141 - Mistakes To Avoid When Hiring Your First Head of Marketing (Emily Kramer, Co-Founder at MKT1)

I love bringing on other startup marketing experts and Emily Kramer is no exception. Plus she's just super down to earth and was fun to talk to.

Emily Kramer is Co-Founder at MKT1 (helps founders and marketers build and scale their marketing functions through their fund MKT1 Capital, advising & consulting, and content and courses). She's like a “CMO investor” because she's got a fund (MKT1 Capital) that’s focused on early-stage B2B startups. Prior, Emily led and built marketing teams from the ground up at Carta (now Series G), Asana (IPOd), Astro (acquired by Slack), and Ticketfly (acquired by Eventbrite).

Emily shares really useful articles that have to do with startups and marketing and I'm going to link to them in the show notes down below in case you want to check them out.

In this episode we cover:

What does “creative” mean to you (HINT: most people think brand and design, but it goes way beyond that);

First marketing hire at a Seed vs. Series A vs. Series B startup - what matters;

As the first marketing hire 4X, what is one thing you learned and then changed about your approach to heading up marketing;

How did you balance creativity with results;

Why you need to be saving time to make big bets;

When you’re setting goals (OKRs) you can’t just set KPI goals (e.g. leads + conversion rate) because your creative big bet projects won’t succeed.

You can find Emily on LinkedIn.

You can learn more about MKT1.

Here's a great article that Emily wrote on how to organize your early stage SaaS marketing org and here's another one about marketing goal-setting.

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