The stuff nobody tells you about startup marketing

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The stuff nobody tells you about startup marketing<br>Doing weird stuff on the internet is optional but recommended

Charles Cook<br>May 06, 2026

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Every few weeks, a founder emails me some version of the same thing:<br>“We’re getting early traction. How do we start doing marketing?”<br>Most advice is written for people at companies that already know what they’re doing. You don’t. That’s fine. I didn’t either when I joined PostHog in 2020, and somehow I’m still here!<br>This is everything about marketing that I’d tell the Charles who doesn’t know anything in 2020.

1. You do have experience

People who contact me think marketing is a thing they haven’t started yet.<br>I used to think the same, but it turns out a bunch of things we were already doing at PostHog was marketing. We just didn’t think of it like that.<br>Our launch post on Hacker News? Marketing.

An unusually deep employee handbook on a weird-looking website? Also marketing.

Posting what is basically your diary to your company website? Marketingggggg!

Marketing is simply closing the gap between what you’re building and the people who’d care about it. Our handbook is a good example: James and Tim knew early users might doubt there was a real company behind PostHog, so they published all internal processes and values on the main website to build credibility fast.<br>So no, you don’t need a fancy strategy, brand guidelines, a content calendar, or a paid budget. Just figure out what your audience finds interesting and talk about it. Plus, when you treat marketing this way, your brand will be that much more authentic.

2. Depth-first > breadth-first

So you have something working. Yay.<br>The instinct at this point is to write a list of 5-10 other channels to try in the hope that one of them also works. This is a great way to end up, six months later, with a pile of stuff that didn’t work and no idea why.<br>It’s much better to do more of the thing that’s already showing signs of life. If you went mildly viral on LinkedIn, keep posting every day. If a podcast appearance converted, email another hundred. If a blog post got picked up, write the next one. And the next one.<br>That’s what we did early on to get our first 1,000 users. When we saw early success with our HN launch, James kept serial posting founder blogs about everything behind the scenes:<br>A reflection after the HN launch on what made it successful, and what we wanted to do with the momentum.

An explainer about how we raised $3M in seed funding as an open source company (including all the tactical details of VC meetings to the boring paperwork).

A retro about how we pivoted through six failed product ideas before landing on open source product analytics.

Going niche forces you to develop something unique in a way that others can’t copy. A big company could never write a “founder blog” series the way we did – being small and relatively unknown allowed us to be as transparent as we are.<br>So go deep, not wide, and resist the temptation to half-ass a bunch of things.

3. Match your channels to your sales motion

The right first channels depend on whether you’re running a PLG (product-led growth) or sales-led motion. If you’re not sure which one you are yet , you need to define your ICP first – it’s your map converting potential users into paying customers.<br>If you’re PLG, your early wins are going to come from places where your users already hang out: Hacker News, Reddit, X, dev communities, tutorials, docs, etc. The goal here is to widen the beginning of your funnel. Other things that help with this include branding, ads, and word of mouth growth. If done well, customers will come to you rather than the other way around.<br>(We are obviously hideously biased, but if you are seeing early signs of PLG working, keep going! It’s an incredibly efficient way to build a business.)<br>If you’re sales-led, from what I’ve heard from marketers at other companies, your early wins are going to come from more targeted approaches. You’ll be the one going up to them. Think direct outreach, industry events, partnerships, and the founder’s own network. Get on the podcasts your buyers listen to. Turn up to AWS Re:invent. 😤🔥<br>In either case, however, don’t start with SEO. SEO is also one of those domains that takes a very long time, and requires you to know what you’re doing. It is very hard to vibe-SEO. Same goes for AEO. See Non-obvious SEO advice for startups for more on this.

4. Think in terms of experiments

Just like how you measure success for product launches, you need a similar mindset for marketing.<br>Before you start anything new, write down your prediction for what “worked” would look like. A simple yes or no question like:<br>“Did more people who look like our ICP sign up, use our product, and become enthusiastic recommenders?”<br>It doesn’t need to be a metric target – in fact, I’d strongly discourage it at this stage (sorry, John...