5 Signs Your Startup Has Outgrown DIY Marketing

DIY marketing can take a startup a long way, and in the early days that’s exactly what you want. You’re testing the business, learning from customers and changing things quickly, so there’s no reason to overbuild the marketing before you know what really needs to stick.

The harder part is knowing when that stage is over.

Usually there isn’t one obvious moment. It shows up more gradually, as the story gets harder to tell, bigger opportunities expose gaps that weren’t obvious before, or the founder remains the only person who can explain the company properly. None of those things is a crisis on its own, but together they can be a sign that the business has moved forward and the marketing around it hasn’t quite kept pace.

Here are five things we tend to notice.

1. You’re telling a slightly different story every time

The investor deck says one thing, the website leans somewhere else, and sales has developed its own version because that’s what seems to work best in conversation.

Some variation is natural as a company grows, but eventually those different versions start creating confusion. If the story changes too much depending on who’s telling it, there’s probably still work to do on the core idea the company wants people to understand and remember.

2. Bigger opportunities are making the gaps more obvious

Your first customers may have understood the product because they knew you, trusted you or were close enough to the problem to connect the dots themselves. Larger customers and investors tend to give you less room to do that.

They want to understand the business quickly, see why it matters and feel confident that there’s a clear point of view behind it. As the opportunities get bigger, ambiguity starts to cost more, and the marketing has to do more of the work before you ever get into the room.

3. The founder is still doing too much of the explaining

There’s a stage where this is unavoidable. The founder knows the business best and can usually tell the story with more conviction than anyone else.

But if every important pitch, sales conversation or piece of content still depends on the founder stepping in to make it make sense, the story hasn’t travelled far enough yet. As the company grows, other people need to be able to carry it with the same clarity, without relying on the founder to fill in the gaps every time.

4. You’re doing more marketing, but it still feels hard

You may be producing more content, showing up in more places or bringing in new tools and outside support, yet every new piece still feels like it starts from scratch.

That often points to a problem underneath the activity. When the positioning, audience and story are clear, they make a lot of the next decisions easier. When they aren’t, more activity tends to create more work because every piece has to solve the same strategic questions all over again.

5. The business has changed, but the marketing hasn’t

This is one of the easiest signs to miss because it tends to happen slowly. The product becomes more sophisticated, the customer changes and the ambition gets bigger, while the website, messaging or sales story still reflects an earlier version of the company.

From inside the business, that gap can be hard to see because you know how much has changed. Someone discovering the company for the first time only has what’s in front of them, and sometimes that picture is six or twelve months behind where the business actually is.

Growing out of DIY is a good problem to have

DIY marketing has done its job if it helped you get the business moving. The question is whether it’s still helping you get where you want to go next.

For a lot of startups, there comes a point where the company needs more structure, sharper thinking and an outside perspective, but still doesn’t need a full marketing team or a large agency engagement.

That’s why we created 5ve for Startups. We work with founders at that in-between stage to help get the story, positioning and marketing foundation into better shape, so the business is easier to understand and the next phase has something stronger to build from.

Drop us a line at hello@5vecollective.com