You spend your time working with early-stage businesses. What do startups understand about marketing that more established companies often overlook?

The first thing that comes to mind is intimacy. For early stage startups every contact, conversation, click, email open or sale is precious – so they put a lot of energy into finding signals and patterns that are clues to what works.

There’s an old adage (from Paul Graham of Y Combinator) to “do things that don’t scale” early on. That might mean communicating personally with prospects, hand-holding through onboarding, attending to service issues like it was your mum who was the customer. These things won’t scale, but they will give you vital information about what makes customers tick… and how you can build a funnel which will scale for automation.

Startups don’t have the luxury of big budgets. What does “doing more with less” actually look like when it comes to marketing?

The start-ups I work with are incredibly curious about finding and using new tools. They pick things up, try them out, swap notes amongst each other. Some of the most vital things in my own marketing toolkit – like Apollo.io – I found because someone at the incubator had spent some time seeing what they can do. If some software or licence is outside their budget, they find cheaper, better alternatives… or build something for themselves in Claude Code.

Do you think having fewer resources can actually make marketing better? If so, how?

Yes. Perfect is the enemy of good. So start-ups have an instinct to deploy quickly, learn what works, then tune to perfection in the shortest possible cycle (before the money runs out!).

We know of the importance of real dialogue with customers. How do the best startups build and maintain that kind of engagement early on?

Like I said, intimacy is the key. Get close and stay close to customers and what problems they want you to solve for them. Another maxim in start-ups is that ‘There are no answers inside the building’. Why waste time arguing over what customers will like or respond to? Get out of the building and talk to them. Test things out, then bin what doesn’t work and improve on what does.

When I see established companies making mistakes in marketing, or seeing engagement or response falling off, it’s very often because they’ve stopped paying close attention to the real world of their customers.

Startups often feel very visible when it comes to content. What are they getting right about being prolific and where do they sometimes go wrong?

All the founders and startup teams I know are pretty disciplined about content creation and experimenting with different media, channels and formats. They are always looking for a signal about ‘product-market fit’ - that magic moment when their product is clearly meeting a valuable need with the target audience, and when the majority of new customers are coming from direct or organic traffic. When a business makes fans and advocates in its customer base everything becomes easier, and acquisition costs get lower.

Where they sometimes go wrong is in consistency in tone-of-voice and relating everything back to the mission and values of the brand they are building. If content is just volume without narrative it can be like they are building a picture using pieces from lots of different jigsaw puzzles.

AI is becoming a big part of marketing. Where do you see it adding genuine value for startups, and where should brands be careful not to rely on it?

These new tools allow us to automate all kinds of marketing and business activities. It’s exciting. But there’s an ocean of slop starting to drown consumers. In my view, there is absolutely no AI substitute for good design and good writing. Investment in these two things early give you the foundations for building successful brands and campaigns. A clear visual and verbal identity is the well source for everything…and you need humans to make it. Once you have it, AI and automation tools are brilliant at helping you figure out how to adapt and extend that into every part of your marketing effort.

If you had to sum it up, what’s the one startup mindset shift that any business could adopt tomorrow to improve their marketing?

Do some “things that don’t scale” with and for your customers to find out new messages or offerings which really cut through and create value for them. Then use AI and automation tools to work out how to apply these at volume.