How to create a simple marketing strategy for your first year
You know you need “marketing,” but your runway says you can’t afford experiments that take six months to maybe work. You’ve posted a few times on social, sent some cold emails, tweaked the homepage headline, and hoped something would click. Instead, results feel random. That’s normal. Most first-year founders don’t fail at marketing because they choose the wrong channel, they fail because they never decide what to focus on long enough to learn anything.
To put this guide together, we reviewed founder interviews, shareholder letters, and early growth retrospectives from companies like HubSpot, Stripe, Airbnb, and Buffer, along with guidance from Y Combinator partners and growth leaders who documented what they actually did in their first 12 to 18 months. We focused on practices tied to verifiable outcomes, not abstract frameworks, and translated those patterns into a plan a small, cash-constrained team can run without a marketing department.
In this article, we’ll walk through how to build a simple, realistic marketing strategy for your first year, one that fits a pre-seed or seed-stage company and gives you clear weekly actions instead of vague goals.
Why first-year marketing is different
In your first year, marketing is not about scale. It’s about learning. You’re trying to answer a few critical questions: who actually cares, what problem they’re trying to solve, and which channel can reliably put you in front of them. Every dollar and hour you spend should move you closer to those answers.
The risk isn’t that you pick the “wrong” channel. The real risk is spreading yourself across five channels, measuring none of them well, and ending the year with anecdotes instead of evidence. A good first-year strategy narrows your focus, sets expectations for what “working” looks like, and gives you permission to ignore everything else for a while.
Start with a narrow, explicit goal
Before you think about channels, content, or tools, define one marketing goal for the next 90 days. Not a vanity goal like “brand awareness,” but an outcome tied to learning or revenue.
Examples of first-year goals that actually help:
Generate 20 sales conversations with a specific customer segment.
Get 100 people from one channel to complete a key action in your product.
Close your first 10 paying customers from outbound.
When Brian Chesky talked about Airbnb’s early days, he emphasized that the team focused on one city and one outcome at a time because broad goals hid what was actually broken. For you, a single goal creates a forcing function. Every tactic either supports that goal or gets cut.
Write the goal down, put a number on it, and set a time box. This is the anchor for your entire strategy.
Define one real customer, not a market
Early marketing fails most often because the target customer is too vague. “Small businesses” or “creators” are not actionable audiences. You need a description that lets you picture a specific person having a specific bad day.
A useful first-year customer definition includes:
Role and context: job title, company size, or situation.
Trigger: what recently happened that makes them care.
Constraint: what limits their time, budget, or choices.
For example, “US-based Shopify store owners doing 200 to 1,000 orders per month who handle fulfillment themselves” is specific enough to find, message, and learn from. This level of clarity is why HubSpot’s early inbound content worked. Dharmesh Shah has explained that they wrote for a very particular type of marketer, which made their content and calls to action sharper and easier to measure.
Your strategy should explicitly name one primary customer and, just as importantly, one group you are not targeting yet.
Choose one primary channel for the quarter
In year one, you do not need an omnichannel presence. You need one channel you can run consistently for long enough to understand its dynamics.
Common first-year channels include:
Direct outbound (email or LinkedIn).
Content and SEO.
Partnerships or integrations.
Communities where your customers already spend time.
The right choice depends less on trends and more on where your specific customer already is and how quickly you can get feedback. Stripe’s founders famously did direct outreach and hands-on onboarding with early developers because it put them face-to-face with users and shortened the feedback loop. That wasn’t “scalable,” but it was incredibly informative.
Pick one channel and commit to running it for at least 8 to 12 weeks. Document why you chose it and what you expect to learn. Everything else becomes optional until this channel is understood.
Set a simple operating cadence
A marketing strategy only works if it turns into weekly behavior. In your first year, keep the cadence boring and predictable.
A simple example:
Weekly input goal: number of emails sent, posts published, or conversations started.
Weekly output review: replies, signups, demos booked, or conversions.
Weekly learning note: one paragraph on what changed or surprised you.
Buffer’s early growth is a good illustration here. Joel Gascoigne publicly shared that they focused on a small set of metrics and reviewed them obsessively, which made it obvious what content and messages were pulling their weight. You don’t need a dashboard with 20 charts. You need a rhythm that forces reflection.
Build messaging from real conversations
Your first-year marketing copy should not come from brainstorming sessions. It should come from customer language. If you’re doing outbound, this means running regular customer or prospect calls and updating your messaging based on what people actually say. If you’re doing content, it means writing posts that answer questions you’ve already heard verbatim.
Intercom’s early team documented hundreds of customer conversations and reused that language across their website and emails, which is one reason their positioning felt unusually clear for a young company. For you, this translates into a simple rule: if a phrase hasn’t been said by a customer, be suspicious of it.
Keep a running document of exact quotes and objections. Revisit it every month and update your homepage, emails, or posts accordingly.
Decide how you’ll measure “working”
First-year marketing metrics should bias toward leading indicators, not polished growth charts. You’re trying to see signal, not declare victory.
Good early metrics include:
Response rates to outbound.
Conversion from visitor to one meaningful action.
Cost in time or money per qualified conversation.
Avoid over-optimizing for metrics that only matter at scale. A small but improving response rate can be more valuable than a flat number of impressions. As several YC partners have pointed out in office hours, early traction is about directionality, not absolute size.
Write down what success and failure look like for your chosen channel before you start. This makes decisions easier when emotions creep in.
Budget time before you budget money
In your first year, time is usually a bigger constraint than cash. A simple strategy acknowledges this and designs tactics you can actually maintain.
Before you allocate dollars to ads or tools, answer two questions:
Airbnb’s early photography effort worked because it was bounded. They knew how many listings they could visit and what outcome would justify the effort. For you, clear time budgets prevent marketing from becoming the thing you “get to later.”
Review and adjust quarterly, not weekly
While execution should be weekly, strategic changes should be slower. Give each channel or approach enough time to show patterns.
At the end of each quarter, review:
What we tried.
What actually moved our goal.
What felt promising but under-resourced.
What we should stop entirely.
This cadence keeps you from thrashing while still creating space to adapt. Many early-stage founders quit channels right before they start to compound, especially with content or partnerships.
Common first-year mistakes to avoid
A few patterns show up repeatedly in founder retrospectives:
Switching channels every few weeks due to impatience.
Copying tactics from later-stage companies without adapting them.
Measuring activity instead of outcomes.
Treating marketing as separate from product learning.
Being aware of these traps doesn’t guarantee you’ll avoid them, but it does make them easier to spot when they show up.
Do this week
Write one specific marketing goal for the next 90 days with a number attached.
Define your primary customer in two sentences and name one group you’re ignoring for now.
Choose one marketing channel to focus on for the next quarter and document why.
Set a weekly input target you can maintain for 8 to 12 weeks.
Schedule a weekly 30-minute review to look at results and write one learning.
Start a document of exact customer quotes and objections from conversations.
Update one piece of messaging using only language customers have already used.
Decide in advance what result would make you double down versus stop.
Final thoughts
Your first-year marketing strategy doesn’t need to be clever. It needs to be disciplined. The founders who make progress early aren’t the ones chasing every new channel, they’re the ones who pick a narrow path, walk it long enough to learn, and adjust based on evidence instead of hope. Start small, stay consistent, and let clarity compound.
