I get a version of this question roughly once a quarter, from someone who’s just been hired as the first dedicated marketer at a $1M–$5M ARR SaaS company. “What should I do in the first 90 days?” The version I send back has stabilized over the last three years. Here it is.
Days 1–14: listen and document
Resist the urge to ship anything in the first two weeks. Your job is to build a documented understanding of what’s actually happening. Specifically:
- Sit on 6–10 sales calls. Including discovery, demo, and closed-won deals if possible. Take notes on language, objections, and the specific moment in the conversation where the prospect either leaned in or pulled back.
- Talk to 5–8 customers. Mix of recent wins, long-tenured customers, and at least one customer who almost churned. Structured conversation: how did they hear about you, what was the prior tool, what almost stopped them from buying, what would they tell a peer.
- Audit existing inbound forms and lead routing. Where do leads come from? Where do they go? What happens between submission and first reply? You’ll find at least one broken thing.
- Read the last 24 months of board decks. If they exist. This gives you the founder’s mental model of the company. It’s often very different from how the company looks from inside the marketing function.
Days 15–30: write the first plan
By week three you should have enough input to write a one-page marketing plan. Not a 40-slide deck. One page. It should cover:
- Your read on the ICP (specific, like in the post on ICP tightness)
- Three messaging hypotheses you’re going to test in the first 90 days
- Three channels you’re going to invest in and three you’re explicitly going to ignore for now
- Two metrics you’ll be accountable for
- One thing the founder needs to start doing or stop doing for this plan to work
Share with the founder. Iterate. Get to alignment in two weeks. If you can’t, that’s important information — either your plan is wrong, or you can’t work with this founder, or the founder doesn’t actually want a marketer.
Days 30–60: execute on three things
Three. Not seven. Three.
The pattern that works most reliably in my experience: one positioning artifact (typically the homepage or sales deck), one new content channel (most commonly a founder-led newsletter or podcast appearance series), and one operations cleanup (lead routing, attribution baseline, MQL definition — pick the most broken one). Three discrete deliverables, all shippable in 30 days.
The temptation to also redesign the website, rebuild the marketing stack, and launch a paid program is enormous. Resist. Those things will be wrong at this stage because you don’t yet have the data to make them right. Make them in months 4–9 instead.
Days 60–90: measure and reset
By day 60 you should have data on whether the three messaging hypotheses held up. Most of the time, two of them do and one doesn’t. The one that doesn’t is more informative than the two that did — it tells you something about how the market is mishearing your category. Document it. Adjust.
By day 90 you should have a written plan for months 4–9 that’s calibrated to what you’ve learned. This is also when you should have the conversation with the founder about budget, headcount, and the next investment area. Not in your first week.
A few things to avoid
- Don’t redesign the brand in your first 90 days. Unless there’s a specific compliance or accessibility issue, brand work in the first quarter is a tell that you’re avoiding harder problems.
- Don’t hire anyone in your first 90 days. Maybe a contractor for a specific deliverable. Definitely not a full-time hire. You don’t yet know what the company actually needs.
- Don’t run a big paid campaign. Paid amplifies what works. If you don’t know what works yet, paid amplifies confusion.
- Don’t argue with the founder publicly in the first 90 days. Disagree privately, ship publicly, build credibility through results. The public disagreements come later, after you’ve earned the credibility to spend.
If you’ve just been hired into this role and want to talk it through, drop me a line — happy to share the version of this with the specifics tuned to your situation.
— Margaret
