How to Thrive as a Solo Marketer in the Chaos of Early-Stage Startups with Sandy Mangat, Head of Marketing at Pocus | Ep. 338

0:00Welcome back to another episode of the Marketing Millennials. I'm Tamara Griminski, and I'm stepping in as your guest host while Daniel's out on pat leave. I'm a career product marketing leader and the former VP of PMM at high-growth startups like Kajabi and Unbounce. Now, I'm the founder of PMM Camp, a community and newsletter for product marketing leaders. And while Daniel's off doing dad things, I'll be here bringing you fun combos with some of the smartest marketers I know. Today's episode is all about life as a solo marketer. I'm joined by Sandy Mangat, the head of marketing at Pocus, an AI sales intelligence platform built for the next generation of go-to-market.

0:37Sandy is a powerhouse solo marketer who's been instrumental in building the Pocus brand and building a community focused on go-to-market and AI. We talk about what it really takes to thrive as a team of one, from balancing strategy with strappy execution, to building a brand before product market fit, to know me when it's time to ask for help. Sandy shares the mindset, hard skills, and Delulu optimism that helped her build a standout marketing engine from scratch. If you're the only marketer at your company or thinking about becoming one, this episode is for you. Welcome to the Marketing Millennials, the no BS marketing podcast.

1:16I'm Daniel Murray, and join me for unfiltered conversations with the brains behind marketing's coolest companies. The one request I tell our guests, stories or it didn't happen. Get ready to turn the f*** up. Sandy, welcome to the show. Oh my gosh, thanks for having me. I'm so excited to be here. I'm so excited to have you here because whenever anyone asks me for an example of a very cool brand or an awesome website. I always say POCUS. And this was before I knew you. And this was before I knew that this whole POCUS brand was created by a very small marketing team. That is so kind. I love hearing that.

2:04And it's honestly, we've talked about this, but I have been following you many years before we ever actually met, just as like my product Marketing North Star. So to hear it coming from you, honestly, is like, if I could go back and tell baby marketer Sandy 10 years ago, she'd be so thrilled. I love it. So thinking of the past, why don't you take us back to like your first week at Pocus? What was going through your mind as a solo marketer walking into this new startup? I imagine you had a lot of opportunity and probably very little direction to go off of. Yes. Honestly, those early days of Pocus, they were chaotic.

2:55They were magical. It was daunting. I'd never been at a company quite that early stage before. So every other startup I joined was closer to series A, but this was a seed stage company. I was the first go-to-market hire. I think it was employee four or five. You know, the product was in design partner phase. The brand like did not exist. The messaging didn't exist. We just had an idea, some like early inklings of a product and just a really strong perspective on the future of go to market from our from the two founders, Alexa and Isaac and and a dream. And it's like, that's all that was there.

3:40And so those early days was just trying to figure out what is our unique perspective here? How do we want to build the brand around that unique perspective? And then kind of like, what are the tactical first steps? Honestly, there was a lot of strategy work, but there was also just tactical things that we needed to do. The website was a Webflow template. The logo was something that Isaac, our CTO, bought on Fiverr. So there was a mix of really big picture thinking that we had to do to forge that direction. And then there was seriously the tiniest, smallest tactical details that you have to figure out as a solo marketer coming in.

4:30And you have to figure out how to balance those as the only person on the team. Yeah, not a small task, that's for sure. I think that you've hit on something that we see as like a day-to-day struggle of a solo PMM or a solo marketer, which is balancing strategy and execution. and I've always been curious about like should the first marketer or solo marketer be a generalist or should you yourself have a point of view and maybe a core skill set coming into the role would love to hear just like your thoughts on that now having lived through it but also maybe like were you a generalist coming in or did you were you hired with a very specific skill set but asked to take on that generalist hat?

5:11So I definitely think that generalist is the way to go, but with a caveat, which is you must spike in something. I don't think you can just be a complete all around generalist, like Jack of all trades, Jane of all trades. It's really, you should be capable in a lot of things. And I would say you should have a strategic perspective, even on areas of marketing that you are not an expert in, but you should know enough to what I say is like know enough to be dangerous. Um, and, but then you need to spike in something. And so, um, what you spike in will, will depend on what the product is, what the kind of aspirations of that founding team are.

5:59And so that is what might change. So if I'm, if I'm talking to other founders and advising them on their first marketing hire, it's always generalist with a bias towards action that spikes in something that you think you will care about. I think the challenge is it's usually pretty fuzzy to know what you might care about. And so that's kind of where there is some, I think, value in doing a little bit of strategic thinking as the founders on what are those areas of spiking? Is it going to be product marketing? Because you believe that there's a lot of complexity in the product that you're building and you need to make it really easy to understand and have very clear go-to-market messaging around that.

6:43Maybe it's your product is pretty simple. There's an existing category and you're just making a play at offering something cheaper, faster, better. And so it's growth. It's a land grab. And so you might find somebody who spikes in demand gen. And so I think that spike is what varies, but I think the core generalist skill set, both hard skills, soft skills, those are important to screen for. There is a real difference between somebody who is cut out for scrappy early stage generalist type work and somebody who is really deep on a specific part of the marketing funnel or function and is used to like really optimizing that versus being okay with more ambiguity across everything.

7:35Yeah. I think you talked about hard and soft skills, which is absolutely critical, but I also think personality is important in like how successful you will be. So like, are you a builder or an optimizer or like how much structure do you like in your day? How much conflict are you willing to handle? Have you seen maybe just friends of yours that have been solo marketers as well, who've maybe tapped out and been like, my personality is not cut out for that. Or like, what do you think about your personality makes you cut out to be a solo marketer? That's such a good point. I think it's personality and, and I don't know if you'd classify this as personality or disposition, but, um, I think I'm delusional.

8:18same girl same yeah like i think you have to have that delulu attitude and uh we actually make that we made that a core value at pokus we are hiring delusional optimists because working in startups is grind uh you are often battling against like massive incumbents who have way more money than you the odds are always stacked against you so if you do not have you know that delulu optimism it's going to be really hard to grind it out every day of the week. So yeah, I guess that is a personality trait or a disposition. But I think that honestly is the thing that separates somebody who thrives in early stage solo work.

9:03And I think other dispositions or personality traits like being kind of like an independent thinker and not necessarily somebody who seeks to always do things kind of like by committee consensus. I think you have to be like pretty confident in some of your tummy feelings, as I call them, as an early stage solo marketer, because there's not going to be somebody that's an expert that's going to be battle testing your ideas. You're expected to make decisions with confidence independently with the information that you have. And if you don't have that confidence, you don't have strong gut intuitions about things.

9:45I think being in that early stage solo marketer seat is going to be really challenging. Yeah. I think experience level and maybe confidence, maybe it's less experience with confidence is important. One of the questions I get asked the most from companies who are wanting to hire their first product marketing hire is what's the level of seniority I should go after? I think so often they're like, well, it's our first hire. We're small. This needs to be affordable. And I think that's one of the biggest mistakes they make, which is you need someone who can be strategic, who has seen this before and is confident in their decisions.

10:18Yes, they're delusionally optimistic, but they're also rational, if that makes sense. They're not reckless, I guess, is what I'm trying to say. Yeah, exactly. I think, and in finding the right balance of seniority, it's like somebody that's on the rise, right? You catch them at the right moment where they've, I think often for early stage, it's like, have you seen it at least once before? It's probably going to be the right mental model to come in with. But it doesn't necessarily have to be in the exact same industry, the exact same go-to-market motion. All of my experience prior to POCUS, I think was in a very weird industry.

10:56It's like IOT and smart hospitals and smart buildings. I talked to commercial real estate people all day in one of my roles. And so it doesn't always have to be directly domain experience, but having seen what good looks like is honestly a cheat code. And then two, just, yeah, having the mental model of what it does look like going zero to one at least once before. I think that's fair. I want to turn a little bit more towards the work because you kind of painted that picture for us. And when you came in your first 90 days at POCUS, there was so much to do. How did you decide where to focus as a solo marketer?

11:34Can you walk us through kind of like the criteria you use even now with like a, you know, a slightly larger go-to-market team, but it's still very small and scrappy go-to-market team. How do you decide where to spend your team when you don't have a massive marketing team behind you? Yeah. And this is like a constant struggle and continues to be a constant struggle. And I don't think anyone ever gets away from it. And this is not just advice for marketers. I think generically advice for anyone in any role, but especially if you are one of the first 30 or 40 hires at a startup, the way that you get clarity on where to focus is always your North star needs to be what's going to move the needle on the business, like the business as a whole.

12:15And I think that is a big difference between early stage versus more established company with a bigger team. I think when you're in that more established role, it could be like local maximums and local optimizations. But when you're in a small team, we all need to be thinking about the bigger picture at all times, not just about our own role, not just about our own department, not our own function, but the entire business. And so coming into Pocus so early, it really was just me sitting with the founders, figuring out what is going to be the thing that moves the needle in the business in year one.

12:53And then obviously, it changed more rapidly the earlier we were. In year one, I think our North Star was pretty clear. It was fine product market fit. But then the ways that we got to that and the way that I supported that probably changed more often compared to today. So months, week cycles, as opposed to now, I think we're mature enough where I can think in quarters, which is a luxury to think in quarters when it used to be like, you know, week over week, we're trying to figure stuff out and just like that rapid iteration phase. But there was always clarity in the early days. And I credit Alexa for this on, we knew early on that it was already a pretty competitive market.

13:45I mean, go-to-market tech is always very competitive. It's super noisy space. And so she early on, and the reason why she hired a marketer as her first go-to-market hire and not sales was marketing and brand and category creation community were all things that she was already thinking about as being important to the business to break through the noise and be really that, the tide that raises all boats. So Alexa had that hypothesis. And then I really aligned to that perspective. So early on, we decided the things that we're going to focus on. And like, it was, it was fun. We created a little alliteration.

14:26It was like, category, content, community. Those are the three things we cared about. And then in year two, we layered in a D for distribution. But actually in the first year, we did not actually care about distribution at all, maybe to our detriment, but we were just like, we're going to put out the best content to educate the market. We're going to help establish this category. And the way that we're going to do that is through community. We're going to try and build the place where people come to learn about modern go-to-market tactics at the time, product-led sales. Now it's all about AI. And we just wanted to be the number one place and built a Slack community.

15:07And then that Slack community fueled our content flywheel because we would host AMAs. And then those AMAs would turn into newsletter and blog posts and the founder brand that Alexa built on LinkedIn sharing those insights. So that's another, I think, tip there. It's when When you are a solo marketer, you have to find investment areas that are going to kind of compound and that you can get the most mileage out of. So us focusing on that content community category flywheel, you know, could feel like three very disparate things that we're working on. But because I was resource strapped, I tried to think of it all as like these three things need to work in lockstep with each other and actually compound on each other to make my life easier and also propel focus and the brand forward.

15:53I think that's such a smart way of thinking about it because so often in a company, like I've been in those OKR meetings and marketing strategy meetings, and we're almost placing different big bets. And we're like, well, if this doesn't work, we have this to fall back on. But what I'm hearing from you is it had to work. And so I needed to build a system that would almost ensure that even if one thing wasn't as effective, it would make the next thing more effective. Yeah, exactly. I, and I think, you know, you'll eventually move to a phase where you can have like, you know, more of like a, we're going to try this bet first.

16:29And if it doesn't work out, we'll go to the next bet. We'll go to the next bet. Um, but I think in the early days we had to brute force some things. And I think a lot, I think a mistake a lot of people make in early stage is abandoning things too soon. And I think if you have that like sequential bet mental model too soon, then you probably are abandoning things too soon as well. Like you don't have a brand. Nobody knows you. Nobody cares about you. A lot of your growth experiments are going to fall flat for that reason. So there needs to be a concerted effort to first build up some of that foundation in order to just start running experiments.

17:12I think there are folks who probably work with more impatient founders and they want to see quick results. And so they jump to the growth experimentation phase of let's find those quick response channels and try and get feedback loops going as quickly as possible. But sometimes I feel like that's doing the brand and the company a disservice because you jump too quickly to that without first spending time on establishing the brand, establishing your perspective in the market. Like the reason people should even care about anything that you do. I think that's so important. And you actually hit on a topic that I was hoping we would get to in our convo today, which is how do you even measure the success of early marketing or an early marketer?

17:58because I think when you work in an, even an organization where you have maybe 50, 60 employees, you're hitting product market fit, you start to have more clear KPIs that everyone's aligning on. But to your point right now, it's like people are giving up early. Well, how should they be measuring their success then? And maybe you can share lessons learned of like, oh, I measured it wrong and I shouldn't have, or successes of like, how were you able to champion for those wins early on if there wasn't a clear KPI? I don't know if there's, you know, like a perfect answer here, but I can share what some of our early OKRs look like for marketing.

18:32So in year one at Pocus, our OKR was actually as a team. This was helpful, by the way. When you're super small, have a team goal and find ways to have everyone roll up into instead of having separate goals for each team. So our company goal was cult following. And our North Stars were like Notion, Figma, these brands that people would revolt if you tried to take them away. And that's what we wanted for POCUS in year one was we want cult following for our product, cult following for our community and our content. And, and, you know, you're like thinking, how the hell do you measure cult following?

19:17And so there were actually some like qualitative things that we thought about that would indicate to us that we were in the go-to-market tech zeitgeist and driving what we needed to drive. One was, if we start to see product-led sales as a term being thrown around by people, not us, by our customers, our community members, organic conversations around this topic that we were trying to incept into the world. and then organically hearing about POCUS like out in the wild. So like, where is POCUS showing up? Do we feel like we're starting to become quote unquote famous in market tech? And there's tactical ways you can measure this of like looking at the mentions for your brand on different social channels.

20:05But honestly, we did not do, we didn't measure that. We just kind of like we're going off of vibes-based marketing at that point. And I think, honestly, in year one, oftentimes, you should just do some vibes-based reporting on things. If you're pre-product market fit, some of those metrics aren't actually going to give you any directional wisdom anyways. And so wasting time on it is not something I would recommend. And so year one, cult following, doing some like vibe space measurement of what we were actually achieving. Some like highlights from from that year, we got Gartner to start covering product-led sales and they started talking about it as a category.

20:52We started seeing customers proactively put out job postings for head of product-led sales or product-led sales director. And so that those were indicators to us that we were starting to really influence the zeitgeist and that and things like Pocus's brand swag was showing up in the wild. And then we'd get a text message from somebody saying, I saw a bucket hat on so-and-so on the bar in San Francisco. So all of those like little moments compound and helped us feel like we were really making the right strides when it came to cult following. And then more measurable things were our Slack community was growing.

21:36We were increasing our newsletter subscribers. Alexa's LinkedIn profile was starting to, we were seeing that up and to the right. So there were definitely some measurable stuff, but I don't want to paint this picture that I was in the dashboards and like monitoring it super closely. I was getting directional kind of metrics-driven insights, but truly it was very much driven by just feeling what was happening on the ground and hearing the right things from the market. Yeah, it sounds like you felt like there was forward momentum and forward progress and that kind of kept you going. Was there ever an inflection point to the brand since you were there so early?

22:20Was there a moment where you're like, now we know we have product market fit. We must change our strategy. Or was this just something that's been incrementally growing over time to get to you where you are today? Yeah. I think there's actually several moments that you experience of we've reached product market fit. We've reached product market fit. And I think that the mythology of there being just this one seminal moment of product market fit and then it's whoosh, it's like 1 % of companies experience that. I think most companies go through a cyclical feeling of reaching product market fit with a certain product with a specific use case in a specific market.

23:00And then you need to grow from there. And then you feel like, ooh, like the market cares less about what I do. And then you're back up and you're trying to find the product market fit again. And then you launch more features and you tweak the product's positioning and messaging given what's changed in the market. And I actually think we've gone through that cycle. With Pocus, we initially focused on PLG companies and the use case of turning their product usage data into revenue, built the product-led sales category, got product market fit there. And then as the market evolved, our customers started to use Pocus for more than just PLS.

23:37We had to evolve with them and how the market was shifting to AI-first tools. So we had to go and rethink about our product and rethink about our product market fit. And so there's been several moments along the journey to product market fit. And it's, I think most companies are not getting there once and then just saying, all right, we're done. You have to keep on, you have to keep on getting to product market fit, but it's, it's different each time and the goals are different. And I think you say that, but I think the sad part is a lot of companies do say that They're like, well, the work here is done.

24:14Now it's like just put all the money into these programs. And they stop the building mentality. They stop the experimenting mentality. So I love that you guys have stayed, you know, humble and close to the customer and obviously a product marketer at heart where you're like, keep evolving, keep refining the messaging and positioning. As you were expanding, there obviously became a time where you're like, I can't keep doing everything alone. How did you know when that moment was to increase your capacity? Maybe it was bringing on contractors. Maybe it was actually hiring, you know, your first marketing hire.

24:48But what were the signals apart from being exhausted and staying up all night? Yeah, great question. And not one I've always gotten right, to be honest. I don't think I have a perfect answer here. I don't think I've always done this the right way. I am naturally the kind of person who's going to try and do everything myself. I think scrappiness and being that early stage operator comes with its downsides. And the downside is you're always going to feel like you can do it yourself and try and maintain ownership. And I remember reading this great article on the first round review called about giving away your Legos.

25:26And so that's definitely something that was a learned skill for me of knowing when to bring in help. I would say when it comes to bringing in contractors and freelancers to help, there was some just really obvious places I did that early on. Webflow development, design, content support if I needed it. But there was probably other areas that I could have brought in support, but I chose to hold on to it longer because of that scrappy mentality of always wanting to be as lean as possible. And then eventually that becomes a bit of a liability. Um, so I think my advice do not do what I did and stay too lean for too long.

26:09Um, I think as soon as you start to feel that there's areas that you figured out and that you need to scale, but you can't scale because it's just you hire somebody to help you scale. I think if there are opportunities that you feel like are slipping away, that could be those needle movers when it comes to the business. but they're slipping through the cracks because you're at capacity, I think that's another signal that you should bring in help. In general, though, what I tell myself now is hire before you hit the breaking point. And so look out for those early warning signals of feeling like it's, you're starting to feel like you've, you're losing track of the things that actually matter to the business.

26:56Yeah. I think that's a, going back to your tummy feeling again. I think we do get that tummy feeling of like, this is becoming too much, or maybe I'm not the best person for this anymore. I've felt that even growing my own teams in product marketing and you just say, nah, I need someone else or I need a fresh perspective, right? It depends on how long you've been chipping away at something too. Yeah. I think for me, it was about hiring. Sometimes I think there's like two ways to think about hiring. You're either hiring to complement what you already do well. So like double down into those marketing advantages you might already have as a team, or it's to fill gaps.

27:34And I think I've tried both. And I would say that for me, hiring for the gap was more effective. And finding that complement to me, I'm product marketing, brand content community. That's how my brain works. If you're familiar with Emily Kramer's fuel and engine, I am a fuel person. And I dabble in engine. And I think I needed somebody who was that engine expert who is a complement to that fuel and is able to take everything from all of the great fuel that we've created and now build the system. And so just hired somebody on the team to do that in the last few months. And it's going great. Exciting.