How I’d Build the Marketing Function as a Seed or Series A Founder

AI is reinventing every knowledge economy function, and marketing is no exception. So the way you build the marketing function as a founder should evolve, too.

I asked ChatGPT what a marketing team should look like at the seed or Series A stage. Here’s the common wisdom, lightly edited:

Seed stage ($1–5M in funding)

1–3 marketers. Hire a generalist who can build early momentum across messaging, content, and demand gen. Supplement with freelance or agency help.

Series A ($8–20M in funding)

3–7 marketers. Start building out sub-functions: product marketing, demand gen, content, design, ops. Prioritize pipeline and sales enablement.

B2B founders are often told to think of marketing as comprising the following buckets:

• VP or Director of Marketing: strategy, coordination, leadership

• Product Marketing: positioning, enablement, launches

• Content: thought leadership, case studies, social

• Comms/PR: announcements and reputation

• Growth/Demand Gen: paid, SEO, email (in adtech, maybe combine this with events — you’re not scaling early-stage adtech companies with paid)

This is intuitive and broadly right — but it leads founders down the wrong path.

What the common wisdom gets wrong

The early-stage “generalist marketer” you’re told to hire — at the price most founders are willing to pay — is rarely equipped to build a function from scratch.

There are exceptions. But most founders make one of two choices. One is they hire someone who’s been a marketing manager at a similar company, thinking “They’ll step into the role.”

The other common choice is someone from a big company who “wants to get their hands dirty.” That person usually has no idea what dirty looks like. They’re used to twelve-person approval chains for a single asset. Now they need to write five posts a day themselves. They can’t keep up with a startup founder’s pace — let alone set the standard themselves.

So most startup founders end up with one of two things:

• A marketer who can’t be a true partner to the CEO — who lacks the strategic chops to own positioning and GTM.

• Or a professional manager who knows the lingo but can’t produce nearly enough to grow your reputation — and who starts lobbying you to hire a whole team.

Avoid both traps: the amateur and the manager.

What you actually need: AI-enhanced supermarketers

Early-stage startups don’t need a generalist plus affordable helpers. They need 1–2 AI-enhanced supermarketers — people who combine strategic depth with tactical output.

These people should be able to cover at least three or four of the five following areas: product marketing, content, comms, events, and strategy. They should elevate the CEO’s thinking. And they should be producing enough high-quality output to replace three competent marketers.

Every founder says they only hire A-players. But doing that means making tradeoffs and doing things differently. It means not hiring a $120K marketing manager and surrounding them with junior support. It means hiring one person who is strategic, fast, industry-savvy, and capable of producing at the highest level.

With AI, there’s no excuse not to find someone like that. One person can now do the work of a team — if they know the space, know how to think, and know how to ship.

So don’t settle for the common wisdom. Don’t play it safe.

Build for what’s possible now — not what was normal five years ago.

The bar is higher. Your expectations should be, too.