The executive summary of the FDA report[1] on the vaccine lists observed side effects in the clinical trial population as well as their incidence rates. Briefly, it is comparable to a normal flu shot.
Derek Lowe, who's worked as a chemist doing drug discovery for 30 years (for whatever that experience is worth to you), wrote an article[2] talking about that report and gives his take on the question of safety.
He's also written an article[3] about how it's likely people will wrongly attribute things that would have happened anyway to having taken the vaccine.
For a techie analogy: Have you ever been roped into doing some computer support for a friend or family member? Fixing a printer, installing a driver, cleaning malware, etc.? Have you ever experienced someone you helped coming back to you the next week blaming you for some new issue that's cropped up because "It must have been you when you worked on it last week!", even though it's because they went to some scummy website or similar? The vaccine rollout is going to be that scenario times a billion.
"High risk" for a vaccine is still a lower risk than that of catching/suffering/dieing from covid. It is a numbers game, a balance between risks. It isn't a magic pill to stop evil in its tracks.
I completely agree -- but what I'd like to understand is what those risks are from the vaccine. In Canada, the risk from COVID is high, but not as high as that in the US.
I was the first Head of Marketing for a high growth tech company (we raised USD $71 million last year). I've been here almost 3 years, growing leads by 11x and revenue by millions with a tiny team and budget.
My advice to those hiring HoM for a B2B startup:
1. Hire a performance marketer (i.e. leads, revenue focused), not a brand marketer. Your sales team needs leads to grow, not "brand awareness". Once you've got a nice flow of leads, that's when the softer side of marketing becomes important.
2. If they are focused on how big of a budget they'll get, that's a major red flag. The first channels should not be paid. Budget needs to be small to start -- once you prove ROI/traction, it's now a conversation about scaling quickly, and not about blindly throwing money away.
3. A quick look at their resume or LinkedIn should tell you everything you need to know... is it full of numbers/data, or is it a list of tasks & buzzword bingo?
4. Hire someone who can do everything themselves. Make sure they won't need to rely on agencies.
Edit: Regarding the article's recommendation about hiring ICs to perform smaller tasks. I personally would find this unappealing because it means I can't build my own initial team, and I'll need to investigate what those ICs have done so far -- have they made poor decisions I'll need to undo?
To expand a bit for those outside of this space, a performance marketer is often called a direct response marketer. They measure the direct response to everything they do. The alternative is often called an awareness marketer. They tend to focus on creative that can create awareness.
2.) A b2b startup just turning on revenue and looking to show a profit typically needs to validate a really high return from marketing efforts. The salary of a marketing head isn’t free. Do the math off what it cost to acquire revenues and profits off that salary. (e.g. $120k/year to a contractor for this role is $10k/month to the company, that should buy you at least a 2X in profit (you really want to be at 4x in profit) if you are in b2b). Once you have something working you need budget to pour fuel on the fire and get it going.
3.) Disagree here. Plenty of information can be considered confidential by employers and may not be published.
4.) Initially true but Agencies add value as you increase spending. They likely have negotiated better ad rates than your single startup can manage so you’ll save on spend by going through them. Also, don’t discount the creative they can do. Nearly all big companies have struck a working partnership with an agency over creative works the agency designed. There is value here but don’t expect them to figure out your initial strategy. Also, avoid agencies that don’t have good ad spend like the plague. Recently spoke to one that bragged about an average 1.2X return on Capital to their customers in top line revenue from advertising. For every dollar we would spend they would likely bring us $1.20 in revenue. That’s horrible. I can do better with direct mail.
> 4.) Initially true but Agencies add value as you increase spending. ... There is value here but don’t expect them to figure out your initial strategy.
Exactly. The parent comment was spot-on about not hiring someone who is wholly dependent on external agencies to get anything done. Avoid people who are basically middlemen between your company and external agencies. You're better off going directly to the agencies in that case.
You want someone who can chart the initial strategy and then judiciously augment with external agencies when appropriate.
As someone who spent years running marketing agencies I can attest that this is all sound advice. My principle advice for early marketing hires is to bring in people who know how to get money in the door starting yesterday.
A few points I'd like to mention though:
> If they are focused on how big of a budget they'll get, that's a major red flag.
I think it's fair to ask is there any money for this? and is there a revenue stream (even just a trickle?) yet? If you're going to potentially be the head of marketing you might want to see that the CEO has their head on straight and has made some sort of progress.
> Hire someone who can do everything themselves. Make sure they won't need to rely on agencies.
I'm not convinced this is practical in all cases. Sometimes the right move is to let someone else take something off your plate. Finding someone who errs on the side of 'I can do that myself' is probably the right choice though.
To expand on this as a marketer that can "do all the things"...
This in many ways requires this person to be technical on some level. Perhaps not an engineer, but comfortable talking to one, someone who understand how tracking works at a technical level, and someone who can handle hands-on configuration of a CRM/ESP, ad platforms, tag management, analytics, etc., writing specs for developers where needed, and generally knowing enough to know when they are out of their depth technically to mitigate security and data liability risk.
The last one is important to ensure a company is adhering to privacy legislation. Often engineers do not know what sorts of data live in the martech stack, as their may not have access or know where to look.
While I agree with most of the rest of your points, I'd disagree with the budget and first channels. If a company's aspirations and timeline require a large budget, it can be pretty important to know that up front. There are definitely scenarios where those are out of line with expectations and reality. Also, paid media and things that are more easily controlled/measurable/scalable may indeed be more appropriate to get going quickly than things like content marketing which, while important (especially for B2B), is often a slower buildup. Again, it is very circumstantial. What works in one situation may not be the best choice for another, which is what a competent marketer will help sort out and devise tests around.
I looked for that person for 7 months in my previous startup (was advertised on angel list as a remote role and a max budget of 120k/y).
I never found that person and had to settle for someone with part of those skills only.
Full disclosure: I am not a recruitment specialist so that's probably where the issue was
Do know that performance marketers are a tiny group and most of them run their own businesses with great success.
You can also become a performance marketer if you are inclined. Takes times, but not a lot of money. If you are interested in this sort of thing go watch some Jay Abraham videos on youtube.
Disagree on money. There are some aspects of performance marketing that you literally cannot get experience with unless you have a certain level of scale and the spend that gets you there.
If someone wants to seriously go down this path, you can learn a lot on your own, but it can also short circuit your learning to get a job somewhere that has experts you can learn from, and invest in your education that way.
Well, I meant your own money. You certainly need money for certain things, but it doesnt have to be yours. A good performance marketer understands how to leverage somebody elses money to their advantage.
It'd be helpful to add some context from your position since I bet you (and/or C-suite) bring a lot of your own expertise to the company and some people may not have those in their locker.
I've found that sometimes the existing gap in the team could be positioning, messaging, or just a basic onboarding process--you would expect those things to disappear around a Series A raise but it's just wishful thinking in my experience and companies are not vacuums.
Finding a solid performance marketer is probably easier than nailing those things. To your point, if you've got traction, deep expertise, and the foundation for marketing set then performance is the focus next. Appreciate the B2B perspective!
Positioning, messaging, and onboarding are all really important to startups and need attention. But they shouldn't be the focal point right away. In my experience, positioning/messaging are more of an iterative process of evolution & refinement over time (via experimentation). Spending 80% of your time on this at the start will not solve the immediate problem of leads/demand.
From a strategic perspective, the focus at the start should be on organic performance, targeting the bottom of the funnel. Put most of your chips on what will drive leads, that are ready to buy, at the lowest investment possible.
Once the sales team is struggling to keep up, you can look at moving up the funnel and reprioritizing.
Edit: Not all niches are the same, so this is more of a generalization.
> IMO the challenge with marketing is the very high budget and lack of (visible) returns .
Modern digital marketing is focused on measurability and ROI. Even traditional marketing can be measured, it's just a bit harder.
When you hire your first head of marketing, make sure they are ROI and results focused. A quick look at their resume or LinkedIn should tell you everything you need to know... is it full of numbers/data, or is it a list of tasks & buzzword bingo?
If you're looking for startup ideas, the best way is to talk to people in your target industry. Setup as many interviews as you can and ask them about what they do and the "pains" they experience doing those jobs.
I’m an SEO person, and true SEO is about providing value and helping the searcher. Not about gaming it. Google does a great job at removing the black hats, and a pretty good job at removing the grey hats, but it’s not perfect.
Undoubtedly true. Doesn’t change the fact that true SEO is about helping the searcher resolve their query. Google is evil, but they have the best search algorithm in town.
Most analytics platforms will report on any straight direct line between spend and incremental revenue. The hard part is measuring the indirect part, as you mentioned, but it is possible.
> When a recession happen the first to go is marketing.
As a marketer, I have found the opposite to be true for some industries. For example, during 2007/2008 my digital marketing agency saw a big surge in business from companies who saw marketing as a way to grow lagging demand.
I guess it also had to do with cost effectiveness. Digital marketing might have been small but cheaper than paper/cable medias. Right now given the size of Google and Facebook (and the fact that their whole revenue is basically ads), it seems the advertising spend on them has become excessive and not cost effective.
