MarketerHire
I don’t usually write about my new investments, because frankly I hate the culture of celebrating financings. Truthfully, if that’s the best signal you have as a startup, you are screwed.
The reason I want to write about MarketerHire is to give founders a bit of insight into investor decision-making. I was connected to MarketerHire from a friend who is a successful founder with expertise in the kind of marketing Marketerhire does. So really, no better intro.
Even with that though, I was a cynic. The idea behind MarketerHire was to rent out marketers to work at companies. That didn’t sound very innovative. So good signal, but I wasn’t excited.
First, I talked to the founder, Chris. He told me how it worked. Basically MarketerHire is a curated marketplace with companies, mostly direct to consumer startups on one side and experienced marketers on the other. Since almost anything gets explained as a marketplace these days, that doesn’t get me excited.
Then Chris said something that completely made sense. Marketing has gotten more and more performance oriented and more and more specialized online over the years. Now, a great SEO person and a great facebook paid person may share characteristics, but their domain knowledge is completely different. And when you are a startup, you have a hard time finding anyone with enough domain knowledge in whatever thing you need to focus on.
So Chris’ insight was that you could slice up “marketer” into about a dozen different domains like social media, google paid, brand, quantitative, etc. And instead of hiring one junior marketing flunky, you could buy a few hours a week of one of these experts time. So if SEO was your main bet, get the best SEO person to take a shot. And Chris had run a marketing agency, so he knew a ton of experts.
So after the first call, I remember thinking, “Cool idea, but do I really care?” I generally care a lot about things like opportunity, equity, and freedom. And sure, this could create those, but I wasn’t sure. So I talked to a few folks on the client side and on the marketer side. And that’s what hooked me.
Over and over what I heard from clients is those few hours from someone who really knew what they were doing was the best money they had spent. What made it for me though was talking to the marketers. They almost all started by doing side-hustles, make an extra few thousand a month doing gigs. But a ton of them were now full-time freelancers.
I asked a couple of them, who were clearly at the top of their game, why they didn’t go work for whatever hot startup they were gig’ing for. The look on their faces was priceless. It said, “Do you understand my life? I work however many hours I want, on the projects I want, I make more money than I ever have, I live exactly where I want. I work with 5 companies so I’m learning a lot and never get bored. Why in the world would I want to go full-time somewhere?”
And right there, the future of work became clear to me. Their incredulity at me was well-founded. The freedom they were experiencing, the feeling of fulfillment and appreciation, was what we all hope to have in our working life. The future of distributed teams will include loyalists, but it will also include experts, and MarketerHire is an example of that.
So I wrote a check. I do a ton of diligence calls, typically 15 minutes hearing the story and experience of customers, suppliers, etc. Rarely do I get such a uniformly high rave as I did on Marketerhire. What I love about these external calls is that although they are obviously chosen to tell a good story, you can usually get some pretty good side information from them. So if the story is just a story, they blow it up.
One of the things I talk about with founders in my portfolio is that for pre-seed and seed investors, the founders and the idea are a major part of the investment. But if you are in market and doing business, think of this kind of reference call. Because if you can delight customers and suppliers, it will come across to investors, future employees, press, and everyone else.
