I'm going to be in the minority here and as a marketer I am probably biased, but I think you should have a marketer or a business guy as soon as possible, when you are designing your product, writing sales copy, setting pricing ,deciding the angle/niche you target and so on. These are are critical early marketing tasks. By marketer I don't mean one of the millions of narrow minded seo guys. I mean someone who can develop a deep understanding of your target audience and the marketplace and how your product fits in

I agree you need someone who understands your target market from the beginning. However, I think that for some markets, a conventional 'marketing guy' would be the wrong choice... for example, I sell infrastructure to SysAdmins. Yeah, if I wanted to sell infrastructure to managers, I'd need a conventional marketing guy. But for my current target market? I am pretty close to the optimal 'marketing guy' because I'm building a product that I would want to buy myself, and I'm selling it to people who buy it for the same reasons i would buy it.

I think it's essential to have someone on the team who understands the target market, their needs, their culture, and their feelings. It's really difficult to know how to build something you don't want for someone you don't really understand.

The money side depends on how much equity you want to share. I think it is worth bringing someone on board very early. You don't want to go from a cold, standing start at PM fit. You don't want a big company, big budget marketer but what Sean Ellis calls a "growth hacker" who can get creative, and experiment with many different user acquisition approaches. Ideally this is someone who can wear a lot of hats, is very product oriented and can help with customer development, and contribute a lot to the venture pre-PM fit, whether it be UX, working on bizdev relationships (these take time), a blog/PR strategy, and other avenues of attack. The more they can do with the least amount of money, the better. Someone who cares a lot about analytics and finds startup metrics for pirates the coolest thing ever. Someone who obsesses about messaging. Someone who has been at the super early stage before. Good luck!

I think we really have two options: find someone like this, or have one of our team become that person. This sounds like a good starting recipe if one of us wants to become that person themselves – Sean Ellis seems pretty awesome!

I meant to actually put exactly that in my note - there is no reason why if one of you is particularly interested in and seems adept at the business side of things that you cannot cover it yourself. Just think through how it will change your dev velocity, and make sure the person enjoys the role, because you always do a better job when you are having fun :)

I think Giff nailed it in his comment to you.

You might want to frame your thoughts around where you think you are in terms of Product/Market Fit -- that is, do you think you are pre- or post-?

You already have three full-time marketers. </Seth Godin>

To elaborate a little: there isn't a huge distinction between much of what you're doing right now and the really crucial marketing stuff for small startups. You're already making decisions with SEO implications, for example, and that is highly likely to be an important channel for you. If you don't feel comfortable making those decisions, rather than getting a dedicated SEO Guy I'd strongly suggest that one or all of you start reading/doing/measuring/testing. Ditto on copywriting, etc.

Don't even get me started on the degree to which building the product or talking about building the product is marketing.

We've already got the front-end guy on our team getting a little SEO obsessed, so hurray! I think the big question was if it was worthwhile to have someone not completely mired in the coding who was working full time on customer acquisition/evaluation; it looks like based on what everyone is saying, that IS the CEO's job. Hey, good news for us – we like trying to do everything ourselves!

My first advice is figure out what type of marketer do you want? There is a huge difference between a business development specialist and an online marketer. Generally a business development specialist is focused on distribution, partnerships, sales, and potentially affiliate programs if you are lucky. A traditional internet marketer will be focused on SEO, content development, user experience, email etc.

My advice is that if you can make the time you should start looking now, even if you are not ready to hire. It is going to take some time to find the right person to mesh with your personalities and if you do find a great person they need to be as excited about your product as you are.

I spent a couple years in product marketing (as a change-of-pace from dev), and I handle "marketing" for my company. Here's what I have to say: you need to be very careful.

You say you're running lean and taking a minimal product to market. Great! What are you hoping to do with a marketer?

In product companies, the "marketing" department does a bunch of different things, usually with different people specializing in each:

* Product marketing management (PM): Pricing. Figuring out what customers want you to build. Getting customers on the phone. Understanding competitors. Building a position for your product that differentiates you in terms of features and benefits.

* Marketing communications management (marcom): Advertising and conferences. SEO. Deciding to have a blog. Presumably (I'm wouldn't know) marcom people are also botching Adwords at startups all around the world as we speak.

* Public Relations (PR): Getting you mentioned in the press, on blogs, and in analyst reports.

Which of these functions you needs depends on what market you're selling to. I have basically no experience selling to people like my mom, but decent experience selling to other businesses. Let me break that market down for you:

* PM: The whole lean startup minimum viable process is designed to do the PM's job, meaning, if you're following the Reis/Blank playbook, you're already doing this person's job. Also, in a small software startup, this is a core role. If it's not being done by the engineers, it should be the "CEO" doing it.

* Marcom: If you can write posts on Hacker News you can set up a blog yourself. You can't afford a marcom person who knows how to use Adwords well, and if Adwords is your strategy, I'll let Patrick chime in to make a case for you automating and engineering that process instead of delegating it to someone with an MBA. You should avoid conferences altogether until you have customers.

* PR: At this stage of the game, you can do a lot of this work yourself. Mostly it involves hustling with bloggers in your space getting them free copies and bugging them to write about you, and then rolling that coverage up to the trade press in your field. (Be especially careful of an older bit of Graham advice about PR firms --- I'd be surprised if he still stood by it --- they are galactically expensive and, to put it generously, will pay off either spectacularly or not at all).

It's possible that you don't want any of these functions, and instead you just want a "business person", by which you might mean:

* Sales: someone to call prospective customers on the phone and get deals to happen

* Channel sales/marketing: someone to call prospective partners/resellers on the phone and get deals to happen.

* Bizdev: someone to call prospective acquirers on the phone and get deals to happen.

None of these are really "marketing" tasks, and in fact these roles are traditionally antagonists of marketing (sales and marketing have a long and sordid history of blaming each other when numbers don't get met). And none of them are things you want to hire before you have customers.

A running theme here is to follow Jason Freid's advice: don't hire people until you are getting run ragged doing their role for yourself. At least that way you know what you're getting into and what you're looking for.

This sounds like awesome advice. We should be able to cover all these roles – in particular, the CEO should be doing the PM role as his main gig. Some of the engineers are already starting to get into the science behind the SEO/AdWords stuff, so I imagine that we'll be inclined to keep some MBA's hands off of it :). PR feels like it will be easy for us – we've gotten some press attention already, and in our space as long as something is an awesome product, then it can get at least some attention.

Thanks tptacek! You might have just saved us a lot of money/time/disconnectedness from our users...

My own startup is nowhere near needing that but my experiences with startups would say: not anywhere near that time-frame. For one thing, it depends on what you're thinking about in terms of marketing.

Are you thinking customer-development and incorporating feedback into the product? That should be done by the founders and product people.

Are you thinking of people who do things like social media and PR? For that you can hire a more experienced firm or consultant with a hire hourly rate but likelier to do more in that hour than some junior "marketing" major.

If I had to put some value on it, I would say: once you have built a "fully" viable product that is market tested and its value is confirmed.

It sounds like all these jobs are things we can and should be doing ourselves. It sounds like a full time person once the product is "done" AND there's an opportunity for much larger growth if we were more widely known, THEN it might make sense to bring someone on.

Wow, thanks for the thoughts, everyone! This might totally change how our company goes about its business – rather than three coders who try to think about market on the side, we'll be two coders being driven by someone actively interacting with the market and learning from it. I'll let you know how it goes 3 months out or so...

If one of you owns SEO and the other takes over in-application metrics, there's no reason all three of you shouldn't be market-facing.

Also, see Sean's post on growth hackers here:

http://startup-marketing.com/where-are-all-the-growth-hacker...

you made need a sales or biz dev person more than a marketing person. some use these terms interchangeably, but I don't believe they're equivalent.