Some founders wonder whether starting marketing too soon could hurt their startup’s focus. Could it take attention away from refining the product or identifying the right customers? Or, on the flip side, is it essential to build buzz and gain traction from day one? It’s a question worth addressing because, frankly, the misconceptions surrounding early-stage marketing are widespread—and they’re sinking startups.
Let me say this bluntly: the idea that marketing should wait is not just wrong; it’s dangerous. If someone in your circle told you that marketing might be a distraction, they likely don’t understand what marketing truly is. And unfortunately, this misunderstanding is at the core of why most startups fail.
What Marketing Really Means
When people think of marketing, they often confuse it with advertising or promotions—efforts aimed at selling something. But that’s not marketing. Marketing isn’t just about shouting your message to the world; it’s about determining what message to shout, who you’re shouting it to, and whether anyone will care when you do.
I fueled a bit of a chat on reddit…
“People just straight up don’t know what “marketing” means, even within the marketing ecosystem. Especially lower down in organizations, people are specialized and tend to see marketing as either Promotion or whatever their day to day entails, without understanding the big picture. They fundamentally do not understand the difference between strategy and tactics, which is why you get posts on here like “What marketing strategy should I use, Facebook ads, or influencers?” – Growth Marketing Mike
Marketing is foundational. It’s the process of understanding the market, analyzing competitors, exploring trends, identifying opportunities, and, most importantly, uncovering the needs and behaviors of potential customers. It informs every decision you make as a startup—what to build, how to position it, when to launch, and where to focus your resources.
If you’re not doing marketing, you’re essentially flying blind.
“Customer Discovery” is NOT a Standalone Process
You’ve probably heard the term “customer discovery,” especially if you’ve read The Lean Startup. Founders love it because it sounds actionable and straightforward: talk to potential customers, validate your idea, and move forward. But here’s the harsh truth—customer discovery is marketing, technically market research. It’s just a small part of the much broader, more complex marketing ecosystem.
Problems arise when founders mistake limited customer discovery for comprehensive market validation. Talking to 20 people who affirm your idea isn’t enough; worse, if you’ve been told “talk to customers” and make decisions about your startup because of what you’ve already defined to be the customers. That won’t tell you how to differentiate from competitors, how to price your product, how to build partnerships, or how to position your brand. It won’t create market awareness, investor interest, or even initial traction.
Without marketing’s full toolkit, you’re likely building a product in a vacuum—and hoping for the best.
Startups often fail because they neglect marketing or approach it incorrectly. They focus solely on building the product, assuming “if we build it, they will come.” Spoiler: they don’t come. Not without marketing.
Marketing isn’t something you tack on after product development. It’s the lens through which product development happens. A good marketer will guide the entire process:
- Identifying which features customers genuinely care about (not just the ones they say they care about).
- Understanding the competitive landscape and building a product that stands out.
- Creating initial content, partnerships, and brand awareness to ensure there’s demand before you launch.
Done well, marketing doesn’t just support your product—it shapes it.
The Misplaced Fear of Metrics
Another objection I hear is that marketing risks becoming too metrics-driven, focused on hitting arbitrary numbers rather than doing meaningful work. This is a misunderstanding of what true marketing entails. Good marketing doesn’t chase meaningless KPIs; it defines which metrics actually matter and aligns the entire company around achieving them.
“The success of “marketing” has been replaced in the KPI/OKR world by essentially just success metrics of the company. Leads, sales, etc are all put on marketing because so much falls under that umbrella and a lot of these MBA/Finance type people feel the need to quantify the success of all those people they are paying. The issue is, because they don’t really fundamentally understand marketing, they over quantify it and focus too much on short-term down funnel metrics.” – Growth Marketing Mike
For instance, if your marketing reveals that competitors are weak in organic search visibility, a strong marketer will recommend investing in SEO and content creation to exploit that gap. If marketing uncovers that a specific audience is particularly engaged on a niche platform, your company’s efforts should pivot there. Marketing is strategic; it dictates where the company’s focus should lie, not the other way around.
Founders: Marketing Isn’t Optional
As a founder, your job isn’t to do marketing but to ensure it’s done—and done well. I’ve *never* met a founder who does it well, and challenging, most “marketers” are really only doing advertising, social media, or some other slice of marketing, misleading using the word to describe themselves, watch for it. Marketing doesn’t mean delegating customer discovery to product managers or ignoring competitive analysis until after the product is built and it doesn’t mean waiting on promoting what you’re doing until you’re ready to sell it. It means treating marketing as the backbone of your business strategy from day one.
When marketing is dismissed or misunderstood, startups fail. Research consistently shows that poor marketing execution is the top reasons for startup failure. It’s not just a symptom of failure; it’s often the cause.
Reframe what you Think is the Role of Marketing in Startups
The core purpose of marketing is to make selling unnecessary. If you’ve done your job well, customers will come to you. That means building a foundation long before you launch—a foundation that includes market research, competitive analysis, brand positioning, audience development, and creating demand.
It’s not an afterthought, nor is it a distraction. It’s the map that guides you to success. So, start marketing early, do it thoroughly, and make it the bedrock of everything you build. Ignore this at your peril.
Paul O’Brien this is a good article and a reminder that we all have to create an audience before converting customers.
Here’s the best way I’ve been able to explain it. Marketing is a research and development activity. It comes first in every business. And because it is R&D, it occurs throughout the business. A company solves a problem for customers, and must understand who the customers are, what the demographic is, and what the market opportunity is. In almost every pitch deck the first slide (after title) is a problem statement. That problem statement, along with the TAM, SAM, and SOM is all marketing.
If you are not doing your marketing first, you might as well start your business over.
Chris Hood The number of times I’ve sat in an incubator and had to debate this with founders, is the leading indicator of why so many founders fail
Without understanding the competitive landscape, without knowing the customer, without knowing the product/market fit, a startup is doomed
Paul O’Brien that’s because they want the technology to be first, instead of their customers. I hear you!
You know it, Paul . Founders often see marketing as just ads or social media tactics. Marketing is strategy—it informs product development, positioning, and the roadmap for growth, not just tactics.
As a CMO, I’ve seen how early marketing ensures alignment across the business and avoids costly missteps. It’s not a distraction; it’s how startups thrive.
I call this Brand Strategy rather than marketing but people don’t seem to understand that term either.
They often want to market a poorly branded product or service without this research determining if other people in the market CARE about what they perceive as a problem to be solved and waste a lot of money.
Paul O’Brien. Spot on! Well written and exactly what founders need to understand. Many founders put marketing in a box for ‘marketing people’ while they get on with the real job of creating a product. You can’t separate marketing from customers and products.
THIS. The amount of people who use “social ads” and “marketing” interchangeably irk me. ? same as people who use enterprise and startup interchangeably. Bugbears.
We use marketing to assess what our audience COULD be. Our content has been in front of over 1B sets of eyes this year. Its almost an average of 200M people per month. It isn’t a measure of how much money we can make this week. It is a litmus test to see who is interested, what demographics look like, and where to spend our marketing dollars as we grow. While some of our efforts are likened to a billboard beside a highway, I like to think that most marketing is about potential.
*Effective* marketing isn’t only broadcasting, it’s also listening. Listening to what the market is saying. Listening for insights on how to improve your brand/product positioning.
“Seek first to understand, then be understood.”
That said, I believe part of the issue – and I’ve mentioned this previously – is that what’s called marketing today is very often advertising. That is, sending messages through some channels. That’s ok but it’s important and better when the msgs are marketing-based (and not effectively random and directionless). Put another way, just because you’re advertising doesn’t mean you’re *effectively* marketing.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/some-best-book-bits-positioning-al-ries-jack-trout-mark-simchock-3gjce/
Actually marketing means what does your audience need and how do you fulfill that need. You meet your audience’s needs in a way that no one else can.
Nimra Quraishi Actually, that’s only partially what marketing “means “
Mark Simchock Advertising is a tactic. It’s not marketing. Ries was one of the greats of his day. But do you understand product positioning? Or the elements of strategy and positioning? To position your product you must understand the competitive landscape. I could write more, but it’s only 0300, and I’m going back to sleep
Gail Gonzales Brand strategy is an element of a marketing plan. After reading this entire thread from the original post to the last comment, I’m not very sure that many people have a full grasp of the difference between true MARKETING (and the marketing plan), and the elements of tactics.
My apologies, but when you write “…often want to market a poorly branded product…” your use of the word “market” is synonymous with SELL.
PS: I cut my MARKETING (strategy) teeth over 50 years ago on Madison Avenue working for clients like Proctor & Gamble, Lever Brothers, Johnson & Johnson, Dixie Northern and other major brands at agencies long ago renamed or bought out like SSC&B, Benton & Bowles and Scali, McCabe & Sloves. For the last 30 years, I’ve used these skill sets in “deep tech.”
Paul
Look, both, you’re dancing around the nuance of it but the primary reason I Liked Gail’s comment but didn’t reply, is that if you want to call it Brand Strategy, fine, call it Brand Strategy, but it is a sub-set of Marketing. Marketing is the umbrella that supersedes everything else we’re considering… the mistake we all make is misrepresenting it and as such, confusing founders (and investors and advisors)
Paul, you are spot on! First of all entrepreneurs don’t follow rules, they break them. Marketing and PR is everything in any company. Yes, you have to have a great product but if you have a great product and no one knows about it, you have nothing. I have built many companies and my most successful action was marketing and PR and positioning. I now just launched a start-up. At the beginning of developing my MVP, I decided I needed users to sign up, even without an MVP. I didn’t question my instinct but went ahead and worked that in to the MVP project as the first step…to create a sign up page. Then I put an ad on Instagram for $20/day to see what we might get. Well…the rest is history as within two months we had 6,000 sign ups!!! With the launch it was easy to get them back but more importantly by then we knew there was a huge demand for our product/concept and had a global reach. That is why you are so right. Marketing can’t start soon enough! Susie Coelho.
Absolutely agree, Paul. Marketing is the backbone of any startup. It’s not just about finding customers; it’s about creating a narrative that resonates. Starting early means you’re not just building a product, but a brand that people care about
Get real, movies start marketing years before they start production. So do politicians. Launching a kickstarter is marketing & pre-sales. What moron counsels against early marketing?
Miles Fidelman you’d be surprised, I’ve been in meetings with VCs while they tell founders they shouldn’t be marketing.
Moron is being too kind to them, these people are at best, HARMING our economy and the lives and possibilities of these founders, and at worst, they’re just completely ignorant and shouldn’t be investing at all.