The Marketer Question
Nobody needs a marketer. People need customers. A marketer is one of several ways to get customers, and by a wide margin the most expensive way to find out you do not have a product. This is the thinking nobody does before posting the job: five questions, six stages, and what each option costs.
Format · 10-page PDF · English and Russian editions · Free, no gate
English edition
The Marketer Question · 10 pages · A4
Russian edition
Вопрос про маркетолога · 10 страниц · A4
How to Read This
Answer the five questions in order. Stop where you get a no and do what it says. Only a yes on all five sends you to the stages, where the hire is a function of size and maturity, not ambition. Cost figures are US market, 2026, from the sources on the last page. Other markets run lower; the ratios hold.
01The Five Questions
Most people leave at question one or two, which is the whole point: a marketer is what you need when you have run out of cheaper things you have not done yet.
Does anyone buy this without you personally in the room?
Q1No. You do not need a marketer. You need a product people want, or a clearer story about the one you have. Sell it yourself thirty times.
Can you say who it is for and why they pick you in one sentence, without the word innovative?
Q2No. Positioning, not headcount. Buy two or three hours of a senior person's time to write that sentence with you, then do the marketing yourself.
Do you know where your last ten customers came from?
Q3No. Founder-led marketing plus a spreadsheet. Ask every customer how they found you. Costs nothing, explains everything.
Is there one channel where money goes in and customers come out, predictably?
Q4No. Run experiments. Buy the execution by the hour. A salary is what you put on a channel you have found, not on the search for one.
Are you now the bottleneck?
Q5No. Keep going. You are the marketer. What you need is hands, not another brain.
Yes. You need a marketer. Which marketer depends entirely on how big you are and how grown-up the business is.
02Six Stages, Six Answers
Size and maturity, not ambition. Ambition is what got you here; it is not a hiring plan. The PDF carries the spend band, the do-not list, and the sourced number for each stage.
The idea
Pre-revenue
You. Founder-led everything, plus the free tools.
The shop
SMB, 1 to 10 people
You, plus one freelancer, one channel.
The startup, before fit
Under $500K ARR
Founder-led marketing, with a senior advisor on call.
The startup, after fit
$500K to $3M ARR
One senior generalist who owns one channel and one number.
The scale-up
$3M to $20M
A real Head or VP of Marketing who builds a team of two to five.
The grown-up
$20M and up
A full CMO who is accountable for revenue, not applause.
The short version, for people who skipped to the end
If nobody buys it, you need a product. If you cannot say who it is for, you need a sentence. If you do not know where customers come from, you need a spreadsheet. If nothing works predictably, you need experiments and hired hands. If something works and you are the bottleneck, now you need a marketer, and the size of the marketer should match the size of the business, not the size of the ambition.
Ready when you are.
Discovery calls are 30 minutes. First one's on me.