The first thing I'd build as the first marketer
A manifesto, not a campaign. Because story powers everything downstream.
I was great at logistics. Terrible at story.
I was huddled around a conference room table somewhere in San Francisco with my marketing team for quarterly planning.
Someone on the team had given me feedback that instead of jumping straight into planning, we should carve out some time to reflect on the previous quarter. What went well and what didn’t go well.
Why is it always so hard to do this? It felt almost painful to carve out some of the “valuable planning time” for reflection. But it ended up being one of the most transformative moments on the team.
I knew we had a big campaign to run that quarter and it felt exciting to know that we had something big on deck. I was always looking at the marketing team from an ops perspective, always trying to solve things by machining them.
Then she said it: “We’re really great at planning out all the logistics of the campaign, but we’re not great at nailing the story. What’s the big campaign story? We just get straight into logistics without knowing what that is.”
That hit so hard.
It hit hard because I realized there was a big hole where a galvanizing narrative should be. But also because it made me see a big hole in me as a leader. I felt like it was my responsibility to know the story.
The first marketer has to build what isn’t there
As the first marketing hire, you have to establish the story. You usually don’t have anything to work off of. You have to build it. Plant the flag in the ground.
Most of us have worked at places where the story was someone else’s job, where the brand team or the strategy team or someone more senior had already done this work.
What I learned is that as the first marketer, that falls on me.
Even as a second time first marketing hire, or third, or even at a large company, you can fall into this trap, just like I did. The narrative that should tie everything together isn’t there.
A confused prospect call. A sales rep who can’t explain what makes you different. A new hire who struggles to describe what the company does. A campaign that feels flat because it’s not anchored to anything bigger.
You’ll get these signals, these reminders, that your story isn’t there.
In that moment around the conference table, I told her the truth. “Yeah, you’re so right.” And I immediately saw how it made the campaigns feel lifeless. Like I was a robot going through the motions instead of creating something alive.
My big learning in recent years is that if you don’t have a story to tell, you have nothing. You can have the most well oiled marketing machine in history and you will still fail.
When everyone tells a different story, there is no story
It felt like we were creating content that wasn’t pointing in any particular direction. It was random. We would latch onto whatever insight or product launch or topic we could find to write about, but it felt diffuse.
This was tied to a deeper problem. If you asked a group of people to write what the company does or what value it brings, you would get at least a hundred different answers. None of them well-articulated. The people who could answer best were our technical folks, but their answers were very technical and unclear. From a marketing perspective, everything revolved around channels and systems instead of the story.
This is so common at early stage startups. You start executing the logistics without knowing what story you have to tell. You often need to start shipping for the story to take form, but you should at least have a scrappy version of that story up front.
The founder has the vision in their head, but no one else can tell that story.
And this doesn’t just happen early stage. I see a lot of companies today going through massive transformation, often launching AI products to compete in the market. Their story has changed. The founder knows the new vision. But does everyone else? Or am I launching into logistics without knowing what story we’re telling?
A manifesto is fuel, not just brand
If I were the first marketer at a startup today, the first thing I’d build isn’t a campaign, a funnel, or even a deck.
I’d write a manifesto.
Not a positioning doc, not a pitch (though those will come next). A reason for being. The story behind the product. The change we believe in. The future we see coming. The beliefs we hold that others don’t. The legacy behaviors we’re here to replace.
When I’ve skipped this in the past, everything downstream lacked aliveness. No real theme, no connective tissue.
It’s not just brand. It’s fuel.
It drives what your team posts on LinkedIn, what the sales team says in their conversations, what your first designer chooses to visualize, what your website says and how it makes people feel, what features get prioritized in the product, what kind of people you attract and hire, what your early customers emotionally connect with, what your community rallies around.
You can’t outsource this.
AI can write helpful content. But it can’t tell your story. The manifesto is how your team learns to tell it together. It’s how you get the founder’s vision out of their head and into everyone’s.
The founder sees the future, the customer whisperer knows today
So how do you write one?
First, start with the founder.
They’re the ones who know the latest future vision as much as possible.
Then, find the “customer whisperers” internally.
Go to the people at the company who know the buyer better than anyone. Ideally they have two things: they talk to customers every day AND they’ve done the customers’ job before this job.
They’re extremely knowledgeable because they know how to do the customer’s job. They stand in their shoes. They understand it really well, but they also talk to people every day. If you can’t find both, find one or the other.
When I did this, I went to a couple of our product leaders who had been in our customers’ shoes in a past role. They weren’t lifetime Product folks. They were subject matter experts who had transitioned into product roles.
It’s helpful to get both the founder and the “customer whisperer” perspectives. The founder is often looking very far into the future. The customer whisperer is focused on words they can say and things they can show customers today that will resonate and function. You need to find the beautiful slice of togetherness (and tension) between both.
I asked them questions like:
What does the old world look like, the one where this company doesn’t exist?
What’s a commonly held belief in the industry that you disagree with?
What are the big questions we’ve been asking ourselves while building this?
What does the future look like ten years from now?
In that future, how are the companies who understand this change winning?
How are the ones who ignore it falling behind?
And most importantly: what’s the promised land? If someone fully embraces this belief and succeeds, what does that make possible for them? How does it make them feel, act, and show up in the world?
The goal was to pull out their unique perspective. Not just a generic “what we believe in” but “what are the parts of what we believe in that are different”? And why it all matters.
When we did this exercise, the team was relatively small. We were all in the room. That was powerful. We didn’t even need to take the interview and turn it into a fancy document. The team already understood the patterns. They saw them clearly.
But we did take them and pulled them into a handful of clear themes in a simple document that we shared around. It was fuel for our brand. Fuel for our content, our campaigns, our email copy, our website, our product launch positioning, our social copy. All of it.
Clarity for the calendar, purpose for the team
There were two results I observed doing this exercise. One is really tactical and one is a little more deep and human.
The first was clarity.
Our content calendar was immediately clear. Our events calendar was obvious. Our social posting strategy was clear. Our campaign calendar was clear. It made everything clear.
That gave us some very clear trends to work with in terms of our writing and really brought some aliveness and some topics we could bite into. We found ourselves, even months later, remembering a theme or a line or a word that was used in those interviews that gave us the right angle on what messaging to put out into the world.
The second was a sense of purpose on the team.
The mission wasn’t just in the founder’s head anymore. I knew what we were showing up to do. I think we drastically underestimate how much a strong mission can be fuel for a motivated team to do their best work. And to feel like we’re building something together. There’s a sense of togetherness in the fact that we’re building for a shared mission instead of just “executing on logistics” in our silo without seeing how it’s connected to the greater whole.
Interview, validate, test, roll out
So, if you want to get to this place, here’s what you can do:
Ask your team how they view your mission. Are you getting vastly different answers from everyone?
Interview the founder.
Interview the customer whisperers.
Pull both perspectives together into a manifesto.
Meet one on one with the customer whisperers and show them your manifesto. Does it land?
Meet one on one with key influential folks in the company and show it to them. Does it land?
Test it somehow. A couple of ads, a couple of social posts, a couple of customer calls. Does it land?
Validate with the founder that it reflects their vision.
Roll it out to everyone.
If you’re sitting in that campaign planning meeting feeling like robots going through the motions, or up at 11pm wondering what to say on that prospect call tomorrow, or sitting in front of a blank page wondering how to describe what your company does, or feeling that fuzzy lack of clarity on what to do, know that there’s clarity to be found. It all starts with asking deeper questions, getting to the root of the why.
A story isn’t what you say. It’s what everyone believes together.
When I look back on that moment, that simple question from a teammate, it taught me something I wish I’d learned sooner.