Emily Kramer
Co-founder of MKT1, angel investor, former marketing leader at Asana, Carta, Ticketfly and Astro
Where to hear and read about Emily Kramer1 episode or test
Emily Kramer is co-founder of MKT1 and MKT1 Capital, an angel investor who was the first or one of the first marketers at several startups, including Asana and Carta. The most useful thing to learn from her is to find whether your marketing bottleneck is fuel or engine, then hire a scrappy early-stage generalist for that gap.
you shouldn't have activity goals you should have impact goals
How to build a powerful marketing machine | Emily Kramer (Asana, Carta, MKT1)
Emily Kramer: the story and the lessons
1Emily Kramer's path as a first marketer
Kramer has built B2B marketing from scratch at startups of very different sizes. She was the second marketer at Ticketfly, then the first marketer at Asana when it had 30 to 35 people, and led that team for just under four years.
She began in advertising, went to business school, then moved into startups.
At Carta she ran the same job as at Asana, much later. Carta had about 300 people and no marketing function, and she built one from nothing.
One of its big bets was a huge data study and events, run by the brand marketer.
Between those jobs she helped a seed-stage company reach a Series A. Astro, another earlier stop, was acquired by Slack.
Today she advises and invests full time through MKT1 Capital. The small fund backs early-stage B2B companies and helps them build marketing. Her site, mkt1.co, links to her courses, newsletter, job board and angel investing resources.
2How Kramer decides which marketer to hire first
Kramer sorts marketing into fuel and engine and fixes the weaker half. Fuel is what you create: copy, content, positioning, templates. The engine is how it reaches people: channels, email setup, segmentation, tracking, ops.
Engine without fuel is outbound email with nothing valuable in it. Fuel without engine is blog posts nobody sees. In her words: "forget all of it and just think of marketing as you need fuel and you need an engine".
She diagnoses a fuel problem with plain positioning questions. Who is the product for, why is it better, how does it compare to competitors, and what is the top-performing page? No answer means a fuel problem.
Good content that was shared once on social and went nowhere is an engine problem. She notes founders usually see their own problem quickly once asked.
Kramer counts tools, templates and calculators as content, not just blog posts. Resources, webinar and podcast recordings and website copy are also fuel, and tools and templates tend to do better.
Fuel still needs distribution to pay off.
She hires for business model experience, not industry experience. Top-down sales, enterprise, product-led and free-version models each call for different marketing. Requiring experience selling to HR or construction shrinks the pool for little gain.
Good marketers learn an audience and product fast, and a fresh set of eyes can help.
Kramer wants a pi-shaped first marketer, not a T-shaped one. That means expert in one of product marketing, content or growth, and proficient in a second, so they can set strategy and manage contractors for the rest.
Realistic pairs are product marketing plus growth, or product marketing plus content. Content plus growth is rare.
She warns against a senior hire who only worked at a big company. Someone from a public company has never built a foundation without a known brand or built-in customers. Founders told her they had just fired a first marketer who had only worked at Salesforce.
She is wary of investor referrals of big names such as someone from Google. She looks for someone who worked early, has seen great work, and will happily do everything themselves.
Her default first hire is a product marketer who understands growth. That person knows the channels, can work with contractors, and writes the company's copy for a long time, so she tests both short and long form writing.
If the company already has good contractors and content, a growth person may go first. She says the scariest question for a product marketer is "what's product marketing?", which Asana's CEO asked every candidate.
Kramer hires the first marketer only after some product market fit. Marketing accelerates one-to-many growth, so it helps once you have successful customers, not just design partners. Typically that is a junior hire at seed or just before a Series A, then two people after the A.
While founders run bespoke sales, they and contractors can cover it. Product-led companies need marketers earlier because there is no sales team.
Her interview questions test whether a marketer can explain simply. She asks what the product is, why it is better and who it is for, then asks candidates to describe something complicated as simply as they can.
For writers she sometimes asks for a simpler version, up to four times. She also asks for a recent project from start to finish, listening for the goal and audience.
3How Kramer gets product and marketing to work together
Kramer calls product-led growth marketing under another name. It mostly means less sales, so product plus marketing share the job of reaching customers. Product is one more channel.
She admits this is a hot take. Marketing should own web conversion and inbound channels, while product runs in-product experiments and onboarding is a shared gray area.
She treats the marketing-to-product handoff like the sales handoff. The path from website sign-up to first use must feel consistent. Product emails colliding with marketing drips makes two teams feel disjointed.
She pairs a growth PM with a marketing counterpart early. There is no single right structure, but you need both skill sets.
Kramer keeps the website in a tool marketing can edit. A website gets updated about five thousand times, so she prefers something like Webflow. A site in the code base or a headless CMS marketing can't touch is a huge problem.
Product sometimes owns the website early, before marketing exists.
At Asana she kept a list of who is the DRI for what. The list was about responsibilities, not job titles: the PM owned onboarding tests and a marketing copywriter owned the words. It grew as hires split up work, and owners were excited to take new items.
It told product teams exactly who to go to for a launch. As she put it: "it's not your job title it's what are the things that you are the DRI for".
Asana ran an open roadmap week before every quarter. Cross-functional planning meetings let the head of marketing sit in on product roadmapping, with a document recording the outcome.
Some attendees were silent participants who just listened. She admits it may not scale forever, but it worked well early on.
Kramer writes a GACC brief before any big marketing project. It covers goals, audience, creative angle, channels and stakeholders (who is the DRI, who weighs in, who helps), and is shared with product early.
Product can correct the audience or messaging before the blog post is written. For a launch, the PM shares what is being built and marketing replies with the brief.
4How Kramer judges whether a marketing team is effective
She wants impact goals, not activity goals. "Write 10 blog posts this month" is a tactic. The goal should be traffic, its conversion rate or the sign-ups it brings.
She pairs a volume goal with a conversion rate, such as more sign-ups at the same or better activation rate, because low-quality sign-ups are easy to buy. A team tracking no conversion anywhere has a huge problem.
Kramer asks a marketing lead for core work, big bets and broken foundations. Core work drives linear growth and is tracked on full-funnel metrics. Big bets could cause step-change growth. Foundations are pieces like lead scoring or a website not yet on Webflow.
A lead who can't name big bets is a warning sign, since venture-backed startups can't reach their growth rate through incremental work alone.
She expects marketing leaders to explain their work in plain terms internally. Marketers talk well to an audience but often poorly to colleagues, and marketing has a bad reputation. Leaders must strip out jargon, which she says she has struggled with too.
Large teams need a "marketing PM", often a product marketer or the lead, to tie many projects together.
5How Kramer invests as a functional angel
Kramer pitches founders one specific way she will help. She builds the marketing function, shapes the job description and hiring process, refers candidates and coaches the hire on strategy. She and her partner Kathleen can get into any deal they want.
She compares it to marketing yourself: "it's almost like you gotta like product market yourself". A clear niche beats being another generalist investor.
She delivers only in her stated area, and her reputation rides on it. Founders know when to come to her and she responds. She warns people with full-time jobs not to overcommit.
The goal is to be the most helpful investor on a cap table, going deep where you are responsible.
Kramer says helping founders takes less time than it seems. She has invested in over 150 companies and most founders ask for help about once a quarter. She talks to one or two marketing candidates a week from a list fed by her newsletter and website.
She has had the same hiring conversations so often she could do it in her sleep, yet it feels new to each founder.
She sees referring the person a company hires as a top investor contribution. The company remembers who sent that person because they see them every day. This has happened to her many times.
She says anyone with a network in a certain area can add this kind of leverage.
How to build a powerful marketing machine | Emily Kramer (Asana, Carta, MKT1)
Teaches how to decide what marketing hire a startup needs using a fuel and engine framework, and how product and marketing teams can work together with clear ownership and impact goals. Comes from someone who was the first marketer at four startups, including Asana and Carta, and now helps founders build marketing functions.
Kramer has built B2B marketing from scratch at startups of very different sizes. She was the second marketer at Ticketfly, then the first marketer at Asana when it had 30 to 35 people, and led that team for just under four years.
She began in advertising, went to business school, then moved into startups.
At Carta she ran the same job as at Asana, much later. Carta had about 300 people and no marketing function, and she built one from nothing.
One of its big bets was a huge data study and events, run by the brand marketer.
Between those jobs she helped a seed-stage company reach a Series A. Astro, another earlier stop, was acquired by Slack.
Today she advises and invests full time through MKT1 Capital. The small fund backs early-stage B2B companies and helps them build marketing. Her site, mkt1.co, links to her courses, newsletter, job board and angel investing resources.
Kramer sorts marketing into fuel and engine and fixes the weaker half. Fuel is what you create: copy, content, positioning, templates. The engine is how it reaches people: channels, email setup, segmentation, tracking, ops.
Engine without fuel is outbound email with nothing valuable in it. Fuel without engine is blog posts nobody sees. In her words: "forget all of it and just think of marketing as you need fuel and you need an engine".
She diagnoses a fuel problem with plain positioning questions. Who is the product for, why is it better, how does it compare to competitors, and what is the top-performing page? No answer means a fuel problem.
Good content that was shared once on social and went nowhere is an engine problem. She notes founders usually see their own problem quickly once asked.
Kramer counts tools, templates and calculators as content, not just blog posts. Resources, webinar and podcast recordings and website copy are also fuel, and tools and templates tend to do better.
Fuel still needs distribution to pay off.
She hires for business model experience, not industry experience. Top-down sales, enterprise, product-led and free-version models each call for different marketing. Requiring experience selling to HR or construction shrinks the pool for little gain.
Good marketers learn an audience and product fast, and a fresh set of eyes can help.
Kramer wants a pi-shaped first marketer, not a T-shaped one. That means expert in one of product marketing, content or growth, and proficient in a second, so they can set strategy and manage contractors for the rest.
Realistic pairs are product marketing plus growth, or product marketing plus content. Content plus growth is rare.
She warns against a senior hire who only worked at a big company. Someone from a public company has never built a foundation without a known brand or built-in customers. Founders told her they had just fired a first marketer who had only worked at Salesforce.
She is wary of investor referrals of big names such as someone from Google. She looks for someone who worked early, has seen great work, and will happily do everything themselves.
Her default first hire is a product marketer who understands growth. That person knows the channels, can work with contractors, and writes the company's copy for a long time, so she tests both short and long form writing.
If the company already has good contractors and content, a growth person may go first. She says the scariest question for a product marketer is "what's product marketing?", which Asana's CEO asked every candidate.
Kramer hires the first marketer only after some product market fit. Marketing accelerates one-to-many growth, so it helps once you have successful customers, not just design partners. Typically that is a junior hire at seed or just before a Series A, then two people after the A.
While founders run bespoke sales, they and contractors can cover it. Product-led companies need marketers earlier because there is no sales team.
Her interview questions test whether a marketer can explain simply. She asks what the product is, why it is better and who it is for, then asks candidates to describe something complicated as simply as they can.
For writers she sometimes asks for a simpler version, up to four times. She also asks for a recent project from start to finish, listening for the goal and audience.
Kramer calls product-led growth marketing under another name. It mostly means less sales, so product plus marketing share the job of reaching customers. Product is one more channel.
She admits this is a hot take. Marketing should own web conversion and inbound channels, while product runs in-product experiments and onboarding is a shared gray area.
She treats the marketing-to-product handoff like the sales handoff. The path from website sign-up to first use must feel consistent. Product emails colliding with marketing drips makes two teams feel disjointed.
She pairs a growth PM with a marketing counterpart early. There is no single right structure, but you need both skill sets.
Kramer keeps the website in a tool marketing can edit. A website gets updated about five thousand times, so she prefers something like Webflow. A site in the code base or a headless CMS marketing can't touch is a huge problem.
Product sometimes owns the website early, before marketing exists.
At Asana she kept a list of who is the DRI for what. The list was about responsibilities, not job titles: the PM owned onboarding tests and a marketing copywriter owned the words. It grew as hires split up work, and owners were excited to take new items.
It told product teams exactly who to go to for a launch. As she put it: "it's not your job title it's what are the things that you are the DRI for".
Asana ran an open roadmap week before every quarter. Cross-functional planning meetings let the head of marketing sit in on product roadmapping, with a document recording the outcome.
Some attendees were silent participants who just listened. She admits it may not scale forever, but it worked well early on.
Kramer writes a GACC brief before any big marketing project. It covers goals, audience, creative angle, channels and stakeholders (who is the DRI, who weighs in, who helps), and is shared with product early.
Product can correct the audience or messaging before the blog post is written. For a launch, the PM shares what is being built and marketing replies with the brief.
She wants impact goals, not activity goals. "Write 10 blog posts this month" is a tactic. The goal should be traffic, its conversion rate or the sign-ups it brings.
She pairs a volume goal with a conversion rate, such as more sign-ups at the same or better activation rate, because low-quality sign-ups are easy to buy. A team tracking no conversion anywhere has a huge problem.
Kramer asks a marketing lead for core work, big bets and broken foundations. Core work drives linear growth and is tracked on full-funnel metrics. Big bets could cause step-change growth. Foundations are pieces like lead scoring or a website not yet on Webflow.
A lead who can't name big bets is a warning sign, since venture-backed startups can't reach their growth rate through incremental work alone.
She expects marketing leaders to explain their work in plain terms internally. Marketers talk well to an audience but often poorly to colleagues, and marketing has a bad reputation. Leaders must strip out jargon, which she says she has struggled with too.
Large teams need a "marketing PM", often a product marketer or the lead, to tie many projects together.
Kramer pitches founders one specific way she will help. She builds the marketing function, shapes the job description and hiring process, refers candidates and coaches the hire on strategy. She and her partner Kathleen can get into any deal they want.
She compares it to marketing yourself: "it's almost like you gotta like product market yourself". A clear niche beats being another generalist investor.
She delivers only in her stated area, and her reputation rides on it. Founders know when to come to her and she responds. She warns people with full-time jobs not to overcommit.
The goal is to be the most helpful investor on a cap table, going deep where you are responsible.
Kramer says helping founders takes less time than it seems. She has invested in over 150 companies and most founders ask for help about once a quarter. She talks to one or two marketing candidates a week from a list fed by her newsletter and website.
She has had the same hiring conversations so often she could do it in her sleep, yet it feels new to each founder.
She sees referring the person a company hires as a top investor contribution. The company remembers who sent that person because they see them every day. This has happened to her many times.
She says anyone with a network in a certain area can add this kind of leverage.