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Marketing Best Practices
Reserve Marketing Spend for Commoditized Markets
Khaled Hassounah made a deliberate decision to skip marketing spend entirely, and his reasoning comes down to when marketing actually earns its place. “Marketing is often something that you do when you have a commoditized product where almost everybody is selling and you want to tell people why what you’re having is better than the other option.” In markets with genuine demand and a product that solves a real problem, he argued that spend is simply not necessary: “if you give people something that they need and that fundamentally solves a problem, you almost always don’t need to market it.” His operating principle is straightforward: “have a unique enough solution that fundamentally solves the user problem and adds a significant value, and then it’s going to market itself.” For operators deciding where to allocate early resources, Khaled’s framework pushes them to first ask whether their market is commoditized before committing budget to marketing programs.
Lead With Science to Disarm Skeptical Buyers
When your technology carries public perception risk, leading with scientific credibility is a deliberate messaging choice, not just a communication style. Omar Abou-Sayed, Co-Founder and Executive Chairman of Vaulted Deep, built his company’s marketing around a science-first approach because it tackles buyer skepticism head-on before it becomes an objection. As Omar put it, the approach “addresses a lot of the concerns that a person of good faith comes into this conversation with, who isn’t well studied on the topic, but thinks, you know, has heard things.” He also recognized that science-first messaging is not the only entry point. “There’s another angle we could start with, which is really about the co-benefits and about solving multiple problems at once. And I think that really resonates with other audiences.” The lesson for operators is that your core messaging architecture should do two jobs at once: neutralize the objections your most skeptical buyers walk in with, while giving you a secondary track for audiences who respond to a different frame entirely.
Position Your Solution as the Low-Risk Choice in Conservative Markets
Marc Borrett built Reactive Technologies’ marketing positioning around a single insight: conservative buyers evaluate new vendors through the lens of personal risk, not just organizational value. He described it in concrete terms: “If you imagine a risk dial for a customer, we need to move that dial from. We’re not the risky innovative solution that might cost your job. If you go with us with a proven technology solution that delivers the measurements that you need to run your grid so you don’t have either increased cost or increased risk that you can’t manage.” To move that dial, he focused marketing efforts on participation in industry standards bodies, because credibility with those bodies signals safety to the buyer. “That really comes down to working with standards bodies, technical bodies that really help set what good looks like from a technical engineering perspective across the industry.” The marketing goal, as Marc put it, was straightforward: “to make sure that we explain very clearly why our solution works and why there is not, in our view, a better way to do it.”
Disclose Product Limitations Early to Protect Customer Trust
Scott Graybeal made radical transparency a core part of Caelux’s marketing strategy, treating honest disclosure of product limitations as a competitive advantage rather than a weakness. The reasoning was straightforward: overselling and then underdelivering ends the relationship permanently. “If anything, we’re a bit too transparent. We tell people where the warts are and we say where the challenges are and own them. Because otherwise I think you’re lying to yourself as a company and you certainly don’t want to lie to customers. You get zero chances after that.” He connected this directly to how the company positioned itself in the market: “You have to set expectations correctly. And that’s very much part of our marketing strategy.”
Earn Buyer Trust by Showing Up as the Domain Expert
Kai made a deliberate choice about how he showed up publicly in ACCURE’s market. Rather than presenting himself as a startup CEO or salesperson, he positioned himself as an industry expert, explaining that “by going out there as the battery expert and not as the serial founder, or not as the salesperson, but really as the expert that knows the industry fairly well, this is what we want to communicate with our audience.” The signal he wanted to send was about the caliber of the team behind the product: “we have some of the most talented, dedicated battery people in the world together. And that makes such a difference. Companies that work with us are guaranteed to work with people that are the best on the planet.” For founders selling into technical or specialized markets, the most credible marketing asset is often the founder’s own expertise, deployed consistently and publicly.
Invest in Brand Where Your Competitors Have Ignored It
In technical, industrial, and scientific markets, a strong brand is rare enough to be a real differentiator. Chris Tolles, CEO of Yard Stick PBC, saw this gap clearly: “I think there’s an enormous opportunity to stand out if you are a super sciencey company with just some basic decent brand practice.” He noted that this level of brand attention is “more common in consumer contexts,” which is precisely what makes it powerful in B2B markets where competitors have set a low bar. For founders in highly technical categories, the implication is direct: the bar for standing out through brand is lower than it looks, and most competitors will leave that opportunity on the table.
Make Buyer Education the Foundation of Your Brand
Alexis built education into Greenly’s brand as an operational principle, not a tagline. Because most of their buyers were coming in with little to no prior knowledge of the category, making people smarter was a genuine market advantage. He was explicit about what that actually meant in practice: “We’ve made it into a value to make people smarter. And of course a value could be a bit corporate. So we try to detail what that really means. If you’re a designer, it means no black box effect. You know, always be explaining what you’re doing, always be educating.” The marketing reflected the same logic: “Our marketing was very inspired by talking to non-experts, so educating the SMB.” Alexis was clear that this approach requires real effort: “Explaining rather complex things simply is actually harder than you think.”
Meet Technical Buyers Through Peer Channels and Trade Shows
In highly technical markets, conventional demand generation tends to fall flat. Adrienne Pierce found this firsthand, noting that “we’ve tried some lead generation and things like that, but there’s such a timing factor and it is such a complex area that a lot of things have to align in order for that type of marketing to really sort of pay off.” The alternative was to show up where technical buyers already spend their time and have real conversations. “We found that it is a bit of a wonky sector. So we’re really kind of meeting folks at a technical level, a lot of discussions at trade shows, talking on panels, doing podcasts, that sort of thing, joining the conversations on LinkedIn and then just having a really approachable website so that people will be sparked and inspired and reach out to us.” When the buyer is sophisticated, credibility earned through peer channels does more work than any campaign.
Choose a Mission That Gives You a Marketing Advantage Competitors Cannot Buy
Kathy Hannun identified mission-driven positioning as one of Dandelion’s most durable marketing assets. “Starting a company that is mission driven like Dandelion has been a big advantage because we get a fair amount of press coverage and people are inherently somewhat interested in the thing that we’re doing. And that’s been really helpful for raising awareness.” She was direct about why this advantage is structural rather than replicable: “It’s an advantage that geothermal heating and cooling has that like any other type of heating and cooling wouldn’t really have.” The principle she drew from it extends beyond her specific category: “If you’re trying to do something ambitious or unusual or a little noteworthy in some way, that will just translate to a big marketing advantage.” Press coverage and organic interest are effectively free distribution, and the companies that earn them are the ones doing something worth talking about.
Design Your Marketing to Attract Talent as Much as Customers
Antoine framed talent attraction as one of the primary jobs of marketing, not a secondary benefit of brand awareness. “One of the main aspects of our marketing is really attracting great talent, where you want to have core messages that are truthful and that reflect your company culture, in your marketing and the face you show as the company.” The discipline he applied to that messaging was the same he applied to customer communication: honesty about real problems and real solutions. “We do little, but we’re truthful in what we do. When we do something, we want to be aware of real problems and we want to be honest in our communication of how we identify these problems and how we aim or have solved them.” For early-stage founders with limited marketing resources, building a brand that speaks to customers and to the people you want to hire is one of the highest-leverage uses of that spend.
Delay Broad Marketing Until You Can Consistently Deliver
Going public too early is a trap that’s easy to fall into and hard to recover from. Stefanie Gerhart, co-founder and CCO of ecoLocked, wrestled with this timing question directly: “It was always a big question for us, when should we really go out and become very vocal about what we are doing? Because we knew it would take some time and there’s the risk then that you go out. Everyone is interesting and looking and wanting to talk, but you’re not ready. And until you get ready, you are kind of yesterday’s news.” Her answer was to stay quiet and work closely with a small number of customers first. “We actually really tried to work with a handful of customers to make sure we are market ready and we are ramping up our marketing efforts, really just I would say in the last few months. So this is kind of two years from founding.” The window of attention you get from a public launch is finite. Spend it when you can actually convert it.
Establish Brand Recognition Before You Chase Pipeline in a New Category
Javier Marti, CEO and Founder of Divirod, made a deliberate sequencing decision early on: build recognition before chasing leads. His reasoning was that broad awareness, even among people who will never buy, creates the foundation that demand generation requires. As he put it, “the more you get to be known by the audience, no matter if they’re buyers or not, the better.” He was explicit about the priority order: “In the early phase, it’s all about getting your brand to be known, getting you to be known by what you’re doing, by who you are, what you’re putting in the market, what you’re building.” For founders building in categories where buyers don’t yet have a budget line for your solution, this sequencing matters. You can’t generate demand for something the market hasn’t heard of yet.
Find a Senior Marketing Advisor Before Investing in Any Major Channel
Most founders scale marketing tactics before they understand how to execute them well. Jan-Willem made the opposite call. Before committing seriously to trade shows as a channel, he went looking for someone who had already built the playbook. As he described it, “one of the better decisions I’ve made was to look for a marketing advisor this time around because it is so important.” He reached out directly on LinkedIn to the former CMO of Datadog, who agreed to advise the company. What followed was a transfer of operational knowledge that changed how Jan-Willem approached events entirely: “one of the things that I’ve learned from him is how to run a trade show. How you can bring process, structure, discipline in trade shows so that you can almost mechanically measure from the people you will speak to the sales qualified leads, how you can design outputs from these kinds of events.”
Build Three Separate Marketing Functions With Three Separate Goals
Manik structured the company’s marketing around three distinct functions, each serving a different purpose. The first was company-level marketing: “a combination of PR and comms. We’re working on thought leadership. We’re trying to be visible to potential investors and potential team members as well as potential partners.” The second was product marketing, focused squarely on equipping sales: “developing collateral, developing training materials, building tools such as ROI calculators and interactive websites, and one pagers and downloadable white papers and case studies, stuff that can help sales deliver the message and convert prospects.” The third was growth marketing, tasked with building pipeline: “using a combination of SEO and SEM, trying to drive traffic to a series of landing pages, helping us to find prospects, get them engaged, get them through the stages of awareness and intent, and then ultimately transferring or helping those folks find our salespeople.” Each function had a distinct audience and a distinct job, which kept the overall marketing effort from collapsing into one undifferentiated program.
Give Your Audience Value Before You Ask Them for Anything
Quentin built Modo Energy’s content strategy around a deliberate decision to remove conversion pressure entirely. “We’re here to build an audience. And the way you build an audience is by not convincing them to click or submit their data through your form, your online form. What they want to do is just get value and go away.” The logic was that trust accumulates across repeated touchpoints long before a buyer is ready to engage. “They might have 1,520 interactions with us on LinkedIn, YouTube and Twitter or whatever before they go, oh, that’s a brand I’m interested in. And so that’s what we decided to do. Zero click marketing video as the ultimate form of communication in this world.” The goal of early content is not to capture demand, it is to build the trust that makes demand possible later.