Your first growth hire

You’ve raised money. You’ve built a product. You’ve run your first launch. You’ve got your first users. Now you need to grow. Who should you hire to help you? This guide will cover who you should hire and how you should hire them.

Growth and marketing teams can have very specialized roles. If you ask the wrong person, here’s what you’ll hear:

Founder: I want to run some Instagram ads for my new app. Who should I hire?

Growth Advisor: You're looking for a Growth Marketer. Well, actually, since you're talking about paid advertising specifically, you want a Paid Marketer. Hold on—Instagram ads are direct response, so that's technically Performance Marketing. But wait, Instagram is a social platform, meaning you really need a Social Media Performance Marketer. Actually—do you have your images and videos for your ads?

Founder: Not yet...

Growth Advisor: Ah, then you'll also need a Creative Producer to make those. So, to clarify: you want someone to run the Instagram campaigns this is a Media Buyer specialized in Social Media ads who collaborates with your Creative Producer. Oh, and you'll want to analyze performance too? Well, that's another hire — a Performance Marketing Data Scientist.

Founder: So I need to hire a Media Buyer specialized in Social Media ads?

Growth Advisor: Exactly! And also a Creative Producer. Plus a Performance Marketing Data Scientist. And don’t forget a Marketing Ops Engineer to integrate everything seamlessly. Now, let's move on to Google Ads...

Founder: This all sounds incredibly complicated.

Growth Advisor: It is. But you know what — great news! My agency can handle everything for you. Completely risk-free. We have an amazing success-based pricing model. If we hit your growth targets, we just ask for your firstborn child.

Luckily, at the start you don’t need this level of specialization. Instead, hire generalists first; specialists later.

Your first growth hire — a Growth Marketer

What does the first growth hire do? They should deeply understand the product, iterate with you on messaging and positioning, create the website, run the launches and then stand up and test new growth channels such as SEO. No one has heard of your startup and so it’s a mistake to hire someone who only wants to do product marketing (defining the messaging/positioning and making the collateral). Instead, they should make sure this is done well but be primarily responsible for top of funnel metrics: brand awareness, sign ups, subscribers, leads.

For job title — I lean towards Growth Marketer.

The core skills needed for this are:

• Ability to deeply understand the product, the market and the customer.
  • Why? They need to effectively translate between your product and the outside world. The requirements here will vary significantly by product. If you’re doing a social media app for teens you might not need a specific background. But if you’re selling an AI developer tool — they need to be technical enough to understand deeply the tool and communicate it — you might need to hire an ex-engineer.
• Excellent copywriting.
  • Why? They’ll be writing many words: the messaging, website, email sequences, ads, and more. Writing great words is high leverage. Great words will turn visitors into customers and customers into advocates.
• Strong eye for design.
  • Why? They’ll be making many assets: the website, social media assets, ads, billboards. Having an eye for design and a working ability with Figma will reduce external dependencies. Have a great designer set the brand direction and create templates which they can leverage.
• Highly organized with great project management skills.
  • Why? They’ll be running multiple launches and campaigns, with each campaign having many parts. They’ll need to be the central driver and executor for many of these. You’ll need someone who creates the checklist, ruthlessly stack rank the tasks, executes and then repeats.
• Data fluency.
  • Why? They’ll be standing up new channels, analyzing results and allocating budget. If they run an A/B test but don’t take into account that the arms are unbalanced you’ll be doubling down on the worse option — and compounding the wrong way…

They should have high-agency, be a ridiculously quick learner and not be afraid to learn new tools/systems.

I explicitly don’t believe you need years of growth or marketing experience. Some of the best growth people we have hired were previous founders and PMs with no formal marketing experience. Hire for gradient over y-intercept. People launching their own projects and companies is a great indicator having the abilities listed as well as high agency.

How to hire Growth Marketers

To assess these skills. I’ve found good success with the following steps:

1. Application review and past work review.
   1. Ask for links to previous work samples in the application. The best candidates will have proof of work — great examples of copy, design, messaging and positioning.
2. Screening interview.
   1. Ask questions to assess are they a culture fit, high-agency, an outlier to their peers, ability to learn new tools quickly, an understanding of the product and space.
3. Take home challenge — making a launch email.
   1. Create an email for a launch of a hypothetical product that has close parallels to your product. This requires defining the messaging and positioning; writing engaging copy; and designing assets to grab the users’ attention and convert. Adapt the challenge to your type of business. For example, if you’re building a mobile consumer app the challenge could be to create an onboarding flow.
4. Live challenge — make a growth strategy.
   1. Outline the growth strategy for a new hypothetical product that’s a similar type of product to yours. Ask them to screen share a Google doc and have them lead the session covering the positioning/messaging, how they’d run the launch, and how they’d continue to grow it to millions in revenue. Can they quickly grasp the main details? Can they come up with messaging and positioning which will deeply resonate. Do they have good intuitions about how to grow it? Can they speak through the maths for how they’d evaluate the results?

What roles should you hire next?

The roles you hire next will vary based on the market and your existing team’s capabilities. But here are some particularly useful ones:

• Growth Engineer / Hacker - frontend leaning (recommended second growth hire)
  • Frontend leaning engineer with a strong interest in growth, ability to write engaging copy and do design. They’ll be able to spin up SEO pages, create interactive homepages, optimize your activation and subscription flows, and create viral mini-tools.
• Growth Engineer / Hacker - backend leaning
  • Backend leaning engineer with a strong interest in growth, ability to scrape data and integrate tools. They’ll be able to run large scale automated outbound campaigns, set up referral/affiliate programs, and set up the data needed for performance marketing.
• Website Designer / Builder
  • An excellent designer who’s comfortable with Webflow/Framer. Your website is the highest leverage sales person you’ll ever have — for selling to future customers, partners and candidates. This person owns the core pages of the website and collaborates with the Growth Engineer / Hacker on SEO pages.
• Brand Designer / Graphic Designer
  • Create the static assets for your website, email campaigns, launches, and pitch decks.
• Motion Designer / Videographer / Creative Producer
  • Create the videos for your launches, social media, website, customer stories and more. Videos are dominating social media algorithms and are still underrated.

When to hire channel specialists?

As you near PMF and start to prove out acquisition channels you want to double down on them. Hire a specialist to focus on just that channel and the associated KPIs. Make it their one thing and one thing only.

Post-PMF there will be channels you haven’t yet proven but know from comparable companies / competitors that should work. If you have the resourcing, I’d lean towards hiring early as the main cost is the opportunity cost of the channel not yet bringing in $1M+ per month of profit rather than the extra headcount cost.

When a channel is working and having only one person on that channel becomes a bottleneck, hire further. Eventually you will end up with a Media Buyer, a creative producer and a data scientist — all just focused on social media ads — but it will be worth it.

Why you shouldn’t hire a paid marketing specialist too early

For B2B, the initial loop of building a great product and launching it should be able to get you to PMF. If it doesn’t, you likely haven’t cracked the right product/positioning yet. Your paid ads won’t be positive ROAS and spending time optimizing the ads and funnel will just waste attention. Instead, have your Growth Marketer set up protective bidding on your own brand, conquesting and maybe a quick test of the main keywords.

For consumer, this is different however. With B2B, you know that if you can get customers to love your product and your ACV is high enough you can scale with a sales team. However, for consumer if you’ve built a great product that someone loves there’s not the same guarantee you’ll be able to scale acquisition. You need to more closely iterate on the growth loop as part of the initial product work which could include paid acquisition.

Should you hire agencies, contractors, and advisors?

When you’re testing a channel, a key risk is a poor quality test. If your ads are rubbish, you won’t learn whether or not Instagram ads will work for you. You’ll just learn that your rubbish ads don’t convert. Instead, you need to do high effort tests to see if there’s signs of life.

The right agencies and contractors can be a quick fix to run high quality tests. The tricky part is finding agencies which are good and the significant time overhead in managing them. Make sure you vet which individual in the agency who will actually do the work — not just that the agency owner is excellent.

I once accidentally ended up with an agency managing a contractor, managing a group of contractors. It was freelancers all the way down… And the principal-agent problem is real.

If you test with an agency and find signs of life, I’d recommend in-sourcing quickly to increase quality and scale.

Alternatively, have your Growth Marketer work with an external channel expert for ad-hoc input but keep the execution in-house.

Next steps

It’s now time to hire your first growth hire. Most likely this should be a Growth Marketer. Write an excellent job ad (test your own copywriting skills). Source widely through friends, investors and past colleagues. Screen for excellent proof of work, do a relevant take home challenge, and test how they think live. Hire for gradient over y-intercept. Then supplement the team with Growth Engineers, Website Designers, Brand Designers and Motion Designers. Over time, as you prove channels and reach PMF hire in individuals to focus on just one channel. Then turn those individuals into teams. Leverage agencies, contractors and advisors as needed, but be cautious.

It’s becoming a meme that the goal is to have a $1 billion dollar company with just 1 employee (you). But there’s no prize for revenue per employee. The prize is for impact and long-term free cash flow. It’s better to have a $2 billion dollar company with 100 employees than a $1Bn dollar company with 1 employee. Management has overhead but with the right people you’ll get way further and have more fun doing so.

Overall, you as the founder are ultimately responsible for growth. But you can hire excellent people to help you get there.