Startup Marketing

Y Combinator filled the Chase Center. Sam Altman. Jensen Huang. Jeff Dean. Alexandr Wang. Six thousand founders selected from 30,000 applicants. You couldn't pay to get in. Everyone who made it walked out with over $25,000 in compute credits from OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, xAI, AWS, and Azure. People online called it the MegaChurch of Tech. That's not a criticism — it's a signal. Jensen Huang's talk already has 200,000 views three weeks after being posted. The asset they created is enormous. And yet — no dedicated videographer for the individual speakers. No coordinated influencer seeding before the event. No clear criteria for who got accepted. Here's what I keep coming back to: in-person events right now are not just about the room. They're about the content machine they create after. Every panel, every conversation, every moment on stage is potential fuel for months of social. If you're spending to put on an event and not spending to capture it, you're leaving most of the value on the floor. And the bigger point: as AI makes it easier for anyone to build anything, in-person becomes your moat. The brands people feel close to are the ones they keep paying. You can vibe-code a feature. You can't vibe-code trust. If you don't have in-person in your strategy, start building it now. https://startupfortune.com/y-combinator-fills-an-nba-arena-with-ai-founders-as-sam-altman-and-jensen-huang-tell-6000-applicants-the-window-is-now/ #B2BMarketing #EventMarketing …more

Ramp built a fake Gen Z influencer called the Kumar Method, grew him to a million followers, and nobody knew a brand was behind it until they chose to reveal it. That is a legitimate masterclass in B2B brand building. The play: go anti-finance to reach people who aren't in finance yet. Don't market to the people who already know you. Market to the people who will need you later. Genius. But they left a lot on the table. The biggest miss: they let people read the Kumar Method lead magnet before asking for an email. One gate before access would have captured hundreds of thousands of addresses. Instead they probably got 20,000. People will give you their email for real value — just ask. Second miss: the reveal was too quiet. If you've been sitting on a secret that took a million followers to build, you don't just drop it. You coordinate. You seed it to every creator and podcast you know. You make the reveal as big as the build. The actual playbook for anyone thinking about this: → Know exactly who you're speaking to before you build the character → Gate the lead magnet from the start → Make sure the character has somewhere to go after the reveal → Treat the announcement like a campaign, not a footnote The Kumar Method strategy is brilliant. The execution had gaps. Learn from both. https://www.trueframe.xyz/blog/kumar-method #B2BMarketing #ContentStrategy …more

One audience. One message. One channel. One CTA. Run it for 30 days. Most startup marketing problems aren't caused by too little effort. They're caused by too many simultaneous experiments. …more

Three things I got wrong about marketing across three startups: 1. I treated it as a phase. "We'll do marketing once the product is ready." Then the product was ready, the launch window closed, and we were starting from zero on awareness with a runway clock ticking. Marketing isn't a phase. It's a habit you build before you need it. 2. I hired it out too early. The first agency we paid wrote posts that sounded nothing like us, ran ads against the wrong audience, and I spent more time briefing them than I would have spent posting myself. Outsourcing only works after you know what good looks like for your business. 3. I confused volume with consistency. We did sprints — two weeks of daily posts, then silence for a month. The algorithm punishes that pattern. So does your audience. Three posts a week, every week, beats fifteen posts in a burst followed by nothing. What I do now is the opposite of all three. Marketing is the first habit, not the last. I run my own content with AI-assisted workflows so I know what good looks like before I delegate. And I optimize for showing up every week, not for output spikes. That's what I'm teaching at my workshop on May 28th in San Jose at the MLK Library, hosted by the Silicon Valley Small Business Development Center. The exact workflows I use now, after three startups and one exit. If you can't make it, book a free 15 to 20 minute marketing audit and I'll help you skip the mistakes I made. https://www.radi8.com/free-audit?utm_source=linkedin&utm_campaign=free_audit&utm_content=post_id DM me if you want the workshop link. …more

The objection I keep hearing about startup marketing, and why I still disagree Common pushback: “You cannot start marketing until the go-to-market is nailed.” That mindset keeps early-career professionals waiting instead of building skills that prove them. After 20 years working with startups, I use a simple alternative: treat early marketing as a learning engine. Three practical moves: 1) Run a 2–4 week micro-project tied to one customer hypothesis. 2) Run two low-cost channel tests and capture outcomes. 3) Document a one-page case study that shows insight and decisions. These deliver portfolio-ready work, mentorship opportunities, and clear next steps into product, operations, or startup roles. Send me a message if you want a one-page template or to talk through an idea. Ask me about Radi8 if you want help automating this into ongoing content. …more

The framework I use to help founders and early-stage startups make progress on marketing strategies. 1) Target outcome: pick one measurable user action and a 30 to 60 day deadline. 2) Customer evidence: run 10 targeted conversations to validate the offer and surface objections. 3) Channel tests: run three focused experiments with the same offer, track cost per acquisition and conversion steps. 4) Systemize: codify the winning sequence into a weekly playbook and handoff checklist. I use this with early-stage teams to turn uncertainty into repeatable demand. If you want a 20-minute review to map this to your launch, send me a message. #startups …more