Marketing Agency For Startups
Congratulations. You've built the product (or at least, the MVP) and you've secured funding. Now you need to tell the world you exist, without burning through the runway to do it.
Marketing a funded startup isn't the same as marketing an established business. You're moving faster, running on fumes, possibly against competitors who've been doing this for years.
What worse is that most of the marketing advice written for startups doesn't apply to you.
It's either written for the TechCrunch-cover exception, or for small businesses calling themselves "startups" because the word sounds cool.
At the stage of your business, you need a partner that understands the difference. Someone that knows ARR isn't the sound a pirate makes. A trusted confidant that's been helping funded B2B startups find their market, sharpen their message, and grow deliberately since 2008.
Is that us? Keep reading. You decide.
Are We For You? Are You For Us?
Startups are primarily about rapid growth within a short space of time. The business concept needs to hold water - or be tweaked accordingly - in order to demonstrate its validity and investability.
Every week we get inquiries from people calling themselves a "startup", when really they're running something different. There's nothing wrong with running a dropshipping store selling phone cases as a side project during evenings and weekends. But that's not a startup. That's a hobby.
For us, a startup is a business built for rapid growth, with funding behind it, that has a plan for an exit. There has to be some kind of funding in place (bank loan, family money, angel, VC, PE, grant, whatever). What matters is that the money is real, the expectations are real, and someone somewhere is expecting a return.
You're selling into B2B, have funding in place (or almost), and you're selling/planning to sell something the market could want at scale. If that's you, we can help.
If that's not you, we're probably not going to be a good fit. You can find plenty of startup marketing agencies who work with bootstrapped side-hustles, direct-to-consumer product launches, or Etsy-to-empire stories. It's just that we're not one of them.
Why Startup Marketing Is Different
At the beginning, you don't know what you don't know.
You're making assumptions about who your buyers are, what problem they want solved, how they expect to be spoken to, and how much they'll pay.
Every one of those assumptions could be wrong. In fact, we'll bet that some of them are.
That's not on you, don't beat yourself up. It's simply the nature of the beast. Startups operate in conditions of genuine uncertainty, which means their marketing can't work the way it does for an established business with twenty years of customer data and a stable category.
You don't have time to run a two-year branding exercise or a campaign that might pay off eighteen months from now. You need marketing that generates signal quickly, tells you what's working and what isn't, and gets sharpened with every iteration.
That means starting with strategy, not tactics.
Agencies that jump straight to tactical stuff, saying "let's run some LinkedIn ads" or "you need to start a podcast" are skipping the stuff that matters more than anything else right now: figuring out who you're actually selling to, what they care about, and why they should care about you specifically.
The reason most startup marketing fails isn't down to bad execution, or a lack of creativity. It's because the underlying thinking needed behind the tactics was never done.
What We Actually Do
As with every engagement, we start by understanding your business properly.
Not just what you sell, but who you're selling to, what they care about, and why they should choose you over the competition.
Get the basics wrong, or don't spend enough time thrashing that stuff out, and it won't matter whatever you do afterwards, because you won't realize your growth potential.
From there, the tactics depend on what the diagnosis reveals. Some startups need their positioning rebuilt before anything else. Some have their positioning right, but the execution is inconsistent. Some need to fix their website before driving traffic to it. Some need sales materials that actually sell.
Our tactical range is broad. Strategy and positioning. Branding. Content creation. Video production. SEO and AI-visibility. Paid advertising. PR. Website design. Sales collateral. AI-enabled creative services. Behavioral science applied to messaging, pricing, and buyer journey design.
But that's not the hard part. What's tricky is putting together the pieces of the puzzle depending on what your particular business actually needs, rather than whatever we happen to be good at selling.
And our fees reflect that. We don't do marketing packages, because we don't believe a single price list can ever cover the range of problems different startups walk in with. Fees are calculated around the underlying business problem the marketing should solve, not around a menu of deliverables.
How We Work
Every engagement starts with Discovery and Diagnosis.
We spend the time to understand your business, your market, your category, your buyers, and what your current marketing is actually doing (versus what you think it's doing).
The results of that tell us all where the real problems are, and what needs fixing first.
From there, we put together a marketing strategy based on what the diagnosis revealed, and taking into account your business plan. Then we build the tactical plan to execute on the objectives set out in the strategy.
Let’s see how we can work together
Sounds good? Then get in touch.
Tell us a bit about your business, where you're trying to get to, and what's getting in the way.
We'll take it from there.