this affect cash and runway

• what will this do to our CAC this quarter

• what are we giving up to do this one thing

• is everyone comfortable with the risk

You’re spending more time in spreadsheets and in meetings with finance. You’ll need to present ideas multiple times, to multiple stakeholders, and be iterating on their feedback each time.

You’re also starting to think about your own job differently, whether you realise it or not. Because at this level, your ability to handle bigger and bigger budgets is basically the argument for why you should keep running marketing instead of the company hiring a CMO over you.

What to do when your budget jumps

When your budget goes up and you’re faced with decisions on new ways to spend a lot more money, you can ask yourself these questions to help ground your decisions.

Is this one of those decisions I’m happy to be wrong about?

If it’s a few thousand pounds on something that feels fun and on‑brand, and you know you won’t lose sleep if it flops, you don’t need a committee.

I once designed a full page ad for the Sunday Times because we got it for a great price the day before. Who knows if it was the exact right way to spend that money at the time. It doesn’t matter.

The cost was inconsequential and when we posted it on LinkedIn people loved it. You don’t need approval for those kinds of things.

What am I saying no to if I say yes to this?

Take the number you’re thinking about spending and come up with three other ways you could use it. More creative production. A series of smaller tests in different channels. Ten micro‑influencers instead of that one big one.

You’ll never get your budget allocation perfect. You just want to make sure you’ve actually looked at the trade‑offs before you fall in love with the shiny thing.

Who else should have a say?

As your budget grows, who decides on how you spend it moves from “me” to “we.”

There’s no exact number, but you might say:

• Anything under five thousand, I’m happy to just do

• Ten to twenty thousand, I’ll at least tell my CEO

• Above that, or anything that takes up more than, say, ten per cent of a monthly budget, we talk it through with finance and the leadership team

The point here isn’t to cover yourself. It’s to turn the big calls into shared decisions.

It’s also just fun to get people excited about what you’re doing. Most people love marketing and seeing their brand out in the world. It’s a great chance for you to educate others on your work.

What does “good” look like, and what do we learn if it doesn’t work?

Big decisions feel scarier when success is fuzzy. I don’t think a sixty‑page deck is appropriate (ever, really), but a rough picture is enough:

• What do we expect this to do over the year

• What early signs would tell us it’s moving in the right direction

• What would make us comfortable saying “this didn’t work, and that’s okay”

Equally important, decide what you’ll learn if it under‑delivers. Maybe you’ll understand a channel better. Maybe you’ll get good creative assets you can reuse elsewhere. Maybe you’ll have proven that a popular idea in the business doesn’t actually move the needle.

What this means for your job

Underneath all of this is an important lesson for all marketers.

The thing that gets you into a Head of Marketing role is not the thing that keeps you in that seat, especially as the company grows.

Bigger budgets are a test.

Can you make trade‑offs that hold up under scrutiny? Bring finance and leadership into the right decisions at the right time? Spend more while the target jumps from a thousand customers to a hundred thousand, and still keep CAC under control? And can you do all of that without letting money make you lazy, forgetting your creative edge you had when you needed to make a £100 idea look like £10k?

If you want to remain the most senior marketer in the business – or become the CMO rather than having one parachuted in above you – this is what you have to get right.

While I’ve got you…

My name is Tom. I’ve launched and grown products at some of the UK’s most loved consumer brands and I’m part of the founding team and VP Marketing at Yonder, a modern-day rewards card. Since starting at Yonder, I’ve written about all my marketing learnings along the way.

If you’re a senior marketer at a startup, this Substack is for you. I write about what actually works in startup marketing (and what definitely doesn’t) for marketers on the verge of breakdown.

Subscribe now

Take my short reader survey so I can learn more about who reads this so I can write more useful stuff. I know you ask your customers to take surveys, so one won’t hurt you. Thanks in advance.

Here are some of my most popular reads:

Oooft. Hasn’t LinkedIn been an absolute dumpster fire lately? Starting to wish I spent more time on my sabbatical looking at waterfalls or something.

SEO is dead. AI is replacing your entire team. If you’re not using Claude Code to 10x your output you’re already behind. Why are you so pathetic? The marketers who can’t code are finished. Look at this one Claude marketer who built their entire performance team on their own. Go and mow lawns for a living. Everything we knew about brand, performance, and customer acquisition is wrong. Are you getting fat?

I read all this crap, and honestly, it’s kinda funny. Because it’s the same stuff I’ve heard for the last ten years.

I don’t think much has changed actually. Certainly not in the ways that matter.

Marketing fundamentals haven’t changed and they never will

I’m done with the whole ‘marketing has changed forever’ over and over again thing. It’s boring.

Mid 2010s, Google changed its algorithm. Then social media killed organic reach. Then performance marketing killed off brand. Then TikTok killed everything. Now it’s AI. Have I missed anything?

Some new thing arrives, some clown on the internet announces everything you knew is worthless, a lot of people panic, and then it turns out the fundamentals are the same and the new thing either plugs into them or doesn’t.

So while the tools and tactics may have changed, I don’t think much else has. Here’s what still matters.

Understanding your customer

You need to know who your customer actually is. It’s crazy how many vibe‑coded Slack‑killer apps I see popping up that have no idea who might want to use their little thing.

Building a comically specific target customer is the absolute foundation of any marketing strategy. At Yonder ours was so specific it was as if we knew them personally.

What are they doing before they find you? What are they comparing you to? What do they need to believe before they’ll switch? How do they research products like yours? If you can’t answer these then another new marketing channel isn’t going to help you.

Getting your positioning right

A real position is a specific, defensible claim about who your product is the obvious choice for and why. Not “now with AI.” That’s not a position.

Positioning is the process of landing your product or service in the right spot in someone’s mind. The right category, unlocking the right feeling and associations they have. That’s how they understand what it is you do and where you fit in their lives. Poorly positioning your product can kill your startup before it even gets going.

It’s slow, careful work that requires you to sit with your customer, your competitors, and your own product until something obvious emerges.

It took us about six months to get this right with Yonder. Perhaps a little too long in hindsight.

Investing in growth now and growth later

Good marketing strategy does two things. It captures the people who are ready to buy now (with good unit economics), or it builds value that makes acquisition cheaper in the future.

You may know this as brand and performance. Same thing. I call it Growth Now and Growth Later because it’s easier for a non-marketer to understand how they work together. It’s never been a choice between them. Real marketing strategies have a balanced plan that executes both well.

The brands that don’t understand this tend to find out why it matters around their Series B and hope a quick rebrand fixes the problem. I wrote more about this here:

Building a distinctive brand

Ironically, for startups that could never prioritise brand building, one of the last real differentiators left is the strength of their brand. Software is no longer your moat. Brand is inimitable. It lives in people’s heads. The associations you build and the memories you create are what give you a fighting chance. It’s always been important, but now more so than ever.

Would your customers know your ads from a competitor’s if you swapped the logos? Do people know what you stand for without being told? Can you raise your price without losing all your customers? Does all your growth stop when you turn off your Meta ads? When they open up their browser to look for a solution, are they searching your name?

I wrote more about the distinction between different kinds of brand-related terms here:

Four years of this newsletter and the message here is basically ‘do the basics.’ Sorry.

If the noise is making you anxious, ask yourself what specifically you’re worried about. If it’s that you don’t know how to use the tools, go learn. That’s the easy part.

But if underneath it there’s a quieter worry about whether you actually understand your customer, whether your positioning is clear, whether your brand is distinctive enough, or whether your product is meeting a real need in the market. That’s the more important question.

Clear positioning makes better AI-assisted copy. A sharp understanding of your customer makes for better creative briefs. A coherent strategy mapped to your customer journeys gives AI more focus and clarity. Without any of that, AI will just help you do everything poorly, faster.

The fundamentals haven’t changed. Which is either reassuring or a bit uncomfortable, depending on how solid yours are.

While I’ve got you…

My name is Tom. I’ve launched and grown products at some of the UK’s most loved consumer brands and I’m part of the founding team and VP Marketing at Yonder, a modern-day rewards card. Since starting at Yonder, I’ve written about all my marketing learnings along the way.

Subscribe now

If you’re a senior marketer at a startup, this Substack is for you. I write about what actually works in startup marketing (and what definitely doesn’t) for marketers on the verge of breakdown.

Take my short reader survey so I can learn more about who reads this so I can write more useful stuff. I know you ask your customers to take surveys, so one won’t hurt you. Thanks in advance.

Here are some of my most popular reads:

In partnership with Ballpoint

I’m writing this series with Josh Lachkovic, managing director at Ballpoint, a performance marketing agency I worked with at Yonder. If you’re thinking about scaling your performance spend and want expert help, they’re worth a conversation.

Congratulations. You made it to part three of three. You’re evidence that TikTok-brain hasn’t fully set in for the best of us. There’s still just enough room up there to learn something useful (hopefully) before some genius in Austria builds a Claude Skill that replaces you entirely, and you can finally join that free love nudist colony you read about in Nat Geo once.

Anyway. Ads.

So far we’ve covered a lot of ground. You now know when to scale. You’re an expert in setting up the kind of tracking that gives your CFO butterflies. And you known that creative is fundamental to the whole thing.

Sounds like you’re doing well. That’s great. Let me ruin that for you.

Parts one and two were the easy bits. Processes, at the end of the day. Glorified to-do lists your office dog could get through with enough treats on offer.

Part three is different. It’s all about how you respond when things go badly. Which they will, because this is marketing and nothing works the way you think it will. What you do when that happens is ultimately the measure of your marketing ability. It’s why they pay you the medium bucks.

I am, as it turns out, exceptionally qualified to write about things going badly.

Here’s what we’ll cover:

• What to do when CAC balloons and you don’t know why

• When to hire in-house versus work with an agency

Let’s get into it.

What to do when CAC goes the wrong way

“Every avenue of growth (markets, products, channels) suffers diminishing returns. Our job as growth people is to slow that down. With ad channels, the biggest levers we have to slow those down are creative and the audience we’re speaking to. There are always external factors at play, but these are the ones you control.”

– Josh

CAC is going to go up at some point. Better to accept it now than act surprised when it happens. See this as an ongoing dance with your ad platforms as part of your job and just get on with it.

Here are a few reasons why and what to do about it:

Creative fatigue

The most common culprit. You’ll see frequency climbing (Meta being forced to spend your budget by showing your same creative more), CTR declining and engagement dropping. Your ads stop winning because everyone’s seen them. The underlying mistake is almost always that you scaled spend before your creative engine could keep up (you can’t increase one without the other), or you kept running under-performers longer than you should have because you were hoping they’d turn around.

How to fix it → more creative, pls.

Optimising for Click Through Rate (CTR)

A trickier problem to solve because it doesn’t look like a problem. Click-through rate looks good in a dashboard. Some product manager out there will think it’s great. But you and I both know that clicks don’t pay the bills, baby. CTR is a hint at acquisition cost, not a measure of it. If the goal of your ad creative is acquisition (and not say, brand building), then measure them on acquisition and not clicks.

How to fix it → measure your ad performance through full funnel acquisition

Assuming all conversions are incremental.

This doesn’t necessarily increase your CAC, but it hides a bad one by taking credit for conversions that would have happened anyway. It’s a slippery slope because it convinces people in the business that Meta is far more effective than it really is. Running holdout experiments where a group sees no ads is the only way to understand what you’re actually buying.

How to fix it → run holdout experiments to measure the real channel CAC

Audience saturation

Looks different from creative fatigue. If narrower targeting is suddenly outperforming your broad campaigns, or repeat exposure keeps climbing even on fresh creative, you’ve probably exhausted a meaningful chunk of your reachable audience. New ads can fix this but at some point you’ll need to look at adding in new channels. Josh reckons you can build a £25M revenue business on Meta alone, so I wouldn’t rush to launch a new channel if you’re still small.

How to fix it → launch new channels, new products but honestly more creative will help too

Seasonal effects

Not a lot you can do about these, but worth paying attention to and getting ahead of. Unless Black Friday is an important period for your brand, I’d look at switching off ads altogether. Christmas could be the same. Use that money more effectively elsewhere.

If CAC went up at the same time last year and there’s an industry-wide pattern (at Yonder we saw new credit card applications spike in the new year) it’s probably not your fault and it’s probably not fixable. Worth communicating this broadly so it doesn’t look like an excuse when CAC spikes or you pull back spend. If your CEO is worried, ask them: “We can keep spending in November if you want, but are you okay with doubling our CAC for that time?”

How to fix it → fluctuate spend throughout the year to avoid expensive periods

Platform change

Again, not much you can do here. If you’re working with an agency like Ballpoint, they can help flag these ahead of time as they’ll have the added benefit of seeing multiple ad accounts at once. Most ad platforms like Meta, Google and TikTok change their ad algorithm often.

How to fix it → keep an eye on them and adjust accordingly

Competitive pressure

This can happen either on product-market fit, or in ad spend, but both hurt you slowly. If you’re finding CAC going up, it may just be that your product isn’t as competitive in the market as it was a few months ago. Or that your competitors have been flooding that ad platform with ads and you can’t show up as much. You’re fighting harder for the same impressions. Make your ads look different enough from the category to try and win on distinctiveness, however there’s no replacement for improving your product.

How to fix it → improve your products and launch new creative. Creative really does solve a lot of your problems, if you haven’t noticed.

Poor documentation and experimentation

This will slowly catch up with you. Make sure you’re diligent in writing down all your learnings. Maintain a strict experimentation database in Notion or similar and record how each experiment works. Test one influencer against another? Write up your hypothesis, attach the creative and then record your learnings. These will compound over time and help when you grow your team so they can see what you’ve done before.

How to fix it → build an experimentation table and update it weekly

Finally, not managing internal expectations

Send this to your boss, and their boss. Everyone in your organisation needs to understand how this stuff works. Your CAC will go up and it can’t be a surprise to anyone when it happens. If the first time leadership hears that performance doesn’t scale linearly is the week CAC goes up 30%, you’re off to a bad start.

How to fix it → never, ever, ever shut up about how marketing works to anyone ever

When to hire someone full-time, and when to use an agency

“A performance marketing team today is really a marketing strategist or CMO, an insights manager or planner, a copywriter, a creative strategist, a creative designer or editor, a creative operations manager, and a data analyst. The role that was one person at £10k/month is now effectively ten people.”

— Josh, in Part 1, in case you skipped it.

All going well and your spend continues to go up, you’ll need to grow your team. And you’ll be faced with the age old question of whether to hire into the team or work with experts from outside your business. Or the third option, which is to use AI to do it all, before it capitulates and you’re back to options one and two.

The annoying answer is, it depends, but here’s a way to think about it.

Most agencies will charge on a percentage of spend. I don’t know what the going rate is now, but assuming it’s 10-15%, then it generally makes sense to work with an agency until you get to around £80-100k a month which would be enough to hire a senior performance marketing lead.

There are nuances to this obviously so here’s some of the trade offs you can expect.

The benefits of hiring in-house

Things like product knowledge, brand context, faster day-to-day iteration, and someone who’s always around and accountable when things go wrong. These are real advantages. Your in-house person will understand your product and your customers in a way no external team ever fully will, and that knowledge eventually starts showing up in better creative and smarter targeting decisions. You’ll also just get the added benefit of them caring more.

The benefits of hiring an agency or freelancer

You’ll get out-of-the-box platform expertise, creative production volume, and institutional knowledge built from working across dozens of accounts. A good agency has seen your problem before, on several other clients, probably in the last six months. That pattern recognition has genuine value and it takes time to build in-house.

If you do go in-house, hire for creative taste and analytical rigour before you hire for channel credentials. Meta certification matters less than someone who can look at a week’s worth of creative data and know intuitively what to test next. And don’t hire too junior expecting them to figure it out — you need someone who’s done this before at meaningful scale, or you’re adding a learning curve to an already expensive problem.

The benefits of doing a little of both

You have your performance marketer in-house who owns strategy, planning, oversight and depending on their seniority, is ultimately accountable. A specialist agency and some freelancers manage the creative production and channel expertise. This is what we eventually got to at Yonder and it worked well.

Be careful to hire an expert media buyer (someone who can work the ad platforms) before having the creative infrastructure to support them. A brilliant media buyer with bad creative is still going to get bad results. Creative solves all your problems, remember?

How to work with an agency or freelancer

I know, I know. Ballpoint are sponsoring this series and they’re an agency. How could you possibly be impartial here, Tom? They’re paying your rent. First off, I wish Josh was paying my rent. And second, I asked them to sponsor this after I decided to reflect on how things went with them. The order is important.

Agencies aren’t always the answer, and Ballpoint are great but they may not be the right one for you. But I have two years of direct experience working with them, and I have some strong opinions on what makes an agency relationship actually work versus quietly not work.

I’ve already written about this here:

What agencies are good at

Creative testing velocity, platform expertise that’s current because they’re living in Ads Manager for multiple clients simultaneously, and a structured approach to experimentation that most in-house teams don’t build until they’re much further along.

What agencies are not good at

Knowing your product and brand as well as you do. Understanding the nuance of your customer, the politics of your brand, the context behind a brief. That’s your job. The way you close that gap is by writing genuinely good briefs, showing up to the weekly sync, and not sitting on feedback for two weeks. I was bad at this at first. Very bad. Josh was too polite to say it directly, but I was the bottleneck. Don’t be the bottleneck.

Ultimately, agencies just aren’t incentivised like in-house people are. Their businesses rely on bringing on as many clients as possible. So assume that the best you’ll ever get out of an agency is 60-70% of what a full-time employee will do. It’s just the nature of how their businesses work.

Naturally, Josh does disagree her.

"While you may get less time than a FT employee, we've often found we outperform in-house team because of the collective experience you get. You basically get access to £1m of salary working on your business when working with us. It's only a % of their time, but our goal is to make sure our fee provides better return than the in-house option."

– Josh

What to look for in a performance agency

Look for a track record of success with similar brands. Perhaps similar business models or growth stages. They should be able to tell you specifically what they did and what changed, not just show you a slide with big percentage improvements and no context.

Make sure you maintain full platform access. Any agency that won’t give you full visibility into your own accounts is not an agency worth working with. You should be able to see everything, any time.

Ask whether they do creative strategy and production or just media buying. At this scale, the creative and the targeting are not separate problems. An agency that thinks in both is far more valuable than one that’s just good at bid optimisation.

Josh’s approach when we started working together was to spend time auditing our setup before suggesting a single change. He wanted to understand what we had before telling us what to do differently. That rigour, the willingness to look before touching, is something I’d look for in any agency conversation.

“A lot of agencies come in and want to restructure things because it looks like progress. But you risk throwing away things that were actually working. A good agency will spend time listening before changing anything.”

— Josh

Red flags

Agencies that won’t share access, don’t send regular reporting, overpromise on specific outcome numbers, can’t explain their methodology clearly, or disappear between monthly calls. And if they’re presenting stuff in a deck each week, they’re wasting their time and yours.

Wrap it up Tommy, I’ve got work to do

Thanks for sticking with me through three parts. I’ve never written a series before, and the honest reason it became one is that I tried to write it as a single post and it was absolutely enormous. I hope the extra weeks were worth it.

Here’s where we’ve landed

In Part 1, we covered what has to be true before you scale. Your unit economics need to be solid, your product-market fit signals must be strong, your budget needs to be able to absorb a CAC spike, and your leadership team needs to understand what they’ve signed up for.

In Part 2, we went deep on the machine itself. Server-side tracking and CAPI, the metrics that actually matter, building a creative production system that can keep pace with your spend, and when to kill an ad.

In this final part, we’ve covered what goes wrong, how to diagnose it, and how to think about building the team around it.

Ultimately, this whole thing is one big system you can optimise. The measurement, the creative engine, the team structure, the expectation management - none of it works in isolation. Get them working together and it gets a lot less stressful. Not stress-free. Less stressful.

If you want to talk through your specific situation with and the team at Ballpoint, then I’d encourage you to reach out or check out his Substack where he writes about all of this in more depth.

In partnership with Ballpoint

Hi, I’m Tom.

I’ve launched products at Monzo, Wise, and built the brand and marketing team at Yonder from scratch. I write about what actually works in startup marketing for marketers on the verge of breakdown.

Subscribe now

If you want help understanding why your brilliant product isn’t selling itself, find me on LinkedIn.

In partnership with Ballpoint

Last week we covered knowing when you’re ready to scale and what to expect when you do.

If you missed it, go back and read Part 1 first. Don’t skip ahead.

Marketing is Hard!

Scale Ad Spend Without Blowing Up Your CAC (Part 1)

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4 months ago · 11 likes · 6 comments · Tom

This week we’re getting into the operational stuff, where I made most of my mistakes at Yonder, so hopefully you can learn from my incompetence rather than your own.

I’m writing this series with Josh Lachkovic, managing director at Ballpoint, a performance marketing agency that helped us scale at Yonder. He knows far more about this than I do, which is why he’s here.

Here’s what we’ll cover:

• How to track and measure what matters

• Building a creative production system

• How targeting and experimentation works

Let’s get into it.

Tracking and measurement at scale

Goal: set up server-side tracking and get your metrics in order

At higher spend levels, small measurement issues become expensive. So make sure you get this bit right.

Setting up proper tracking

You’ll need engineering support for this, so copy and paste this to the person with the most screens in your office.

Meta’s Conversion API (CAPI) lets you send conversion data directly from your server to Meta, bypassing the browser. Every ad platform will have their own one but they do the same thing.

When someone converts on your site, you capture their details like email and phone number and send that to Meta. Meta then tries to match that person to a Meta account.

The goal is to get your Event Match Quality as high as possible. Meta shows this as a score out of 10. Aim for at least 6, ideally higher. Better match rates mean Meta gets clearer signal on who to show your ads to, which means better (cheaper) performance over time.

And try align your events to standard Meta events where possible (Purchase, Lead, AddToCart, CompleteRegistration) because these come with built-in optimisation learnings across millions of advertisers. You can set up custom ones, but unless you really know what you’re doing, which you don’t, because you’re reading this, then keep it simple.

Finally, sync your CRM with Meta so you can exclude existing customers from your advertising. It’s a small win but we gotta take these wins when we get them.

Once that’s sorted, here’s what to measure

The metrics that matter most to the success of this part of your strategy are:

1. Blended CAC which is your total acquisition cost across all channels and

2. Payback, which determines how aggressive you can be with spend.

3. Some sort of proxy for LTV - like first-month revenue, repeat purchase rate etc.

These aren’t the same as platform data points like individual ad set or creative performance or funnel effectiveness but I’ll assume you’re following these and won’t get into them too much now.

Daily checks should take about five minutes to look at spend pacing and obvious anomalies. Basically, making sure nothing’s broken.

Weekly reviews of 30-60 minutes to check creative performance, test results, CAC trends, and writing new briefs based on learnings.

Monthly is when you zoom out for half a day to look at cohort analysis, channel mix, and bigger picture strategy. Are we acquiring quality customers? Should we shift budget between channels? Is CAC going up or down over time?

Building a creative production system

Goal: be able to produce 25+ pieces of creative a week

Do you have what it takes to make 25 good ads every week, indefinitely, while learning from what worked and what didn’t? You’ll need to.

A winning production cycle

Here’s how this worked at Yonder once we’d figured it out.

1. Our performance marketing lead (or Ballpoint, before we had one) would review what was working and what wasn’t. We used a tool called MagicBrief that let us search and save high-performing creative from other brands.

2. From there we’d write a brief which included the insight driving the test (why we think this will work), references from other brands, the funnel target (brand awareness vs conversion), the product pillar, and the format.

3. Our creative lead would then decide whether to produce in-house, send to an agency, or brief a UGC creator.

4. When creative came back, we’d review for quality and compliance.

5. Then ads go live, we monitor early performance signals, and the cycle starts again.

The whole loop - insight to live ad - needs to happen in days, not weeks. If your turnaround is two weeks, you’re not iterating fast enough.

Building your creator network

UGC consistently performs well because it feels native, but finding and managing creators is its own challenge.

We found creators through Ballpoint’s network, UGC-specific agencies, and just reaching out directly to people whose content we liked. Just DM people. Most creators are happy to hear from brands.

We’d typically start them on minimum content deals - three pieces to test the relationship - which gives you enough material to see if their style works without over-committing.

Fair warning, they can be so bloody annoying to work with. Not following briefs, picky contract details and missed deadlines used to wind me up so much.

Give yourself the best chance with clear briefs, agreed usage rights (you need to be able to run this as paid media, not just organic), and a tight feedback/revision process. And if they’re really annoying just don’t work with them. You’ve got enough problems.

In-house vs agency vs freelancers

At Yonder, we used all three at different times and there’s no single right answer.

Ballpoint handled creative strategy and production early on when we were still learning. They got us to maybe 60% of what a full-time hire could do, but the real value was learning what good looked like. That year taught us enough to hire well later. Thanks Josh.

In-house made sense once we had enough volume to justify dedicated headcount and enough knowledge to know what we were looking for. We brought our creative lead in and she could move faster on simple executions than briefing an external team.

Freelancers and UGC creators filled the gaps for specific skills we needed occasionally, or creator content that wouldn’t make sense to produce ourselves.

“While Ballpoint is a full service agency, a lot of the clients we work with now just use us for creative production. They might manage spend in-house but need creative diversity or stronger strategic thinking going into creative. At which point, working with an agency is a great solution.”

— Josh

The mix will change as you scale. Start with more external support, bring things in-house as you learn and grow.

Creative experimentation is your targeting

Goal: mix formats and test hooks and messages to find winning ads

This is the bit that took me longest to internalise. Traditional audience targeting through interests, lookalikes and detailed demographics matters far less than it used to.

Meta’s algorithm has gotten good enough that broad targeting usually outperforms narrow targeting, as long as your creative is strong.

This means that creative isn’t just what you say to your audience, it’s also how you reach different audiences (← Read again. Save. Pin. Pocket. It’s important)

We ran both brand campaigns and Advantage+ campaigns, and the key to making broad targeting work is creative diversity.

• You need a mix of formats: static images, short-form video, longer video, carousels and a mix of production quality like high-polish studio content alongside iPhone-shot UGC.

• You need different creator types: different faces, different demographics, different styles, because this naturally segments your reach without you having to manually target.

• And you need different message angles: product features, social proof, founder story, comparison to alternatives and lifestyle aspiration.

Feed the algo with enough variety and it’ll do the rest.

How to tweak your ads to find a winner

The first few seconds of an ad, what we in the industry call a hook, is the most important element behind good creative. The internet is full of things trying to grab someone’s attention so work hard on making sure they stop to watch your ad.

Once you’ve got hooks that stop people you can test your message. Basically, whatever you want to say in your ad. Could be the core value proposition, whether that’s a product benefit, social proof, founder story, or comparison to alternatives. Play around with it.

Format testing (video vs static, length variations, aspect ratios) matters but usually less than hooks and angles and execution details like colour variations and font choices are your small optimisations once you’ve found a winning concept.

For timing, five days and 20 conversions is the threshold. Before that, you don’t have enough signal to make a confident call. After that, more time rarely changes the verdict.

“If a creative hasn’t hit your benchmark CPA having spent 8-10x your target CPA in budget, kill it. So if your target CPA is £50, give an ad £400-500 before making a call. Sounds brutal, but creative volume matters more than giving under-performers extra chances.”

— Josh

What’s next

You’ve got your measurement in place and a creative system that produce loads of ads quickly. But things will still go wrong. This is marketing. They always do.

Next week in Part 3, we’ll cover what can go wrong when scaling, how to work with agencies effectively, and how to build your team as you grow.

See you then.

In partnership with Ballpoint

Hi, I’m Tom.

I’ve launched products at Monzo, Wise, and built the brand and marketing team at Yonder from scratch. I write about what actually works in startup marketing for marketers on the verge of breakdown.

Subscribe now

If you want help understanding why your brilliant product isn’t selling itself, find me on LinkedIn.

In partnership with Ballpoint

I’m working on this series with Josh from Ballpoint, a performance marketing agency I’ve worked with at Yonder. If you’re thinking about scaling your performance spend and want expert help, they’re worth a conversation.

As a marketer who’s always turned to product to solve my problems, realising I couldn’t just word-of-mouth my way out of our growth challenges was a big moment for me.

So I spent two years learning what made up an effective performance marketing strategy. Measurement, experimentation, channel mix - the lot.

I did this alongside Josh Lachkovic, managing director at Ballpoint, a performance marketing agency that specialises in just that.

So I’ve teamed up with Josh on a three part series on scaling performance marketing. Josh is one of the most knowledgeable people I’ve come across in the industry and for two years has been a regular source of debate, idea sharing and learning. I’m sure he’d say the same about me but I haven’t asked.

The three part series breaks down into:

1. Knowing what changes at scale, when it’s time to spend more and how to get ready

2. How measurement, creative production, testing, and infrastructure change at scale

3. What can go wrong, working with agencies and building your team

Let’s get into it.

Why can’t you just spend more?

If you’re clueless, or me two years ago, the first question you might ask is why not just spend more money? Change the budget to £100,000 and we can all just go on holiday.

Sadly, it doesn’t work like that. I’ve learned this the hard way. Over and over again.

For the sake of this series, we’ll talk about Meta advertising network, though the fundamentals apply to other creative-led channels like TikTok, Twitter, etc.

What happens when you increase spend

When you spend on Meta, your CPAs are based on the audiences you’re currently reaching. Early on, you’re likely doing a good job reaching early adopters. But when you spend more, Meta pushes your ads into new audiences who aren’t as ready to buy.

Your creative burns out faster. Your CPAs creep up. The platforms don’t have enough conversions to learn from. And suddenly the thing that was working beautifully at £10k is haemorrhaging money at £30k.

At Yonder, we scaled our performance spend from almost nothing to mid five figures too quickly. All of the above happened to us. We didn’t have enough creative ready, we didn’t have the right tracking in place, and our CAC was unmanageable at that level. We had to dial it down and start again. So fun.

Are you actually ready to scale?

Wanting to scale and being ready to scale are different things. Here’s what needs to be true before you start throwing more money at Meta.

Your unit economics need to work at current spend

This sounds obvious but it’s surprising how many brands try to scale their way out of bad economics.

If your LTV:CAC ratio is less than 3:1, you’re probably not ready to spend more. For bootstrapped businesses, you probably need higher — maybe 4:1 or 5:1 — because you don’t have the runway to wait for payback.

– Josh

Payback is the time in which a customer ‘pays back’ their acquisition cost through the revenue they generate. CAC alone is a bad metric to measure your acquisition, because it doesn’t account for the revenue they generate.

A subscription product with 80% month-one retention can afford a longer payback window than a one-off purchase that needs to make money on day zero. If you’re a high-frequency product — subscriptions, meal kits, anything people buy repeatedly — you can be more aggressive because you’re buying future revenue. If you’re a one-off purchase, your margins need to be big enough on that first transaction.

Make sure all of that makes sense before you spend more. Scaling with bad economics is a great way to bankrupt your business. Zuck will be waiting for you when you’re ready. Don’t rush.

You have real product-market fit signals

Another big learning for me was that channel fit is a big part of product-market fit. Sadly, better products die all the time. SAP did £30 billion in revenue last year, and no one knows how to use that junk. Doesn’t matter.

Getting your acquisition engine firing is essential to product-market fit, not just something you do afterwards. Until you’ve proven a repeatable, scalable engine, you haven’t nailed that “market” side of the equation.

That said, you need some foundation before you scale paid. At Yonder this looked like incredibly high Trustpilot ratings, lots of word-of-mouth growth and almost zero churn. We had the fundamentals of a great product in place, but not the channels to reach more people. Make sure you’re seeing something similar.

If you’re still iterating heavily on the product or your messaging changes every month, you’re not ready.

You can survive if CAC spikes temporarily

When you scale spend, CAC almost always goes up before it stabilises. Sometimes it spikes 20-30% in the first few weeks as the platforms learn and your creative fatigues faster.

Can you absorb 3-6 months of higher CAC while you figure it out? Budget for it and don’t be surprised when it happens.

If a 25% increase in CAC for a quarter would cause a crisis, you’re not ready to scale aggressively. Start slower.

Your CEO and board understand what will happen

This is the one that trips up a lot of marketing leads. You need internal buy-in that performance marketing doesn’t scale linearly. If your leadership expects £100k spend to deliver exactly 10x the results of £10k spend, you’re going to have a bad time.

Set expectations early. Explain that efficiency will likely dip before it stabilises. Show them the ramp plan (more on that below) and get alignment that you’re playing a longer game. Over-communicate. Then communicate some more.

Make it clear up front so you’re not having this conversation for the first time when CAC spikes and everyone’s panicking. That’s not a fun meeting.

What’s fundamentally different at £100k/month

Creative volume goes through the roof

At £10k/month, you can usually get away with a few new ads per week. You can make them yourself on Canva or with your phone without much fuss. And if you have some early winners you can just keep them running.

At £100k/month, you need 25+ new ads per week (new concepts and variations) just to keep up with fatigue. Producing that kind of creative — images, videos, scripts, approvals, compliance — is a massive job.

“At Ballpoint we have a metric called ‘Ads Launched Per Mille’ (ALM). For every £1,000 of ad spend, how many ads are we launching? For brands spending mid-five figures, this should be around 0.25. As you get above £100k, it can drop to 0.1-0.15 because your winners can sustain more spend before burning out. But the absolute number of ads you need is still way higher.”

— Josh

Meta likes to see 50 conversions per week per ad set, but you can generally tolerate 20+ in test campaigns because the tradeoff in learning rate is worth it.

Before you scale, you need to know: who’s making the ads? What’s your brief template? What’s your approval process? How fast can you go from idea to live ad?

If the answer to that last question is “two weeks,” you’re not ready for high spend. You need to turn around new creative in days, not weeks.

I was terrible at this early on when working with Josh’s team. I’d sit on creative briefs for weeks and it was only when I realised the impact on our experimentation and CAC that I adjusted my way of working. I was the problem.

Your team structure needs to change

A £10k/month spend can be managed by a marketing lead doing it as part of their job. Once you’ve got tracking set up and know your way around Ads Manager, it’s not hard to update a few campaigns and some creative each week.

At £100k/month, that’s impossible.

“A performance marketing team today is really a marketing strategist or CMO, an insights manager or planner, a copywriter, a creative strategist, a creative designer or editor, a creative operations manager, and a data analyst. The role that was one person at £10k/month is now effectively ten people.”

— Josh

We scaled with Ballpoint before hiring in-house. They got us to about 60% of what a full-time hire could do, but the real benefit was the thought leadership with Josh and their creative function that produced all our ad creative until we slowly brought it in-house.

That year taught us what good looked like and meant we could hire slowly and hire well.

Measurement needs to get more sophisticated

At £100k, marginal gains on measurement really start to matter. You need proper conversion tracking, the Meta Conversion API (CAPI) set up correctly with engineering support, and you need to start thinking about incrementality.

It’s much easier to fix tracking at £10k than at £100k.

Decision-making speeds up

At lower spend, you can afford to wait and see. Take a look at a dashboard when you’ve got some time. Review things at the end of the month.

At higher spend, you need weekly (sometimes daily) reviews. A losing ad at £100k/month can burn through meaningful budget in days, not weeks. You need processes that let you spot problems and react fast.

At Yonder, our finance manager was regularly following our spending patterns and alerting me when something was different so we could look into it.

Ramp up spend slowly

Here’s a general framework for how to increase spend over time. This isn’t gospel — every brand is different — but it’s a sensible starting point.

The basic rule: increase 20-30% per month when CAC is stable:

£10k → £13k → £17k → £22k → £29k → £38k → £49k → £64k → £83k → £108k

That’s 10 months to go from £10k to £100k+. Feels slow. But it’s your most likely path to success.

I’ve seen 50-100% increases and also 10% crawls. Everyone is different, you may move faster or slower.

– Josh

If your CAC is holding steady, you can afford to increase by 20-30%. If CAC is creeping up, slow down. If CAC is spiking, stop and diagnose before increasing further.

In reality, you’ll probably see this go up and down anyway. The platforms, your audience, and competition mean performance will vary a lot. It doesn’t make sense to spend the same amount when things are bad as when things are good.

If you need 100 ads live to spend £100k/month efficiently, you might need to run 300 tests to find those 100 winners. And that assumes you launched them all at the same time, which you didn’t.

Ads burn out after a few weeks. Winners stop winning. You need a scale approach that supports your ability to find enough winners continuously. If you ramp spend faster than you can ramp creative volume, you’ll blow up your CAC and have to pull back anyway.

Slower ramps protect your CAC while you build your creative engine. And a healthy CAC means you have more budget to reinvest, which means you scale faster in the long run. Patience is a virtue, I’m told.

What’s next

Okay, so we’ve covered knowing when you’re ready and what to expect at scale.

Next week in Part 2, we’ll dig into how to manage your measurement, creative production, testing, and infrastructure change at scale.

See you there.

In partnership with Ballpoint

Hi, I’m Tom.

I’ve launched products at Monzo, Wise, and built the brand and marketing team at Yonder from scratch. I write about what actually works in startup marketing for marketers on the verge of breakdown.

Subscribe now

If you want help understanding why your brilliant product isn’t selling itself, find me on LinkedIn.

In partnership with DOJO AI.

Hello marketers. I’m coming to you from a cafe in Buenos Aires that serves vegemite on toast, so to say I’m in a good mood would be like saying that guy who won $200k on a scratchie, then won it again when he re-enacted it on TV, was in a good mood. Bit niche. It’s Australian heritage. Look it up.

Today I’m reviewing DOJO AI — a marketing tool seemingly every CMO I know won’t shut up about. I had onboarded it briefly at Yonder before I took off on sabbatical last year, so I was curious about its progression to see if it lived up to the hype.

To assess it properly, I’ve looked through the lens of a few different marketing functions — growth, brand, content and product marketing and also spoken to a bunch of CMOs about how they’re using it. I’ll filter their feedback throughout. If you have questions, I’ll add their LinkedIns so you can ask them directly.

I also jumped on a call with Luke Costley-White, one of their founding team members, who walked me through a few things coming on the horizon so I’ll talk about how things exist today and what they’ll look like soon.

This is a sponsored article, but I’ll always give my honest review on how I feel about a brand or product and the sponsor can’t change what I have to say.

The lonely marketer problem

Like crypto before it, I think most of the excitement around AI is childlike wonder at the magic rather than genuine end-product value.

Having said that, last year I wanted to explore ways AI could help our small team at Yonder move quicker. So I started with the problems I actually have.

One of the biggest, and I reckon many of you can relate, is the crippling loneliness of being the most senior marketer in your company. If you’re lucky, you’ll have a CEO who likes workshopping and a team ready to talk through ideas but having a battle-hardened senior marketer alongside me for the trickier strategy or positioning problems? That was missing.

I can’t remember where I first heard about DOJO. It was just sort of there all of a sudden. But I saw Jasper Martens, PensionBee CMO whose hair is always so imperiously well-placed that I wear a hat whenever we meet, mention it, so I reached out.

It felt like this could help with some of the loneliness stuff above. And with that endorsement, I figured I’d give it a go.

So what is DOJO AI?

Their website calls it the “operating system for your brand” or something, but I’d describe it as ChatGPT with a deep understanding of your marketing strategy.

You connect your performance channels — AdWords, Meta Ads Manager, Google Analytics etc. — and when you query it, it uses typical AI reasoning plus all your private data.

If ChatGPT says “based on the world’s general knowledge, here’s what you should do”, DOJO says “based on the world’s general knowledge and my specific understanding of your brand and strategy, here’s what you should do.”

It has different “agents” - AI bots trained on specific things - but the main Sensei seems to handle everything. I’ve always wondered why AI tools make you pick the model. Feels like poor product experience to put that on customers. Anyway, you can pick if you want, but it doesn’t seem to matter much.

Growth Marketing — 7/10

Given the analytical nature of growth marketing, I figured this is where DOJO might be most helpful. Romney Taylor from Kuda agreed:

“The performance marketers on my team use DOJO most. The daily dispatches on Slack give varied use cases — budget pacing, impression share loss, feature request mining — which encourage experimentation.”

I ran a simple test: “I’m looking for quick wins, what do you see?” Immediately it started digging through our Ads Manager. As you’ll see, it looks the same as many chat interfaces so the usability out of the box is great.

My first observation was that it takes a while to think. Which annoyed my little TikTok-brain but overall I think is a good thing. Anything too quick probably isn’t that helpful. Reminds me of when a VC told me to “try billboards” when giving me growth advice. Thanks mate, I’ll check it out.

After a few minutes, it produced a very detailed analysis with some interesting stuff like:

The analysis covered creative, media buying, and account structure. I’m not a performance marketer natively, so it’s hard to judge how actionable this truly is. But I found it helpful for contextualising priorities and level of effort.

The level of detail was both impressive and, to be honest, a bit of a burden. It felt like a junior analyst reporting to a CMO who hadn’t quite worked out that CMOs don’t have all day and just need to know the most important stuff.

The platform data clearly influences advice beyond what generic ChatGPT would give — so DOJO is fulfilling its promise there. But the projected impact felt optimistic. I’d be surprised if you can move conversions 30-40% in just a couple weeks. The maths looked okay at a sense-check level, but take the numbers with a grain of salt.

There’s also a new dashboard feature on the way. So it feels more like a marketing home than another chat bot. Rather than dropping you into a long-form report every time, the beta version Luke demoed shows the main insights you might expect and lets you dig into what matters.

It remains to be seen just how this fits in with the dozen other dashboards you’ll be using as a marketer but there’s potential for it to marry everything up in a nice way if they get it right.

Brand Marketing — 6/10

From a brand perspective, I wanted support on two things: media buying strategy (knowing where, when, and how much to spend is the single hardest challenge as a marketing leader) and creative execution.

I asked it to help me plan a £1m annual budget across campaigns, always-on, above the line, and other channels.

It came back with a plan across ten different channels — which is too many. It should know that spreading budget across that many channels won’t work at our stage. But the brand vs. short-term demand split was spot on (about 40/45 with some leftover for lifecycle). One for each column, I suppose.

The quarterly phasing was also right. For Yonder, the start of the year is always big followed by another spike around summer travel, with quieter end-of-year spending. I’d probably shift more from Q4 into Q1, but otherwise it looked about right.

It felt like this was just a common sense approach using basic marketing fundamentals. So it’s not that it was wrong, it just didn’t feel like it was tailored enough to us like I would have expected.

On creativity, I asked for summer campaign ideas based on past activations (giving away free drinks when people spill them during football games, prizes when it rains etc.). The ideas weren’t bad, but not at the level where I’d just run with them. DOJO gives solid thought-starters but isn’t producing work you can ship without significant creative refinement.

That’s probably a limitation of any AI trained on the average of everything — the best ideas we had at Yonder were always miles from what any AI would suggest.

I’d expected a marketing-specific tool to give sharper guidance on spending for our stage and goals. Seeing it recommend budget for banner ads didn’t feel right. But the brand vs. performance allocation was almost bang on with what I’d have done and creative concepts were directionally right and clearly informed by our product positioning, strategy for the campaign and on things we’d seen work well in the past. I just wouldn’t rely on it for groundbreaking creative concepts.

Content marketing – 8/10

Now we’re talking.

Despite others telling me that growth marketing is DOJO’s thing, I reckon content is where it’s at. On the call with Luke, he walked me through a new SEO/content workflow that felt much more complete than a generic “write me a blog post on X” prompt in ChatGPT.

The flow looked something like:

• DOJO goes out and does the research you or your content lead would typically do. Things like social listening across LinkedIn/Reddit, keyword research, collecting data points and references and then builds an outline.

• It then writes the full article, but with your existing content library in mind. It finds relevant posts you’ve already published and suggest internal links in context, rather than bolting them on at the end. This is traditionally where AI-driven SEO strategies fall apart because they exist in a weird silo and it’s a red flag for Google when reviewing content. DOJO content seems to feel connected to everything else in a more natural way.

• Finally, it runs an editorial pass with a kind of “magazine editor” lens as Luke described it. I watched as he did this with his example and it was asking things like “is this actually engaging, does it show multiple sides of an argument, is there a clear opinion, and where could external references or quotes make it feel less like a generic AI answer?”

The output wasn’t going to win a Pulitzer, but it was a long way from the average AI sludge. It read more like a solid first draft from a midweight content marketer who’d done their homework, with the interlinking and schema markup (authors, FAQs, breadcrumbs etc.) all there. I’ve never actually built out an SEO content engine but for teams with a big content backlog and no time to manually stitch it together, it could be really useful.

It can also go out and find relevant social conversations, summarise the thread, draft a comment in your personal tone of voice, and suggest who to connect with on LinkedIn.

I’m not a fan of social media automation, it annoys me seeing so much crap on LinkedIn from bots so while you can automate a lot of this, just getting some thought starters and a few people to connect with is more valuable than writing all the posts for me. Used thoughtfully it’s like a research assistant for social.

From everything I’ve seen so far, if content is core to your strategy, the direction of travel here is really promising. Nicely done, DOJO.

Product Marketing — 7/10

This is where I was most curious. My background is product marketing, so basic advice isn’t helpful. I need support on the really specific, last-mile stuff that separates good positioning from great - and I’ve always been left wanting with AI. It’s just too generic.

Last year at Yonder we had a tricky challenge. We needed to position some products side by side without confusing customers who’d never seen them presented that way. A minefield of potential confusion.

So given I knew how that challenge eventually played out, I wanted to see if DOJO could get there on its own.

I gave it the problem: “We’re launching debit cards alongside credit cards. Same tiers, different card types. People are confused. How do we position them together?”

It started with obvious solutions “try calling it a financial membership” which is exactly what we tested early on, and no one knew what it meant. When I pushed back, it quickly landed on the exact solution we eventually reached.

It took us two months to get there through user testing. DOJO got there in thirty seconds and two prompts.

It’s not replacing user research, because my feedback was informed by the research we did with customers, but it gets you to hypotheses much faster and no doubt would have been a useful tool for me a year ago.

After this I wanted to get into the actual website messaging. Bringing our positioning to life. I didn’t quite get the sparring partner I needed. A lot of product marketing is refining granular phrasing differences, and while DOJO is a big time-saver on the meatier strategic work, it’s not yet producing market-ready messaging.

I’ve got a high bar for this. Marginal messaging gains separate the good from the world-class, and AI isn’t there yet.

Many marketers are probably happy to settle for what is 80% good here so it may just be that I’m very particular.

What frustrates me (and other CMOs)

No shared knowledge between threads (yet). Every new conversation starts from scratch. Annoying when you’re building on previous work.

However, when chatting with Luke he showed me their new library tool that’s coming soon, a bit like the memory feature in ChatGPT, which I think could really improve the product marketing stuff.

With the library, DOJO can remember previous positioning explorations, customer research summaries, and past tests across chats.

For me this is probably the most valuable thing an AI marketing tool could add and I’m surprised it’s taken them so long to build this but glad it’s coming soon.

Thread length limits. A few CMOs mentioned hitting walls on longer, more complex queries. Apparently this is improving.

Missing integrations. It connects to most primary data sources but gaps remain with Mobile Measurement Platforms and CRMs. I can see how getting our Braze data in here would be amazing when digging into lifecycle stuff in future.

It can be slow. Complex tasks take time, and I found myself switching tabs and losing focus. Makes the experience feel stuttery rather than fluid.

Creative output still isn’t there. Fine for thought-starters, but don’t expect it to write your next campaign. I think it’s important marketers push back on AI slop so while it’s tempting to accept average here I really think we should be holding the bar much higher. DOJO performed on par with all other AI chats in this area.

That said, everyone I spoke to acknowledged how quickly DOJO is improving — and every CMO gave it at least 8/10 and said they’d recommend it without hesitation.

Where it shines

Analysis. Interrogating your own platform data with AI reasoning is genuinely useful, especially for small teams without dedicated analysts.

Combining research with strategy. It marries market-level insights with your proprietary positioning and internal data. That combination is the real value. Advice filtered through your context. Seeing this play out in the content marketing examples was genuinely exciting.

It disagrees with you. DOJO isn’t as agreeable as every other chat app. It’ll just tell you you’re wrong. Julia Taylor, CMO at CovertSwarm, said that’s one of its main benefits:

“The main benefit is the analysis that challenges how we think and isn’t sycophantic.”

The verdict

Growth – 7/10 – Real platform data and AI reasoning makes it genuinely useful for performance teams.

Brand – 6/10 – Good on budget allocation and phasing. Weaker on creative.

Content – 8/10 – Very strong but I’m cautious about too much automation here in things like social. Your call I suppose.

Product – 7/10 – Strong on strategic positioning challenges. Impressive speed to insight. Still work to do on final messaging.

Overall: If you’re a CMO of a small team looking for a thinking partner that knows your business or you have a small team of senior operators who need to set strategy and do the work then DOJO is worth trying.

The overwhelmingly positive feedback from other CMOs I spoke to is probably more telling than anything. People that use it seem to love it.

It needs to get better at producing sharper messaging with a deeper understanding of your product set. But it’ll make a small team much faster and give you someone to spar with who isn’t just nodding along. Within a few extra prompts, it gets much closer to the heart of the matter, whether that’s growth, brand, content or product, than other AI tools can.

It can’t hurt to try. You can get a free trial here. If you do, let me know what you reckon.

Hi, I’m Tom.

I’ve launched products at Monzo, Wise, and built the brand and marketing team at Yonder from scratch. I write about what actually works in startup marketing for marketers on the verge of breakdown.

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If you want help understanding why your brilliant product isn’t selling itself, find me on LinkedIn.

After burning through another free trial of LinkedIn Premium, I found myself on that familiar, desperate are-you-sure downgrade path.

“Tom, did you know you’ll lose access to DM’ing strangers and asking them to subscribe to your Substack? Did you know you won’t see which recruiter has viewed your profile for the nineteenth time this week? Did you know you’ll lose your Headspace subscription?”

Headspace?

I was expecting the profiles and InMail thing. That’s the actual product. But Headspace? Not whatever new AI feature they’ve launched and are presumably very proud of. Instead, Headspace.

I don’t dislike Headspace. I’m broadly in favour of breathing and have no objection to being encouraged to do it occasionally. But I don’t open LinkedIn because I need to unclench my jaw. I open LinkedIn because I want the mild, productive anxiety that comes from seeing other people announce their promotions.

The Headspace thing just felt so out of place. It didn’t make me second guess downgrading. It made me wonder what LinkedIn thought its job was. As a product marketer, this felt like a miss and something that I was about to write 2,000 words about. Apologies in advance.

Products go wrong not because teams add bad features, but because they add good features that don’t belong together. Internally, more feels like progress. To customers, it feels unclear.

A small, coherent set of benefits pointing in the same direction will almost always beat a sprawling bundle of stuff.

Why feature stacking feels good

Packing a product full of features and benefits is tempting for very understandable reasons.

Product managers are incentivised to ship. Partnerships teams are incentivised to land logos. Leadership teams want to see progress. Each feature usually makes sense on its own:

“Headspace is £15 a month. We’re giving it to people for free as part of LinkedIn Premium. That is, technically, more value.”

I’m sure someone will point out that Headspace could be good for work, LinkedIn is for work, therefore this makes sense. I understand the argument.

You could make the same case for almost anything if you try hard enough. Hotel discounts make sense because people need a break from work sometimes. Meal kits make sense because busy professionals need to eat. Do we chuck in Tinder Gold because working people don’t have time to meet people in coffee shops?

I’ve been in these rooms and I’ve seen how it happens. No one is being reckless. There’s just this underlying assumption that more is always better. But that’s not how products win, and it’s not how customers evaluate them.

Customers don’t experience features one by one like you build them. They experience the product all at once. Most people buy you for one reason, occasionally two if they’re tightly related. They make a snap judgement about what you’re best at and move on. If that judgement takes too long, you’ve lost them.

It makes positioning and messaging really hard

And like most things that go wrong inside organisations, marketing is left to clean it up.

I’ve seen this dynamic up close, and it usually comes from a series of reasonable choices made by smart people, each of which makes sense on its own.

During the Monzo Premium relaunch, the product gradually expanded to include budgeting tools, insurance, extra cash withdrawals abroad, and a metal card. Each of those features had a clear rationale. Customers liked them. They solved a problem.

The difficulty wasn’t any individual feature, it was the shape they created together. As the product grew, it became harder to answer a simple question: what is this the obvious choice for?

It wasn’t clearly a budgeting product, because dedicated budgeting apps went deeper. It wasn’t clearly a travel product, because travel-first cards were more focused. And it wasn’t quite a premium banking product either, because that category comes with a different set of expectations.

From a marketing perspective, the ambiguity made positioning and messaging almost impossible. Every message needed context. “The premium budgeting & lifestyle travel account” was one of the heinous crimes against marketing I wrote at one point.

The experience taught me that if positioning feels unusually hard, it’s because the product is trying to say too much. At the time, all of this felt completely reasonable. That’s kind of the point.

No shade on Revolut, but Ultra is probably the most egregious Homer Simpson Car product I’ve seen recently. The £4,290 value framing is comically misleading. It’s like walking into a £20 buffet that claims it’s “worth £1,000” because, technically, you could eat everything.

There’s Headspace again, and, oh, Chess.com. Seriously?

It eats up margin, time and energy

Every additional feature costs something. Sometimes that cost is obvious, like margin. More often it’s spread thinly across engineering time, design attention, support complexity, and just the exhaustion of having to care about another thing.

At Yonder, we explored a partnership that included a New York Times subscription as part of the membership. It is a strong brand with clear standalone value.

Underneath, it was expensive and it didn’t reinforce why someone chose Yonder in the first place. The proposition started to drift towards “great lifestyle rewards and this one news subscription.” The margin it would have consumed could have been used to deepen the rewards experience itself, which was the actual reason people joined.

You can see the same pattern playing out with AI right now. Everything suddenly needs an AI feature, whether or not it improves the product. AI summaries of messages. AI assistants layered on top of workflows that already work perfectly well. I don’t need an AI summary of my WhatsApp messages. I can read.

They look good in investor updates, but they rarely account for the energy they drain from the thing the product is actually meant to be great at.

The real cost is everything you don’t do because your attention, margin, and ambition are being spread too thin.

It makes you less competitive

When you spend margin and attention on loosely related benefits, you’re choosing not to invest that same resource somewhere else. Markets are far too competitive for that kind of waste.

Broad propositions often feel safer because they seem to widen the net. Surely there’s something in here they’ll want. In practice, it usually does the opposite.

If someone cares about travel, they’ll compare you to the best travel products they know. If they care about budgeting, they’ll compare you to the best budgeting product. Being a bit of both doesn’t help you win either comparison. It’s like writing a cookbook for meat-lovers and vegans at the same time and being surprised when nobody buys it.

Trying to win several categories at once tends to land you in the worst possible place. You’re not the best at anything, but you’re also not bad enough to trigger urgent change. It’s a slow erosion through rising CACs and falling word of mouth. If someone can’t easily explain what you are to someone else, you’re already in trouble.

How to push back when you see this happening

If you’re trying to push back on feature stacking internally, saying something “doesn’t feel right” is easy to ignore.

What does help is reframing the discussion around trade-offs. What category does this help us win? What comparison does it sharpen? What would we stop leading with if we added it? What margin or focus are we trading away, and what could that resource do if we invested it in the core instead?

Optionality can be a valid roadmap strategy. It is not a proposition to the market. You can build many things. You cannot be many things at once in the minds of customers.

Don’t build the Homer Simpson car

If marketing feels impossible, it’s rarely because the marketing is bad. It’s usually because the product is asking it to do too much, justify too much, and compete in too many directions at once.

Strong products make marketing feel boringly straightforward. You know what you’re for. You know what you’re better at. You know what comparison you want to win. When that happens, marketing is easy.

So if you’re struggling to explain what your product is without reaching for an ampersand, it’s worth resisting the urge to workshop the messaging again. The problem probably sits upstream.

Hi, I’m Tom.

I’ve launched products at Monzo, Wise, and built the brand and marketing team at Yonder from scratch. I write about what actually works in startup marketing for marketers on the verge of breakdown.

Subscribe now

I’m also building a new tool that helps marketers measure their brand growth. You can try it out for free here: whatsmybrandscore.com

If you want help understanding why your brilliant product isn’t selling itself, find me on LinkedIn.

It’s been a big old year with the pen over at Marketing is Hard! headquarters.

Thanks everyone who has read, shared, and opened the email just to keep my open rates up but isn’t that fussed. It all counts.

Despite spending half the year off on sabbatical, I’ve written over twenty articles on my learnings as a startup marketing leader, jotting down things I’ve learnt along the way.

If you haven’t seen it, I’ve also been spending some of my sabbatical working on a tool called What’s My Brand Score? that helps startups measure their brand work so they can continue to invest in the long-term demand generation work that defines successful brands over years, not months. It’s free and takes a few minutes

Okay, onto the good stuff. Here’s selection of my most read, most shared and most useful posts from 2025. Forward this email onto a marketer who needs a little light reading over the holidays.

Positioning, messaging and strategy

1. Say less, better: on fighting the constant urge to say too much in your marketing messaging and focus on saying one thing well.

2. How to actually write a marketing strategy: a breakdown on how to align your strategy to your customer journeys

3. Forget everything: a lesson in the vital product marketing skill of stepping out of your own brain so you can talk about your products on your customer's level. Harder than it sounds.

4. How we build and spend our marketing budget at Yonder: a super detailed breakdown on how we set and spend every pound of our budget at Yonder

5. How to measure brand: a breakdown on why traditional methods don't work for startups and a new way to think about measuring brand. This one led to the tool above.

Setting up your marketing team

1. From intern to CMO: Exactly what you do at every level of marketing: the single most impactful thing I've ever written. This article has been read and shared tens of thousands of times around the world. If you only read one thing on this list, make it this one.

2. Everything you need to hire your first marketer: a step-by-step guide on how to hire your first marketer – whether you're a marketing leader growing your team or a founder hiring your first one. From writing the job description to making the offer.

Changes in the world of marketing

1. Stop stressing about SEO and think about Internet Visibility: making the case that individual channels don't matter as much as showing up where your customers are actually looking.

2. How we made progress on AI Search at Yonder: a post on how we use Profound at Yonder to improve our visibility in ChatGPT, Gemini and other AI chat tools.

3. The world of PR has changed forever: a realisation on the new world of internet media and what that means for marketers. RIP the press release.

Career progression and navigating your organisation

1. How to work with product managers: an important guide on one of the trickier relationships to navigate as a marketer.

2. How to work with founders and CEOs: how to operate with empathy, clarity and confidence when working with your leadership team. They're stressed too.

3. What makes you a good marketer could make you a bad CMO: on identifying the gaps that stop good marketers from becoming excellent CMOs.

4. How to write marketing updates so you don’t get fired: a template you can copy that helps you lay out what's happening and why in your marketing team for the rest of your organisation.

Anyway, I hope some of the above has been helpful to you at some stage this year. Marketing is hard, genuinely, and writing for this community has been a huge support in my own learning. Please keep the messages coming and I look forward to picking things up in the new year.

Please don’t work over the holidays. Spend time with the weird side of your family. Watch your favourite Christmas film (Die Hard). Think about moving to Australia. Pay your little brother to wiggle your mouse every few minutes so you can keep your Slack status green. See you next year.

Hi, I’m Tom. I’ve launched and grown products at some of the UK’s most loved consumer brands and I’m part of the founding team and VP Marketing at Yonder, a modern day rewards card. Since starting at Yonder, I’ve written about all my marketing learnings along the way.

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If you’re a senior marketer at a startup, this Substack is for you. I write about what actually works in startup marketing (and what definitely doesn’t) for marketers on the verge of breakdown.

I do some 1:1 consulting from time to time where my speciality is helping you understand why your brilliant product isn’t selling itself. Contact me on LinkedIn if you’re into that sort of thing.

Take my short reader survey so I can learn more about who reads this so I can write more useful stuff. I know you ask your customers to take surveys, so one won’t hurt you. Thanks in advance.

tl;dr I’ve built something I wish I’d had at Yonder: a free brand measurement tool for startups called What’s My Brand Score? - and you can try it now.

Get My Free Brand Score

Plug in five data points you already have, and it tells you whether your brand is growing.

Here’s why I built it, and how it works.

Growing a brand is hard enough. Knowing where to spend your money, how much to spend, how often to show up, and what to actually say without sounding like everyone else. Add in a whole extra layer of measurement, made ever more complicated by performance marketing nerds who insists every click must be attributed to something, and it’s no surprise marketers occasionally wonder whether a life in sales might be more fun (snap out of it).

Brand measurement has actually been fairly well-understood for decades. That’s not the issue. The issue is that over the last fifteen years, performance marketing introduced a very convincing but ultimately false idea. That if we just measured more precisely, if we captured enough clicks, if we modelled hard enough, we could finally quantify everything brand was doing.

So marketers spent a decade and a half trying to force a new science to replace an old one, instead of accepting that the two were solving different problems.

And naturally, it’s early-stage startups and scaleups that get stuck in the worst possible place. Too small for traditional brand measurement to work, too serious about data to rely on vibes, operating inside product-led, analytically minded organisations while trying to argue that the fundamentals of brand growth, which haven’t changed and never will, still matter.

Anyway. All of this is to say, I think there’s a better way. One that uses modern data sources, respects how brands actually grow, and doesn’t require you to burn half your budget just to prove you’re doing something useful.

But first, why the usual approach doesn’t work.

Why traditional brand measurement breaks down for startups

The classic way of measuring brand growth relies on consumer research and surveys. Large research companies, often ones you’ve never heard of, with access to massive panels of respondents, ask people questions like “What brands do you know in this category?” or “Which of these have you heard of?” or “What words do you associate with this brand?”

At scale, this data is genuinely useful. It helps big companies understand awareness, consideration, penetration, and sentiment across a market.

The problem is that it comes with three fairly terminal issues for startups:

1. First, it’s expensive. Proper tracking often runs well north of £100k a year. Even the “startup-friendly” versions tend to land around £30k annually, because the economics are simple. You’re paying humans to answer questions, and that doesn’t scale down cheaply.

2. Second, you need to be big enough for it to work. If you launched yesterday and surveyed ten thousand people today, your awareness would round to zero. That’s not insight, it’s a waste of money. These tools only become meaningful once you already have a presence.

3. Third, they’re slow. Most trackers run a few times a year. Startups change far faster than that. Campaigns launch monthly. Positioning evolves. Teams grow. Measuring brand twice a year when you’re growing 20–30% quarter-on-quarter just doesn’t cut it.

The science behind this approach is still sound. It just hasn’t adapted to the realities of earlier-stage companies that want the same confidence in their brand investment, without the overhead.

A more practical way to think about brand growth

I’m on sabbatical at the moment, in Peru. I injured myself in the gym the other day (god I’m old) and was faced with two options while resting. Ayahuasca with the shaman around the corner, who is also the barista at the local café, or finally sit down and solve the hardest problem I faced as VP Marketing at Yonder before I left.

When I properly thought about it, any useful brand measurement system for startups had to meet a few criteria. It had to be affordable, quick to update, genuinely actionable, and work whether you’re early-stage or much further along.

Most importantly, it had to reflect a simple truth I’ve realised but rarely see articulated clearly:

Great brands are well-known and well-loved. You need both.

(Save that) ↑

The five signals that show brand growth

Instead of measuring “brand” as one abstract thing, I look at five observable signals that together show whether your brand is growing over time:

1. Memorability: captured through Share of Search. When people think about your category, how often do they think about you compared to everyone else? It’s scientifically proven to represent your Share of Market.

2. Visibility: shows up in branded search impressions. How many people are actively searching for you by name? This measures real demand and visibility combined, and it moves as brand work compounds.

3. Content Efficiency: taken together as reach and engagement, show whether you’re expanding awareness in a way that actually sticks. Reach without engagement is noise. Engagement without reach is a small cult. Growing brands need both.

4. Trust: reflected in positive reviews. They’re blunt, imperfect, and incredibly revealing. They tell you whether your promise matches reality, and they quietly influence everything else you do.

5. Community: captures your owned audiences. That might be customers, subscribers, or another consistent top-of-funnel signal, but the rule is simple. Pick one primary measure and stick with it over time.

How the methodology works

It’s deliberately simple. Each of the five signals are scored against targets which contribute up to 100 points, for a total possible score of 500.

I’ve also worked out, in my head at least, there are five different stages of brand growth:

1. Nascent (1–100): New to market

2. Emerging (101–200): Starting to grow

3. Scaling (201–300): Investing in brand

4. Established (301–400): Solid market presence

5. Leading (401–500): Category leader

Rather than asking you what “stage” you think you’re at, the system infers it from your data. Everyone is first scored against the Nascent benchmarks. If your score exceeds that level, you’re re-scored against the next tier.

As your brand grows, the bar rises. A one-point gain in Share of Search means far more for a small brand than it does for a dominant one. That’s how brand growth actually works and the model doesn’t scale linearly to reflect that.

Turning this into something you can actually use

After working all this through, I decided to productise it into a free (for now…) tool called What’s My Brand Score?

You sign up with your email, add a few data points you already have access to, and get a clear score and brand stage in minutes. It’s designed to be updated monthly, shared internally, and used to anchor conversations that would otherwise descend into opinion.

It’s early, and it’s very much a developing concept in my head. Which is why I’d love your feedback. Tell me which metric felt hardest to find. Tell me what surprised you. Tell me what you’d change.

If this helps give you clarity, or even just a bit more confidence that your brand work is actually working, then it’s doing its job. And if it stops one more meeting from spiralling into attribution garbage or tools built for companies a hundred times your size, even better.

Get Your Free Brand Score

Hi, I’m Tom.

I’ve launched products at Monzo, Wise, and built the brand and marketing team at Yonder from scratch. I write about what actually works in startup marketing for marketers on the verge of breakdown.

If you want help understanding why your brilliant product isn’t selling itself, find me on LinkedIn.

You’ve been given budget to hire. Congrats! You’re now responsible for spending a load of money on someone you’ve never met to do a job you barely understand and whose performance is directly linked to your own success. No stress, if you get it wrong, you’ll spend the next year managing someone you’ll come to hate and who can’t do the work.

I’ve hired a handful of marketers now and been through countless interviews myself. You won’t always get it right, but over the years, I’ve worked out how to turn the odds in your favour. This is the process that helped me, and I hope it helps you too.

Work out what you actually need (and when)

Before you get started hiring, make sure you actually need to hire someone.

I remember getting advice once that you should always do the job yourself for a year before hiring someone, or whatever. Which I think is bad advice. You’re likely already very busy and committing loads of time to something you are not good at isn’t the right way to increase your efficiency.

That’s not to say you shouldn’t understand the role, that’s very important. But I think it’s better doing that learning through the management of a freelancer or agency who can get started sooner and can be switched off when you realise you don’t really need that part firing yet, it doesn’t work, or you get to a point where you want to bring it in-house.

Don’t just hire someone right away to cover your weaknesses. You don’t even know if that thing will form part of your strategy. Use an agency or freelancer first to help validate a new strategy and then hire only when you can’t scale that resource.

Freelancer/agency vs full-time

Agencies and freelancers will help you get to about 60% effectiveness of a full time role. It’s worth remembering that they’re optimising for their business, not yours. We ran performance marketing through an agency for a full year. They were as good as they could have been, but ultimately we still needed to bring that role in-house to unlock more efficiency and growth. That year taught us exactly what good looked like and meant we could hire slowly. Here’s some additional reading on how to work with agencies:

Hiring someone full-time only makes sense when you’ve proven the channel works and need consistent execution, focus and improvement. If you can’t clearly articulate what success looks like or how to get there, you’re not ready to hire full-time.

Unless you’re a founder or CEO reading this and wanting to hire your first marketer, I wouldn’t advise hiring a “generalist marketer”. They’ll be okay at everything instead of great at the one thing you need. I twice hired SEO freelancers and twice realised SEO wasn’t going to be our thing. If I’d hired that role full-time like everyone told me to, we’d have wasted six months and £60k.

Choose the right level for your needs

Once you’ve decided to hire full-time, you need to decide what level makes sense. Read this first:

Choose the level that works best for you and make sure you have the budget for it. Then you can work on your job description.

Write a job description that isn’t rubbish

Most job descriptions are copy-pasted. The internet is full of enough crap. Here’s what a good one will include:

Actual salary range. Not “competitive salary” which means nothing. Put “£55-65k depending on experience.” Hiding it means only desperate people apply because everyone good assumes you’re lowballing. It’s gross, don’t do that.

Equity range if applicable. Be specific: “0.1-0.2% vesting over 4 years with 1-year cliff.” Don’t write “generous equity package” because that’s meaningless and makes you look like you’re hiding something. They’re going to find out later, why hide it now? Don’t comp-fish them.

Exact responsibilities. Not a laundry list of everything you need solved. The 3-4 things that actually matter. “Own our Instagram content, posting regularly, compounding learnings and ultimately growing our audience over time.” That specificity attracts people who know if they can do it and filters out people who can’t. Notice I didn’t say ‘own our entire social media presence across all platforms while also running events and maybe some PR.’ That’s three jobs. Don’t try to solve all your problems with one person.

What they’ll learn. Good people optimise for growth, not just salary. “You’ll learn how to build brand from zero at a fast-growing fintech” helps to paint the picture on who they’ll become while they’re working with you. Sounds exciting, I want this job.

What experience actually matters. Not “5 years experience in marketing” because that’s noise. As an example, I used “Must have proven experience growing a YouTube or social following from scratch” when hiring a videographer. For me that encompassed all the key skills I needed for the role: crafting ideas, shooting, editing, and ultimately less measurable but equally important qualities like grit and seeing things through.

Hiring process timeline. “3 weeks from first interview to offer.” This shows you’re organised and won’t waste their time with a two-month process while they get offers elsewhere. Include every step involved in the process so it’s clear upfront what they can expect.

How to work out compensation

You need to benchmark using multiple sources because any single source will mislead you.

At Yonder we used Ravio which is very detailed but you can use GlassDoor and other publicly available data if you need more affordable range. You could call a couple of recruiters and tell them you’re thinking of hiring - they’ll tell you market rate even if you’re not using them.

Factor in location, stage (Series A pays less than Series B for same role), and equity (more equity means lower cash is acceptable).

I’m on sabbatical so I can’t check the Yonder salary ranges (writing this on a futon in Colombia, if you’re wondering) but from memory they’re roughly a bit like this:

• Associate Manager: £30- 45k

• Marketing Manager: £45-65k

• Senior Marketing Manager: £65-100k

• Head of Marketing: £80-110k

Keep in mind we are a London-based, Series A stage startup. They also vary a lot depending on the role, so definitely do some extra research for your business.

Adjust based on your budget constraints, but don’t lowball. You risk damaging the trust of a candidate at a pivotal stage of their excitement to join you. You’ll only attract people who can’t get better offers, which means you’ll get people who aren’t very good. Put the actual range in the job description and offer higher end if they’re more experienced and lower if they have potential but aren’t at the level just yet.

How to actually find good people

Don’t just post your job description and wait. Good people aren’t actively looking, they’re being recruited.

Post your job on LinkedIn, your company site, and anywhere else your audience hangs out. You’ll get inbound applications this way - put them through the same screening process as everyone else.

Don’t wait for applications to roll in. Use LinkedIn search and filter by current role, company stage, and location. Look for people one level below where you’re hiring - Senior Managers when you want a Head of, Managers when you want a Senior. They’re ready for the step up and hungry to prove themselves. You’ll also be able to offer the lower-end of your salary range as they’ll grow into the role and have room for compensation reviews if they do really well once they get going. Someone already in a Senior role will expect the higher-end salary if they’re swapping from one Senior role to another.

Your outreach needs four elements: why you’re reaching out specifically to them (reference their actual work), what the opportunity is (be specific about growth stage and challenge plus some info on your company), what they’d own and learn, and a soft ask for coffee or a chat, not “apply to this job description.”

Here’s the template I use, but I’d customise it almost every time depending on their experience and context:

“Hi [Name], I’ve been following your work at [Company] - particularly [specific thing they did]. I’m building the marketing team at [Your Company]. We’re hiring a [Role] to own [specific thing] and I think you’d be great at it. Would you be open to a coffee to chat about it? No pressure if timing isn’t right.”

When I was hiring our Performance Marketing Lead, I probably sent over 50 of these and we ultimately hired someone from one of them (Hi Siân!). I’m not sure she’d have found us if I didn’t reach out, so it’s important you do the work even if you have a well-known brand. The best candidates aren’t always looking.

The step-by-step interview process

Here’s the full process:

1. Screener call

2. Task

3. Final round

4. References

5. Offer

Budget about 4-6 weeks from first screener to offer. Longer than that and you lose good candidates to other opportunities. For more senior roles, this could be much longer so give yourself the time you need.

Don’t overdo this with a million interviews. I almost took a job at Stripe in 2017 after twelve rounds of interviews! It was ridiculous. What ever became of them…

Anyway, you’ll get 90% confidence using this process and save everyone a lot of time.

Step 1: Hiring Manager Screener Call (that’s you)

Book these for 45-minutes but plan for thirty. It gives you an out if they’re clearly wrong, gives you time if they’re interesting. I’d start with “We have 45-mins, but often it only takes 25-mins” so you can jump if they’re just not right and save you both time.

During this call I will always:

• (5-mins) Start with an overview of our marketing journey and why we’re hiring the role. This gives them valuable context on why you need them.

• (5-mins) Then I dig into why they show up to work every day and what they’re looking for in their next role. Understanding someone’s motivation is extremely important.

• (10-mins) Then I’ll have them walk me through a project they’re really proud of and dig deep into their role, what worked, and what didn’t.

• (10-mins) I’ll then explain our biggest challenge and ask them how they would think about solving it.

• (10-mins) Finally, I leave ten minutes for questions at the end. Take note of what they ask and what they’re interested in. They’re interviewing you too. So don’t switch off. You’ll catch some red flags here. If they ask zero questions about your business, don’t actually care or they’re not curious.

At the end of the week, either move them onto the next stage or send them a kind rejection. I’ve personally written hundreds of rejection emails and never use templates for people I have spoken to on screener calls.

Step 2: The Task

Pick the best 3-4 candidates and put them through to the task stage. This is designed to dig into how they use their experience and marketing brain to understand and solve a real-ish world problem. It’s your best chance to stress test their skills.

Tasks can be really tedious and annoying as a candidate. They have jobs and families and their own lives already, so I think it’s a bit lazy of hiring managers to expect the world in such a short period of time, usually unpaid.

The best way to do this is to design a task that is specific, based on a real problem you have faced and can be done in under 3-hours.

Scope it clearly for them: “This task should take 2-3 hours and we’re not looking for perfection.” If the task is more than 3 hours or you’ll actually use the work, offer to pay a set hourly rate for their time. They’ll do better work and it shows that you respect their time and contribution. It costs very little and, to be honest, is the right thing to do.

When hiring our new VP of Marketing to replace me when I went on sabbatical, the task was a problem I had just experienced myself directly so I had a very good idea of what the solution looked like:

“Yonder has just launched a debit card alongside our credit card offering. You are tasked with outlining how this will impact our existing marketing strategy and prepare a doc that you would hypothetically share with the leadership team to educate them on what’s coming”

I included some fake business data and some insights they could use to build their plan on. I gave them a clear timeline, around a week including one weekend, and was clear around exactly how I wanted it to be prepared and sent back.

You’re assessing if they understand the problem, if their solution is practical and if they can communicate themselves clearly.

Step 3: Final Round Interviews

Bring your best two (maybeeeeeee three, but try for two) candidates onsite or on video for final round. Structure it as three separate conversations:

Marketing Deep-Dive (1 hour): You plus another marketer or marketing-adjacent role if you have one. Deep dive on their task. Ask “Walk us through your task - what was your thinking?” You’ll want to go unbearably deep and see how good they are when they can’t use ChatGPT.

• Why did you think this was a good idea?

• How did you come up with that?

• If I subbed out X for Y, how would that change things?

• If we doubled the budget, or halved it, how might that change things?

Values-Fit (1 hour): Two non-marketers - product, design, ops, whoever they’d actually work with. We call this a values-fit at Yonder, where we dig into how they demonstrate some of our operating values. It’s generally a culture-fit style interview but instead of “do we like this person” it’s “would we love working with this person”. This assesses collaboration and communication. Focus on how they work, not what they know about marketing.

• Tell us about a time you had to convince someone to change direction

• How do you handle feedback or criticism?

• Walk us through a project where you had to collaborate with people outside marketing

Leadership Interview (1 hour) (Senior roles only): Your CEO or founder. “Why are you interested in joining at this stage?” and “What’s your vision for how marketing should work here?” Honestly your CEO will probably know what to do here.

Always leave 10-15 minutes at the end for their questions. Good candidates have many questions.

Step 4: Reference Checks

Call two references before you make an offer. Some they provide, and always one you source through LinkedIn back channels.

Don’t ask “Were they good?” Everyone says yes to that. Ask “Would you hire them again?” which forces an honest answer. Ask “What’s the best way to manage them?” which reveals how they actually work. Ask “What’s something they could improve?” because everyone has weaknesses and you want to know theirs.

If the reference is lukewarm, that’s a no. Good people have enthusiastic references who will go to bat for them.

And please actually do this step. I know you’re excited and you want to just make the offer. Do the references.

Step 5: Making the Offer

Once you’ve got a top candidate you’re excited about, now it’s time to close! The best candidates will likely have offers from other companies or counter-offers from wherever they are now. Just because you’re ready for them to work for you doesn’t mean they are. It’s game-time, this is where the best hiring managers shine.

When making your offer, I always go with my best offer. Don’t play games or lowball. That’s disrespectful and wastes everyone’s time. You’re not a time-waster, are you?

I’ll call them as soon as we are ready to offer and let them know on the phone, then immediately follow up with an email with all the details in there.

Include in your offer email:

• Base salary

• Equity (percentage or cash equivalent and vesting schedule: “0.15% vesting over 4 years with 1-year cliff”)

• Benefits (pension, healthcare, whatever you offer)

• Start date

• Reporting structure (who they report to)

Be excited! This is great news for both of you. Make that email sing, baby. Give them 3-5 days to decide.

Step 6: Handling Negotiation

Good candidates negotiate.

What’s negotiable: Start date, working arrangements (remote days, hours flexibility), and title (but not level). For example, they may prefer Paid Marketing Lead over Performance Marketing Lead.

What’s not negotiable: Salary (you already offered your best number based on band), equity (maybe 0.02-0.05% wiggle room but don’t move much), and level (don’t hire a Manager then give them Head of title because they asked).

If they come back asking for more money: “We’ve benchmarked against market and this is top of band for the role. We’ve offered our best number upfront because we don’t want to waste your time or ours. Is the comp the only blocker?”

If they push: “We can’t move on cash but we could adjust equity slightly - would [+0.05%] work?”

Fortunately Yonder have always paid in the 90th percentile for companies of our size, so this has rarely been an issue for us. If they won’t accept, walk away. If your offer is fair and reasonable, then stand behind it.

“But what if they’re the perfect candidate, Tom?” They’re not.

Red flags to keep an eye out for

Before we wrap up, here are some red flags you’ll probably ignore (but shouldn’t):

• Hiring someone because you’re desperate and overworked and need another pair of hands even if they’re not quite right.

• Hiring for potential that’s just too far off being realised (any longer than six months before they’re operating at high capacity is too long).

• Ignoring your gut feeling about culture fit because their skills are strong (they’ll poison the team).

Hiring is hard and takes practice

You’ll probably still mess this up a bit. Everyone does. But following this process means you’ll mess it up less, and you’ll know faster when it’s not working.

Now go write that job description. And please, for the love of god, include the salary range.

Seriously though. The salary range. I’m begging you.

If you need more help with this stuff, just send me a message on LinkedIn and we can have a chat.

About me

My name is Tom. I’ve launched and grown products at some of the UK’s most loved consumer brands and I’m part of the founding team and VP Marketing at Yonder, a modern day rewards card. Since starting at Yonder, I’ve written about all my marketing learnings along the way.

If you’re a senior marketer at a startup, this Substack is for you. I write about what actually works in startup marketing (and what definitely doesn’t) for marketers on the verge of breakdown.

Subscribe now

You can find me on LinkedIn congratulating my mates on their new jobs, trolling Forbes articles about billionaires, and occasionally sharing something useful when absolutely forced to. Say hello.

I do some 1:1 consulting from time to time where my speciality is helping you understand why your brilliant product isn’t selling itself. Contact me on LinkedIn if you’re into that sort of thing.

Take my short reader survey so I can learn more about who reads this so I can write more useful stuff. I know you ask your customers to take surveys, so one won’t hurt you. Thanks in advance.

Marketers are lazy. And our laziness is making our lives harder. Our lives are already hard. Why do we do this?

We’re lazy because we use the word ‘Brand’ as this gigantic catch-all for so many nuanced parts of a marketing strategy, and we just expect everyone around us to know what we’re talking about. We’ll say things like “we need to improve our brand” or “we need to work on brand” or whatever vague initiative we’ve put in our Q4 OKRs this year, and hope people understand what we mean.

Scratch just below the surface and you’ll see there are several distinct concepts that marketers constantly lump together and, most troublingly, use interchangeably as if they’re all the same. They’re not. And you look stupid when you treat them that way. And I can’t have you looking stupid.

Brand promise, brand platform, branding, and brand marketing are all uniquely important parts of your brand strategy.

To a CEO or product manager, they may sound identical. They’re not. And this can get you in trouble if you can’t explain how they’re different.

So here’s a breakdown of what they actually mean, when to use them, and a few examples from my own experience to make it feel real.

Brand Promise

Quick summary: what you promise to deliver to customers.

Your brand promise is the implied contract between you and your customer. It’s the consistent value or feeling they should expect every time they interact with you.

It’s not copy. It’s not a tagline. It’s rarely even written down publicly. It’s the core commitment your company makes to customers.

At Yonder, our brand promise is: “The best curated credit card rewards for your lifestyle.” It’s what people can expect when they sign up.

Monzo’s promise is “We’ll help you understand and use your money easily.” You’ll never see that on a billboard, but it’s baked into every product decision they make.

Nike’s promise isn’t “Just Do It.” It’s “We’ll make you feel like an athlete.”

Funnily enough, while this language rarely appears in your own marketing, it often shows up in how customers talk about you to others. “I use Yonder because they offer the best credit card rewards for me.” That’s our promise, being passed from one customer to the next.

If your promise reads like copy, it’s probably not a promise. A promise should be testable in the experience. If you’re stuck, try writing it as a commitment. Then prove it in your service and product.

Brand Platform

Quick summary: the system that defines how you operate and make decisions.

The brand platform is the structure that makes up your brand Think about it as the scaffolding or the bricks or… metal? Look, I’m not a builder. It’s the part that keeps everything standing upright.

It typically includes your purpose, positioning, value proposition, audience, personality, voice, and messaging pillars. It’s internal-facing, guiding decisions across product, service, and communications. It impacts everyone in your business, not just marketers.

It’s what ensures your app, your social channels, and your support team all feel like they belong to the same company.

At Yonder, our brand platform positioned us as a youthful, rewards-led challenger to Amex, making premium financial services feel fresh and new. That framework informed everything: the rewards we curated (massages, cabin rentals, dinners out), the way we marketed (stunts, activations, content), even how we talked to members. It made every small decision feel coherent.

Without a clear brand platform, your company will present inconsistently to the world. Your website copy might sound fun and human, but your app or customer support could feel cold or corporate because those decisions are being made by someone outside the marketing team. Brand platforms prevent that fragmentation. Consistency builds trust.

Most teams skip this step because it feels abstract. But without it, the rest floats away untethered. You end up with operations people describing the brand one way, product another, and marketing trying to stitch it all together at the end.

As a marketing leader, it’s your job to define this and get buy-in across the business. It’s no good if it sits in a deck somewhere. It’s also important not to think about enforcing this, but about educating and empowering with it. When people understand the why, you’ll get more buy-in naturally.

Branding

Quick summary: literally how your brand looks and sounds.

This is the one everyone mistakes for the whole thing. Branding is the visible and verbal expression of your brand platform. It’s the logos, colours, fonts, photography, tone of voice, packaging, motion, the lot. Literally how your company shows up anywhere.

Think of your brand as a person: the brand platform is who they are (their personality and values), and the branding is how they look.

It’s how your brand shows up in the world. The translation of all that strategic work into something people can actually see and feel.

At Yonder, that means the card design, the photography, the app design, the confident but approachable tone of voice. It’s what makes us recognisable.

This is the stuff marketers spend too much time on. The branding, at the end of the day, is just colours and words. People ask a lot about how we came up with the name Yonder, as if the name defines our brand in some way. If we picked another name, we’d still be the same brand. Airbnb would still be Airbnb if they incorporated under something else.

While it is important, the mistake is starting here. Every founder does it after their first raise: they hire a branding agency in Shoreditch or Williamsburg or whatever the edgy part of Sydney is nowadays, spend a fortune on a logo and colour palette, and call it strategy. It’s seductive because it’s visible, and visibility feels like progress. But branding is the last thing you do, not the first. It’s like painting your house before it’s been built. What is with all these building analogies?

Brand Marketing

Quick summary: how you build long-term memory and preference.

Brand marketing is the work involved in making people aware of, understand, and feel something about your brand.

It’s the process of memory creation. The work that makes someone remember you exist when they’re finally ready to buy.

It is measured typically in awareness and a handful of other metrics, but overall, it’s a measure of how well known you are and how likely someone is to choose your brand over a competitor.

Done well, brand marketing builds familiarity, trust, and emotion. It’s what turns your name into a mental shortcut.

At Yonder, brand marketing meant showing up in ways that reflected our promise: partnerships with local restaurants and playful out-of-home campaigns. All of it worked together to make Yonder feel distinctive before people even understood what it did.

Knowing the Difference Matters

When you mix these up, two things happen. First, you sound like you don’t know what you’re talking about. We can’t have that. Second, you make your life harder when you try to work across your organisation.

Be clear about what you need to do and why. You don’t “need to work on the brand.” You might need to refine your promise, rebuild your platform, refresh your branding, or invest in your brand marketing — but those are not the same thing. And when you understand the difference, you can push back with confidence when someone says “we need a brand promise” when what they really mean is “write us a tagline.”

• The brand promise is what you deliver. It gives meaning.

• The brand platform defines how you operate. It gives structure.

• Branding is how you look and sound while doing it. It gives form.

• Brand marketing is how you build memory and preference. It gives reach.

When they work together, you stop arguing about what “brand” means and start building one people actually care about.

While I’ve got you…

My name is Tom. I’ve launched and grown products at some of the UK’s most loved consumer brands and I’m part of the founding team and VP Marketing at Yonder, a modern-day rewards card. Since starting at Yonder, I’ve written about all my marketing learnings along the way.

If you’re a senior marketer at a startup, this Substack is for you. I write about what actually works in startup marketing (and what definitely doesn’t) for marketers on the verge of breakdown.

Subscribe now

I do some 1:1 consulting from time to time where my speciality is helping you understand why your brilliant product isn’t selling itself. Contact me on LinkedIn if you’re into that sort of thing.

Take my short reader survey so I can learn more about who reads this so I can write more useful stuff. I know you ask your customers to take surveys, so one won’t hurt you. Thanks in advance.

Ignoring the obvious irony here in that I’ve never actually been a CMO, I have spent the last four years talking to them about how to do the job. Same thing? No? Fair enough. Let’s move on.

After begging actual CMOs on LinkedIn to talk to me over and over again, the one thing that’s stuck with me, and the point behind writing this post, is that the best CMOs have one thing in common. They know what they don’t know. Much harder than it sounds.

Turns out being really good at one type of marketing isn’t what makes you good at running an entire marketing function. What matters is how you plan, resource, and execute well on the things you’re not naturally good at.

Most CMOs come up through one of three disciplines

Unless you’re one of those weird CMOs who used to be a lawyer or something, or you got the job the old-fashioned way – because your dad was on the board – you probably specialised in one of these early in your career:

• Brand marketing – building distinctive, well-known brands that drive long-term growth.

• Growth marketing – testing, hypothesising, and optimising to drive measurable results.

• Product marketing – shaping propositions that meet real market needs.

Each gives you a useful edge. But they also come with blind spots that will quietly define your time at the top. You can’t spend millions on brand if you don’t understand growth. You can’t dump your whole budget into performance and expect long-term effects. And you can’t talk about customer love if your product positioning’s a mess.

The three paths to the top and what you’ll need to work on

Each background gives you an advantage. It also leaves a few gaps you’ll need to close.

The Product Marketer Turned CMO

Starting with this one because this was me. I was a product marketer at Wise and Monzo, and I used to solve every marketing problem with a product solution. If we weren’t growing, it must be the product. I remember the CEO at Wise, Kristo, once telling me we’d be able to get rid of the marketing team if the product was good enough. Naturally, I leant into product work.

So I didn’t think much about funnels or channels. I figured a great product would find its way to customers and my job was to make it clear and compelling. The marketing would do itself. I was wrong.

What you’re good at: Product marketers are natural connectors between a product and a market. We’re typically customer-obsessed and can shape propositions that make sense, then tell a consistent story that connects product to need. We’re strong on positioning, messaging, and go-to-market thinking.

But Kristo at Wise was wrong (he’s a billionaire and never remembered my name, so I’m sure this won’t keep him up at night). Companies with better products die all the time. The opposite is also true. Crap products with incredible distribution are everywhere. Look at Oracle, how the hell is that still a thing? It’s a thing because they worked out how to distribute whatever it is they do. If you don’t know how to actually market your product, it doesn’t matter how good it is. You’ll die too.

Where to level up: Start caring about the numbers. Get comfortable with resource allocation, measurement frameworks, and understanding how your marketing translates into commercial outcomes. If you don’t, finance will define it for you and you won’t like their version.

Learn to take creative risks. Product marketers position products well, but can you stand out creatively when you’re not talking about your product? Positioning doesn’t build fame. Do you know to connect emotionally with your customers?

You may already know how to tell a product story. Now learn how to tell a company story, something bigger than features and benefits, something that makes customers and your own team proud to belong.

What to learn: performance measurement, channel mix, resource allocation, creative excellence, brand strategy. It’s not enough for the message to fit the market. You need to make the market pay attention.

The Growth Marketer Turned CMO

Probably the most common path to the top in the last decade. Mostly because with the rise of Meta, Google, and TikTok, growth marketers have been best placed to prove their impact. Boards love that.

You’ve probably spent years building scalable systems like creative production pipelines, affiliate networks, SEO machines. Funnels, dashboards, attribution models, automation flows. You know exactly what levers to pull to make the graph go up. You’re good with numbers, we get it.

What you’re good at: Growth marketers are brilliant at discipline. You understand data, iteration, and experimentation better than anyone. You’ve built an engine that delivers consistent, measurable results. You know how to prioritise, allocate spend, and optimise the hell out of a channel mix.

But you can’t A/B test your way into being loved. Most of the work you’ve excelled at captures existing demand, it doesn’t create new demand. At scale, that means rising acquisition costs and eventually running out of people to convert. Without learning how to generate long-term growth through brand building, you’ll hit a ceiling fast.

That’s the difference between good growth and great marketing. You can measure performance to death, but distinctiveness doesn’t live in a spreadsheet. At some point you have to make a creative leap, and that will make you deeply uncomfortable. It’s not measured in the ways you’re used to and requires you to rewire how you see marketing.

Where to level up: Develop a feel for the parts you can’t quantify. Learn to work with creative people instead of trying to systemise them. Learn how to brief an idea without drowning it in logic. Make work that earns attention, not just buys it.

You’ll also need a deeper grasp of product. As a marketing leader, you should feed insights into product development and work closely with product owners to ensure you’re meeting market needs. Performance marketing tells you what’s converting. Product marketing tells you why. Spend time in customer interviews. Watch people use the product. Get obsessed with motivations, not click-through rates.

What to learn: storytelling, creative judgment, brand building, customer insight, proposition design. You can’t spreadsheet your way into distinctiveness.

The Brand Marketer Turned CMO

You’ve spent years thinking about long-term emotional connection. That’s great, it’s a proven way to drive sustainable growth.

But even if you’re not working for a publicly traded company, you’ve still got quarterly targets. If you put all your eggs in the brand basket, there’s not a hope you’ll hit short-term goals. And if you don’t hit those, you won’t be around long enough for your brand work to pay off.

You’ve got taste. You know how to make people feel something. You understand distinctiveness, tone, and the compounding value of creative consistency. You probably tell great stories at the pub.

Where to level up: Start building your analytical muscle. You don’t need to do it all yourself, but you’ll never become a proper sounding board to your experts if you don’t understand their craft. Do you know how to set up experiments and measure significance, compounding learnings as you go? You’ll need to.

You’ll also need to start learning how product propositions fit into the brand work you already know. How do features challenge or reinforce your message? What happens when your product works in one market but not another? How do you roll out messaging consistently across markets and channels? That’s what good product marketing looks like and it’s what you’ll need to understand to do your job well.

It’s not enough to make people feel something if it doesn’t ladder up to growth. Distinctiveness and brand love have to translate into business value. You can’t just run a beautiful campaign and wait for your next promotion. You’re in the big leagues now, mate.

What to learn: funnel mechanics, short-term growth, product marketing, financial literacy.

Ultimately, it’s an executive role, not just a marketing one.

You’re the voice of the customer in the boardroom, helping define where the company goes next. You’re responsible for how the market, media, investors, and future hires see your brand.

You’re thinking years ahead, not just quarters. You’re influencing product direction, market expansion, and even M&A. You’re likely presenting to the board regularly and shaping how marketing itself is valued inside the business.

A good CMO isn’t a specialist. They move between brand, growth, and product marketing without losing the plot. They’re channel-agnostic, data-literate, creatively curious, and commercially grounded. They know when to push for brand and when to pull back.

If you want to be a great CMO, start by mastering what you ignore. The further up you go, the fewer people will tell you where your blind spots are, so you’d better know them yourself.

If you want to do some further reading, I’ve written about how marketing roles differ by level here:

While I’ve got you…

My name is Tom. I’ve launched and grown products at some of the UK’s most loved consumer brands and I’m part of the founding team and VP Marketing at Yonder, a modern day rewards card. Since starting at Yonder, I’ve written about all my marketing learnings along the way.

If you’re a senior marketer at a startup, this Substack is for you. I write about what actually works in startup marketing (and what definitely doesn’t) for marketers on the verge of breakdown.

Subscribe now

I do some 1:1 consulting from time to time where my speciality is helping you understand why your brilliant product isn’t selling itself. Contact me on LinkedIn if you’re into that sort of thing.

Take my short reader survey so I can learn more about who reads this so I can write more useful stuff. I know you ask your customers to take surveys, so one won’t hurt you. Thanks in advance.

I spent most of my early marketing career as a middling product marketer dreaming of being a marketing leader so I could wheel and deal a global brand, stick an ad in the Superbowl and sponsor a Premier League team.

When I eventually got there and became Yonder’s VP Marketing I found there were far fewer rounds of golf than expected and the best I could do was sponsor the back of the shorts of a fifth tier club in London. Still counts.

Turns out, when you’re running a marketing function, a lot of your time is spent on reporting on how things are going. And for a long time I found it frustrating, pointless, and in my mind, time spent thinking when I needed to spend time doing.

Finding time to analyse my work was both hard and a convenient excuse

After a year of treating reporting like a bureaucratic chore, it eventually dawned on me that it wasn’t just paperwork but the only way to know if I was getting anywhere. Took me long enough. With hindsight, I was learning a lot all at once as a first-time leader but I still wish the penny had dropped sooner.

When you’re a team of one (then two, if you’re lucky), managing agencies, juggling half a dozen strategies, and moonlighting as product marketer, finding time to actually think about what’s working is a pipe dream. I had no system for shutting out the noise and sitting with the results.

It started to cause problems within the leadership too. My CEO, Tim, was rightfully demanding more insight into how things were going and my natural resistance to it meant I wasn’t fulfilling an important part of my job. Slowly but surely, the monthly cadence for how we update the rest of the organisation grew better and better and as parts of my team matured they were able to analyse their own work so I could focus on other areas more deeply.

Seeing the whole picture

The end result was a monthly report that we shared with the whole company.

It wasn’t just marketing, this is a process that every function at Yonder had to do each month. Every team approached it slightly differently. Finance and the Credit Risk teams were naturally more number heavy. The Member Support team included many anecdotal examples of moments we’d helped customers.

Ultimately it was down to the functional head to report on what they felt was most important for everyone else to know.

The format that I’ve landed on for marketing

Below is a link to a Notion template for a marketing monthly update. And below that is one with some example data I’ve thrown in. I’ve made it all up. So don’t copy it or you’ll get fired.

Here's the template

Example report

If you want to avoid your monthly existential crisis, this structure will do it. Forged in the fires of actual startup chaos, it’s designed specifically to communicate how your work connects to the rest of your organisation in a way that’s easy for executives and other teams to follow. If you’re wondering whether I’m making this up as I go along, the answer is: absolutely. But so is everyone else.

Start with connecting your work to everyone else’s

I always found it so frustrating when another team would stand up and present their monthly business review and just say “this month we built this new micro-service”. Okay, why?

The biggest mistake most marketers make (and apparently a few engineers) is that we don’t tell effective stories about our work. If you start with connecting your work to everyone else’s, you’ll have their empathy and understanding for why your work is important.

So I start with a quick reminder of our company goals, which in my example, are to drive X new revenue and acquire customers at a target payback for the business. Immediately they can see how our work contributes to everyone’s success. You’re off to the races.

Once you’ve connected your work to company goals, the next job is showing results in the right order.

Write your report backwards

Another interesting learning as I became more senior is that your docs need to be written backwards, in a way. Start with the answer. Instead of writing a report that says “we did X, Y and Z this month and this is how it impacted us” you should structure it like “this is how we did this month, and here are the three things we did to achieve it”.

It’s not a natural way of explaining yourself but it’s how senior folk with limited time like to absorb information. Executives are weird. They want to see the end of the movie first, then they’ll go back and watch the rest later if they have time.

Break your report into themes, not functions

Never report on how each function is reporting. Like ‘Paid Social’ or ‘PR’. All your analysis should come from what I call workstreams, which I suppose are a bit like OKRs. In my example you can see I have three workstreams that the whole marketing team are reporting on. They’re basically broad goals with a series of actions within them – e.g. improve our visibility on the internet or drive more brand awareness.

Each of these should then have a brief explainer as to why it’s important and how you’re measuring your work. It may seem obvious to you but I promise it won’t be to anyone else outside your team. Being a marketing leader is constantly re-educating your organisation on what you’re doing and why your work is important. Here’s an example:

Why is this important? Customer journeys are complex, so it’s difficult to know where they’ll look first when they look for products like ours. Our goal is to show up as effectively as possible in as many places as the may look. On Search, in chat tools, forums and earned media.

Within a workstream, highlight a few actions or learnings

Don’t put “Learning #1” as your title then explain it below. Put the learning as the title, then below explain what happened, what you learned, and what you’ll do next. For example:

We restructured Meta campaigns to bring down media buying costs

• What happened: Consolidated all ad sets, refreshed creatives, switched to cost-cap bidding. CAC improved slightly by 5%.

• What we learned: Fewer, broader ad sets improved delivery. Cost caps helped control spend.

• What’s next: Keep 3–5 ad sets, rotate new hooks every 10 days, and shift budget from re-marketing to prospecting.

Give someone the chance to go and do further reading

Below each action, you should link out to the more detailed analysis or project where you’re coordinating that work. Often you’ll find CEOs or other execs will just be curious and will want to dig much deeper into something when they have time.

Good reporting is sharing the right amount of information at the right time.

Finish with risks, decisions and asks

Someone once told me that the more senior you become the further forward you need to be looking. As VP Marketing, I was always thinking about a year ahead of where we were. “Okay, we’ll grow now for six months but how do we hit growth targets in a year when they’re 10x what they are today?” This is your chance to highlight anything you need the organisation to know.

There are always fires in fast-growing companies and your job is to identify them as soon as possible and with as much time and accuracy as possible.

Now a few hot tips on how to actually write it

Formatting

Formatting matters, to a point. I’ve built this template in Notion because it’s the tool we used but it can be easily recreated in Notes, Google Docs or whatever it is you’re using. Use colour to your advantage, like green to highlight positive numbers and red to draw attention to numbers going the wrong way.

Charts, graphs and images

My example doesn’t include any images because the data is made up and I couldn’t be bothered to mock-up anything with fake information. So use your common sense.

Don’t use a chart for every point you’re making but a handful of well-placed graphs to help tell your story will make it easier for people to absorb what you’re saying.

Order of information

What is more important is the amount of information and the order it is shown. I’ve written this template to align with what executives need in order.

Start with the most important bits then add in your detail later on.

Tell someone if it’s good or bad

Don’t assume they’ll understand if an outcome is positive or not. Often finance would report on something and my first question would be “is this good or bad”. While the answer is often nuanced, it’s helpful to just tell someone what to think about something and if they disagree they can.

Give yourself plenty of time

You’ll want to give yourself at least one full working day to do this every month. Usually in the first couple days of the following month so you can wait for all of the data you need to reflect on the previous month. Anything less and you won’t be able to actually learn from what you’re writing and you’ll be stuck in the same cycle I was of trying to the tick the box and move on.

It’s best to block off a recurring day in your calendar and make sure your team know about it ahead of time so they can prepare their parts as well.

Optional extras

You could think about adding in a section on “marketing inspo” or “competitor examples” or “trends” as a chance to highlight what you’re seeing around you. Play around with it.

It’ll take some practice and your version will eventually change

Will this stop reporting from feeling like a monthly existential crisis? Not entirely. But at least you’ll look less like you’re making it up as you go along. Which, of course, you still are. We all are.

While I’ve got you…

My name is Tom. I’ve launched and grown products at some of the UK’s most loved consumer brands and I’m part of the founding team and VP Marketing at Yonder, a modern day rewards card. Since starting at Yonder, I’ve written about all my marketing learnings along the way.

If you're a senior marketer at a startup, this Substack is for you. I write about what actually works in startup marketing (and what definitely doesn't) for marketers on the verge of breakdown.

Subscribe now

You can find me on LinkedIn congratulating my mates on their new jobs, trolling Forbes articles about billionaires, and occasionally sharing something useful when absolutely forced to. Say hello.

I do some 1:1 consulting from time to time where my speciality is helping you understand why your brilliant product isn't selling itself. Contact me on LinkedIn if you're into that sort of thing.

Take my short reader survey so I can learn more about who reads this so I can write more useful stuff. I know you ask your customers to take surveys, so one won’t hurt you. Thanks in advance.

When most businesses think about “growth,” they’re often just thinking about distribution. Basically: how do we reach more people and get them to buy?

Which is fine. It’s part of growth. Just not the only part.

The danger is it makes marketers look like they’re entirely responsible for growth. And when growth doesn’t happen? Time to update your LinkedIn, pal.

After being responsible for Yonder’s growth over the last four years I’ve worked out that the biggest wins on growth don’t come from more ads or more channels at all.

In essence, there are three ways to grow.

The “Distribution is Growth” Fallacy

Often growth is just seen as the process of running more ads, running more A/B tests, sharpening the funnel here, sending another email there, and crossing your fingers for the algorithm gods on whatever channel is trending at the moment. That’s where most of us start.

You’ll grow, but it’ll be hard-won. That’s distribution. It matters, but it rarely gives you that growth curve that makes a VC get a little sweaty under those quarter-zips they’re always wearing.

Ultimately distribution matters but it’s the hardest place to create step-change growth. More AB tests will not get you there, brother.

The margins are razor-thin. Everyone’s playing the same game, with similar budgets and similar CPAs. And if you’re small, you’re fighting some massive incumbent who already own half the market and can afford to spend you under the table. If you’re looking for a silver bullet, maybe try LinkedIn? Heaps of ideas on there.

So yes, you could grind from £10m ARR to £20m ARR on distribution alone. But the real spikes, the moments where the graph actually jumps, come from somewhere else.

The three ways to grow

1. Better Distribution (the bit you already know)

Same products, same market, but better distribution

This is the one you already know and are likely spending all your time on. So let’s start here. For most marketers, it’s the only lever you can actually pull so let’s not dismiss it because it’s still very important.

At Yonder, this was our first year in market. I wrote all about it here. We explored every possible way to reach our target market with our new credit card.

We launched on comparison sites, built referral programs and inch by inch our business began to grow.

That’s distribution. It’s the grind of incremental growth. Lots of testing and hopefully lots of small wins that stack up over time. If you can do this well, you’ll hopefully land on a few channels and a creative strategy that helps your business grow.

A better funnel can mean millions in incremental revenue.

2. New Products

New products, same market, same distribution

I first realised the power of new products in driving growth when we launched the free Yonder Credit Card.

We’d previously only had a paid-for product which, despite jamming it full of value, was still asking people to pay for something upfront. Naturally, this added a lot of friction to our growth funnel.

We eventually launched the free Yonder Credit Card and almost overnight we doubled our growth. It was the kind of jolt in the arm that we’d hoped all our distribution work would do for us but never did. Suddenly, things looked different.

Because we’d spend time on our existing distribution in the London market, we just dropped the free Yonder Credit Card into it and watched it go. We changed nothing else except for just introducing a new product.

Same audience, same city, but now we had a second proposition aimed at people who didn’t bite the first time. That opened up a whole new slice of the market. Growth is easy.

Launching something new for the people you already serve is hugely important part of how brands grow. You see it everywhere. Uber riders become Uber Eats customers. Monzo current account holders become Monzo savings account holders. Skincare brands start selling haircare or whatever it is that people are putting on their bodies nowadays.

We just popped a second product into what we were already doing. That’s the magic. You don’t need to reinvent marketing. It’s how a lot of influencers make money. They already have the distribution, they just start selling something new.

It’s a little disingenuous to say you don’t have to change anything. We of course had to think about what creative and messaging would look like for the new products and how they might show up differently to what we already offered but ultimately these were easier answers for us than to somehow 10x our distribution.

3. New Markets

Same products, new market, same distribution

And then the third, and honestly, most powerful: new markets.

You take your existing products and existing understanding on distribution and you drop that into a new market: a city, a country, or entire continent.

When we launched in Manchester and Bristol, the product didn’t change. It was the same one we’d been offering in London. But now we had a new pool of people. Fresh early adopters. A new wave of word-of-mouth. A spike in applications just by showing up somewhere new.

Quite literally we opened up eligibility through some of our comparison site partners and just like that we started growing in a new market. We did nothing else (right away).

This is the lever that built companies like Uber and AirBnB. You don’t sit around trying to get a handful of new drivers or houses in San Francisco, you just open up your products in Paris, Berlin, Madrid. Same product, same distribution, new people.

Your product is good, now take it somewhere else.

If you want to grow, you need to do all three well

The businesses that don’t think about growth more broadly will always be playing that game of inches.

I get that it’s not quite so easy to walk into the CEO’s office and say, “Let’s launch in Germany.” You have to pick your battles and if you’re not able to influence product direction or market expansion at this stage of your career, then that’s totally fine, and you should be focusing on being the best at distribution.

But if you own growth in your organisation and you’re just thinking about distribution, then I’m sorry. You don’t own growth. You will simply just not grow fast enough.

You have to be thinking about these three levers:

• Same product, same market but better distribution

• Same market, same distribution but with more products

• Same product, same distribution but in new markets

Zoom out to zoom in

I know I typically write about the really specific, tactical stuff, and this one feels a bit “in the clouds.” But honestly, I remember finding this framing useful just as a way of classifying what we were doing.

At Yonder, we’d always have a mix of product, market, and distribution initiatives running in parallel. It made me feel like we were fighting on all the right fronts at once, rather than just trying to squeeze another half-percent out of Facebook.

Hopefully this helps you zoom out and see the bigger strategic levers for growth. But it doesn’t replace the grind. You still need to obsess over distribution, creative, positioning, all the messy day-to-day stuff.

If it sounds like I’m giving you more work, that’s because I am. Welcome to marketing. Good luck.

While I’ve got you…

My name is Tom. I’ve launched and grown products at some of the UK’s most loved consumer brands and I’m part of the founding team and VP Marketing at Yonder, a modern day rewards card. Since starting at Yonder, I’ve written about all my marketing learnings along the way.

If you're a senior marketer at a startup, this Substack is for you. I write about what actually works in startup marketing (and what definitely doesn't) for marketers on the verge of breakdown.

Subscribe now

You can find me on LinkedIn congratulating my mates on their new jobs, trolling Forbes articles about billionaires, and occasionally sharing something useful when absolutely forced to. Say hello.

I do some 1:1 consulting from time to time where my speciality is helping you understand why your brilliant product isn't selling itself. Contact me on LinkedIn if you're into that sort of thing.

Take my short reader survey so I can learn more about who reads this so I can write more useful stuff. I know you ask your customers to take surveys, so one won’t hurt you. Thanks in advance.

I’m sitting here on one of those incredibly uncomfortable airport chairs. You know the ones. Just wooden slates with a sharp elbow rest every 30 centimetres to stop people sleeping on them. It’s slanted forward ever so slightly that it’s a leg workout just to stop from falling forward – an affront to the global chair community. Anyway, in front of me is an ad for an e-SIM brand that apparently uses a percentage of revenue to plant trees. Noble. But it got me thinking.

Would you actually buy an e-SIM because it plants trees? Is that part of your decision making as a consumer? Or like the rest of humanity, are you more concerned with how these products impact you?

It reminded me of an important marketing lesson I learnt a long time ago. People rarely buy things just to support a cause.

Back when I was a wide-eyed 22-year old, I started my career working for a non-profit in San Francisco that supported victims of human trafficking around the world. In the most Silicon Valley thing you’ll read all day, part of our fundraising strategy was taking equity in startups to help drive more sustainable funding over time.

Naturally, many of these brands used their support for us in the marketing. “This chocolate fights human trafficking”. Or “every shirt sold ends exploitation”.

People would buy once out of solidarity, curiosity, or more likely, guilt. Then never again. Why? The chocolate was crap. The shirt was itchy. More often than not, cause-led business focus so much on the cause they’re supporting (good) that they forget to build compelling products and services that actually compete in the market (bad). They think the cause will be their differentiator and it almost never is.

There’s an important marketing lesson in here

People are selfish. We want the best value for our money all the time. We like to think we’d buy products that weren’t built in a sweat shop but last year Shein did $2.77 billion in revenue.

Would you buy a vegan skin cream if it didn’t work anywhere near as well as one that had animal products? Would you use ocean-friendly sunscreen if you still got sunburnt? If you want people to choose the ethical option, that choice has to be just as good or better than the alternative. Sure, there is a broader issue here around regulation. Governments should be stepping up and policing brands more. But don’t expect consumers to take that hit for you.

People only buy a product or use a service for one of two reasons: it’s cheaper or it’s better.

What does this mean for your product?

If your product is as good as what’s already in the market but cheaper, you win. If it’s better but the same price, you win. Anything else? You’re probably losing. It’s a frustratingly unromantic view of humanity, but it’s been proven again and again.

Brands that do good for the world can only succeed if they can compete on their products and services alone. Cause messaging is not a sustainable market strategy.

Tree Card launched with a simple hook to plant trees when you spend. Admirable, but it couldn’t match Monzo’s budgeting tools, Revolut’s feature set, or even Barclays’ app basics. They banked on the cause carrying them. It didn’t. Same with pretty much any Fair Trade chocolate. You may buy a block one time to support their cause but when it’s Friday night and you’ve had a shocking week you’re unlikely to reach for a block of cardboard when that Cadbury is looking at you funny.

Cause-led products rarely last unless they can stand on their own in the price/quality fight.

Should I just give up and let the world burn?

No. Brands should be doing more to make the world a better place.

But not instead of competing on the things that actually drive buying decisions. Get the fundamentals right first. Then layer the cause in a way that strengthens your brand rather than replacing it.

Did you know that Tony’s Chocolonely support the cocoa industry to end supply chain exploitation? I didn’t either. Because while they’ve done an excellent job of building an ethical supply chain they haven’t made that their entire identity.

My guess is they know that most people associate cause-led chocolate as tasting like a shoe. They’ve instead focused on building a competitive chocolate product on taste first (and my word have they nailed that). They’re competing and winning not because they’re a modern thoughtful brand, but because their product is the best.

Wrapping up

If you can say only two or three things to a busy consumer, make sure they’re about why you’re better or cheaper. Once you’ve nailed that, you’ve earned the right to talk about the cause.

While I’ve got you…

My name is Tom. I’ve launched and grown products at some of the UK’s most loved consumer brands and I’m part of the founding team and VP Marketing at Yonder, a modern day rewards card. Since starting at Yonder, I’ve written about all my marketing learnings along the way.

If you're a senior marketer at a startup, this Substack is for you. I write about what actually works in startup marketing (and what definitely doesn't) for marketers on the verge of breakdown.

Subscribe now

You can find me on LinkedIn congratulating my mates on their new jobs, trolling Forbes articles about billionaires, and occasionally sharing something useful when absolutely forced to. Say hello.

I do some 1:1 consulting from time to time where my speciality is helping you understand why your brilliant product isn't selling itself. Contact me on LinkedIn if you're into that sort of thing.

Take my short reader survey so I can learn more about who reads this so I can write more useful stuff. I know you ask your customers to take surveys, so one won’t hurt you. Thanks in advance.

Refer a friend

Why isn’t there more budget transparency?

I saw a marketer post their full budget breakdown on LinkedIn the other day and immediately wondered why I don’t see that more often. It’s almost as if resource allocation is a closely guarded trade secret, or, more likely, no one knows what they’re doing and they’re worried they’re doing it wrong.

Either way, it struck me as something I wish I’d seen more of a few years ago when I was working this stuff out myself.

So I figured I’d show you how we do it at Yonder. Not because it’s perfect - there are almost certainly better ways to do this - but because I want to show you that budget planning doesn’t need to feel so daunting.

I was thinking about the best way to do this given how dynamic different products, markets and industries are. So I’m using some generic numbers and percentages rather than the actual ones we use at Yonder. It should make it a little easier to follow and implement yourself. Also, more importantly, I’m on sabbatical and I’ve been locked out of my work account so I can’t check them lol.

This will be most helpful for Series A+ startups with some budget but I think there are elements of this process that are usable for earlier and later stage organisations too. If you’re really early stage, I wouldn’t be spending too much time on budgeting in general.

Anyway, here’s how we set our budget and what we spend it on.

We start with a revenue target and work backwards

For context, Yonder is a premium rewards card aimed at Gen Z and millennials. I was VP Marketing until I went on sabbatical, and like most startup marketing leads, my job was to drive growth - but more specifically, revenue growth.

We start with our ARR target for the year. Typically this is set by a combination of where we need to be as a business, our funding, and what the board think is ambitious.

For the sake of this post, let’s say our target is to add £10 million ARR (it’s not, but the maths is cleaner this way).

We then look at what the average customer is worth to us in their first year.

At Yonder, that number varies. We have four product types (full credit, full debit, free credit, free debit) with different pricing and usage patterns. Some customers pay £15/month, some nothing, and they all behave differently. But for the sake of planning, we use a blended average - let’s call it £150 revenue per customer.

We then use payback - a period of time measured in months in which your marketing spend is ‘paid back’ by the revenue your customer generates - as a way to measure our marketing efficiency. Payback is a better way to measure efficiency because it ties your revenue and your costs together. It stops you overspending on low value customers, and gives you flexibility to spend more on higher value customers.

Our working model is based on a 9-month payback. So we’re happy to spend up to £112.50 to acquire a customer - or 75% of their first-year revenue. It’s hard to say how that might change depending on your industry but in general this is a reasonable goal that what works for us.

So:

• £10 million / £150 = 66,666 customers we need to acquire this year.

• 66,666 customers × £112.50 CAC = £7.5 million. This is our marketing budget.

Or, in other words, the amount we reasonably need to spend to hit our goals.

If we don’t want to spend this amount of money (or we don’t have it) then we either need to reduce our ARR target or find ways to bring down our CAC. It’s important to get to this point in collaboration with your CEO and others, because it shows what is possible will happen - not just what they want to happen.

Ultimately this is a bunch of assumptions that we’ll spend the year working on proving, disproving and adjusting. But it’s enough to get us going.

CAC = Onboarding costs + marketing spend

Our Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC) of £112.50 include all the costs involved in acquiring a customer, not just the media spend or marketing stuff.

For us, about 30% of our CAC goes to onboarding costs. Stuff like:

• Free trials (1–3 months depending on the offer)

• Welcome points and rewards (e.g. 10,000 when you join)

• Referral bonuses for existing members

• Credit checks

• ID verification

• Card production and delivery

That’s £33.75 per customer, or around £2.25 million total - money we have to spend before we even show up on someone’s Instagram feed.

An accountant will tell you these aren’t marketing costs because they sit in a different line item. The accountant is technically correct and practically useless. These are marketing decisions. You decide what the welcome offer is. You decide whether to send a metal card or a plastic one. And if you’re not counting them in your CAC, you’re kidding yourself. And your accountant.

So let’s make this the mental model:

• CAC = onboarding costs + marketing spend

• Marketing spend = Growth Now + Growth Later

Growth Now vs Growth Later

With onboarding costs taken out, we’ve got £5.25 million left in actual marketing spend.

We split that in half:

• Growth Now (performance) — stuff that drives customers in the next 30 days.

• Growth Later (brand) — stuff that drives demand in the next 6–12 months.

We’ve been too heavy on performance in the past. We’ve also gone too heavy on brand. But after years of overspending on one and neglecting the other, we’ve landed on a 50/50 split.

There are some ways to calculate this online for your product and industry, but not a lot of data on what this looks like for earlier-stage businesses.

Before we move on. Make sure to set your Growth Later budget first. Ring-fence it. Otherwise, performance will eat it alive the moment CPAs go up or you miss a monthly target.

Set the brand budget first, or you won’t have one.

Growth Now: Spend to capture existing demand

We’ve got £2.625 million to spend on performance.

Here’s the rough split:

• Meta (~40%, ~£87k/month): Our biggest channel. Great demographic fit, decent targeting, creative that converts. It’s more expensive than it used to be, but still where we see the most consistent volume.

• Comparison sites (~35%, ~£75k/month): Think MoneySuperMarket, Compare the Market. These are for folks who are in-market and looking. High intent but often high churn, annoyingly. We show up strategically, but we don’t optimise for volume - quality matters more.

• Affiliates (~15%, ~£30k/month): Cashback sites and deal forums. Lower volume, but good for online visibility and SEO.

• Experimental (~10%): Ongoing tests like new channels, new creative formats, whatever side-of-desk idea I’m running this month.

Meta hits people who aren’t looking yet. Comparison sites catch those who already are. Affiliates grab those who aren’t sure yet. None of them win alone. All of them work together.

Growth Later: Spend to generate future demand

The other £2.625 million goes into brand building.

This includes:

• Always-on content: Instagram, creators, influencer partnerships. Not performance content - just stuff that makes us worth noticing and remembering. This is inclusive of two full time headcount (content lead and videographer) plus all of our editing and creative costs.

• Seasonal podcast and other new media bursts: We’ll sponsor a few shows for 4–6 weeks, then go quiet. Keeps us fresh, avoids diminishing returns.

• 1–2 big consumer campaigns per year: Big brand swings. We’ve done campaigns like Pint Protection and WTF is APR?! that people actually talk about. They don’t convert today, but they pay off in every other channel later. These have long term strategic value for us and ultimately are measured on how they drive more incremental word of mouth from our existing base.

• Above the line: media buying for big above-the-line campaigns is often where most brands spend their brand budgets because you’re buying reach which ultimately gives you market share. This is expensive because of the scale. Think TV, billboards, radio etc.

Most people aren’t looking for a credit card right now. But when they are, we want to be top of mind. Or at least somewhere between Amex and “I’ll Google it.”

How we spend through the year

January is by far our biggest month - about 2x our monthly average.

So we ramp brand spend in December to prime demand. Then go full-funnel in January: performance, referral, content, the whole lot.

We stay elevated through February and March, then taper off in April and May when performance slows. Summer gets a bump again - holidays, events, higher spend - and autumn is our quieter testing window before ramping up for the next January.

We try to set our budget to follow human behaviour. Not quarters.

Who actually makes these decisions?

It’s not just me in a Google Sheet. It’s:

• Me, in a Google Sheet

• Our finance manager (asks smart, annoying questions)

• Our VP of Finance (asks the same ones, but louder)

• The CEO (wants more with less, always)

Marketing budgets touch everything - support, compliance, onboarding. Planning how much to spend isn’t just about efficiency. It’s about whether the company can actually absorb the growth you’re targeting. This is a collaborative process.

Final note

Anyway, I hope this is useful and gives you a little head start on building your own marketing budget.

Almost everything above is still unproven and driven by our assumptions as we learn more. We don’t know if 50/50 is optimal split for our Growth Now and Growth Later spend. Or if Meta deserves 40% or 60%. Or if January should be 2.2x average or 1.8x.

What we do know is that this approach feels like a reasonable way to use our limited resources to hit some pretty unreasonable targets.

It’s not perfect. But it’s working. And I promise you that’s good enough.

While I’ve got you…

My name is Tom. I’ve launched and grown products at some of the UK’s most loved consumer brands and I’m part of the founding team and VP Marketing at Yonder, a modern day rewards card. Since starting at Yonder, I’ve written about all my marketing learnings along the way.

If you're a senior marketer at a startup, this Substack is for you. I write about what actually works in startup marketing (and what definitely doesn't) for marketers on the verge of breakdown.

Subscribe now

You can find me on LinkedIn congratulating my mates on their new jobs, trolling Forbes articles about billionaires, and occasionally sharing something useful when absolutely forced to. Say hello.

I do some 1:1 consulting from time to time where my speciality is helping you understand why your brilliant product isn't selling itself. Contact me on LinkedIn if you're into that sort of thing.

Take my short reader survey so I can learn more about who reads this so I can write more useful stuff. I know you ask your customers to take surveys, so one won’t hurt you. Thanks in advance.

Refer a friend

Empathy in marketing is only half the job

If you’re new to marketing, someone will tell you soon enough to “put yourself in your customer’s shoes”.

In theory, it’s good advice. The idea is to build empathy. Think about how people live their lives, what motivates them, and what might make them care about what you’re selling. That stuff matters. It always will. So it’s a good place to start.

But after years of working on messaging and positioning strategies at companies of all sizes, I’ve realised the whole concept is slightly misunderstood, or at least missing a key piece.

Because even when you’re looking at things from the customer’s perspective, you’re still bringing all your own knowledge with you. You know how the product works. You know the category. You know the jargon, the entire backstory, the reason it got built in the first place and how it fits in with all your other products.

Believe it or not, your customers have managed to live full, happy lives without knowing, or caring, about any of this. Which is why one of the most important skills in messaging isn’t knowing what to say. It’s forgetting what you already know and starting from there.

The curse of knowing too much

When you take a step back from your messaging, you’ll probably notice it’s littered with assumptions about what people do or don’t know.

While understanding who they are and what they want to achieve is still pretty fundamental, obviously still do these things, it’s important to start asking yourself things like what do they even know? Not what they want. Not what they do on weekends. Not their personality type.

I mean, literally, what do they understand about products like yours?

It's everywhere once you see it

It’s easy for me to say ‘just forget what you know’ but in practice it’s not quite so simple. It’s not just that you know too much. It’s that you literally cannot imagine a world where you don’t know what you know.

And so, without meaning to, you build creative and position products on a foundation that only exists in your own head.

When I was at Wise, we launched a multi-currency account alongside our existing money transfer product. You could hold money in different currencies in one, and send money abroad with the other.

It made perfect sense to us so our messaging reflected so much of what we already knew. But customers had no idea why they were separate or how they worked together. It was obvious internally and confusing to everyone else. Which, as it turns out, is a terrible marketing strategy.

We’ve had similar challenges at Yonder too. We launched a feature early on called “Earn or Redeem” where you could choose to either spend your points or pay normally and earn them faster. It felt so clear to us and it solved a clear customer problem for when customer’s wanted to choose whether to use their points or not at one of our partners. Job done.

It turns out, before anyone could understand “Earn or Redeem,” they had to understand so much about Yonder for those words to actually make sense. Things like:

• How credit cards work

• That you earn points when you spend on them

• The difference between earning and redeeming points

• What “redeem” even means

• And, crucially, what points are in the first place

We’d assumed way too much because we already knew the answer to all of those things. Our messaging was perched on top of a scaffolding of customer knowledge that, frankly, didn’t exist.

The entire crypto industry is a masterclass in assuming knowledge nobody has. “Hedge your BTC by staking it on the chain to earn 5% interest!” For anyone outside the degen echo chamber, these are just words.

A little more humility, a little more forgetting, and maybe some of these products might have made the jump from Discord to the real world. (Side note: if your onboarding needs a YouTube tutorial, you’ve probably missed the mark.)

So what do you actually do about it?

It’s not glamorous, but I think the lesson here is to practice forgetting what we know when we talk about what we’re selling.

Every time you write copy, build a landing page, or work on some ad creative, ask yourself: what does someone need to know, and in what order, before any of this makes sense? Then just list it all out.

If you have the time, try run your drafts past people who don’t work with you. Watch them read it, then ask them to explain it back to you. If they can’t, there’s your answer mate.

Ultimately, no one lives and breathes your product like you do. Most people are busy, distracted, and won’t bother trying to understand your jargon, assumptions, or anything else that isn’t immediately clear to them.

So forget everything, and start from there.

While I’ve got you…

About me

My name is Tom. I’ve launched and grown products at some of the UK’s most loved consumer brands and I’m part of the founding team and VP Marketing at Yonder, a modern day rewards card. Since starting at Yonder, I’ve written about all my marketing learnings along the way.

If you're a senior marketer at a startup, this Substack is for you. I write about what actually works in startup marketing (and what definitely doesn't) for marketers on the verge of breakdown.

Subscribe now

You can find me on LinkedIn congratulating my mates on their new jobs, trolling Forbes articles about billionaires, and occasionally sharing something useful when absolutely forced to. Say hello.

I do some 1:1 consulting from time to time where my speciality is helping you understand why your brilliant product isn't selling itself. Contact me on LinkedIn if you're into that sort of thing.

Take my short reader survey so I can learn more about who reads this so I can write more useful stuff. I know you ask your customers to take surveys, so one won’t hurt you. Thanks in advance.

Refer a friend