1658: Seed Stage B2B Startup Marketing with Lara McKeithan

Robert Plank 0:00 Building a startup is one of the hardest things a person can do, you're wearing 17 hats. You're making decisions with incomplete information, trying to build something from nothing while convincing investors, customers, and sometimes yourself that this is going to work. And wouldn't it be great to have someone who can perhaps be your marketing team, sit in your Slack, know your roadmap, build the engine until you're ready to hire and pursue these other avenues for funding. And we're here with exactly the person that we need to have this conversation with. It's the one and only Lara McKeithen who runs Pier. They are at PeirForStartups.com, that's P-I-E-R. And they are a startup marketing agency for seed stage B2B founders. So, if you are a founder who's raised your seed round, you have a product that works, and marketing's been an afterthought. That's where they do their best work. So, Miss Lara is here to educate us and explain to us this this scary, fast-paced world of seed funding, Miss Lara, how are you?

Lara McKeithan 1:05 Thank you, thank you for having me.

Robert Plank 1:08 Happy to have you. And so, what did I leave out of that introduction? What should we know about you, and how are you unique?

Lara McKeithan 1:14 Yeah, I think that was a nice introduction. I think one thing I I should say in the world of seed stage startups, I the word agency can be very scary, and so even though sometimes I'll say I'm an agency because it's a term that folks understand, I also try to avoid it because at the seed stage, you really need someone who's not going to just toss you into a company and hand you off and pull some levers? You need someone who's really embedded in your company and your product and your customers. Who's going to have that startup mode mentality and really be a partner for you and work directly with you. And that's where I come in. I love that if you ask my clients who's your marketing team, they would say, you know, Laura and Pierre. I I feel like I'm part of the companies that I work with, and I think that's something that's really different at the seed stage. Is you really need someone who's going to be your marketing partner, even if you don't have the the funds or you're not quite ready to hire full time in house.

Robert Plank 2:23 Okay, well, great. And I have to admit, I know very little about the the funding, the seeding, you hear about the Y combinator, this and Series A, Series B, that. But if someone out there is a future possibility for you and your services, what should they know, and how do they know if they're on the right track to partner with you?

Lara McKeithan 2:46 Yeah, so I think if you're on the funding track, or even if you're not, I typically work with startups who are at kind of this pre-seed seed stage, so where that might feel like, oh, this is where I'm at. Is as you kind of mentioned in the intro, you have a launch product. You maybe have started to do founder-led sales or founder-led marketing. Kind of in the beginning, very often founders are have created a product around something that is a special pain point to them, or they know people in the industry are well versed in the industry, so they've tapped their initial networks and market, and they've started to get a sense of who their ideal customer is, their ICP, and they have people coming in the door, and then they're like, "Okay, we know something's happening now. We need to scale it. Investors want to see month over month traction. They want to see we have customers. They want to see we have revenue. So we kind of are more technical or more product focused. We've tried our sales and marketing. Now we need a strategy, but we also need someone who actually can implement it and build it and set everything up and run it and knows how to look at the data and when to pivot and make decisions quickly and like I said in that startup mode and that's a really good time for when I work with a founder is when they need to start scaling marketing and building it out and really set the foundation, and I kind of in I say pre seed seed stage because typically once they get to a Series A, that's normally when I hand it off to someone who they've hired in house for marketing, and it kind of makes sense at that stage. Which I've seen worked with 50 plus startups, and it always tends to be like near the Series A, where they hire in house and they need someone who's like really there in the day to day to keep growing it. So that's when I'm a good partner to to come in and build and and yeah, love working at the early stages when there's not a lot of historic data, not very. Large budgets, small team, and we can really partner together and collaborate and grow and get those best days on record and and keep building.

Robert Plank 5:14 Exciting! So you're at that point where there's unlimited possibilities, there's some randomness.

Lara McKeithan 5:18 Yeah, exactly.

Robert Plank 5:19 Time to scale, figure out some numbers, and and I'm curious, like what? I mean, I'm sure every case is different, but like, what needs to be done? Like the you know the the ads, the SEO, the partnerships, the networking, all the above. Like what? Like what kind of magic secret sauce do you pile on?

Lara McKeithan 5:37 Yeah, that's a question I get a lot, and there's no special secret sauce for any two startups, so that's really kind of where I start is looking at okay, what is the product? Who are their customers? Who are their competitors? What does the online landscape look like? Are people coming and looking for that product, or do they not know about it? And we have to find those people and educate them on the product. Where our competitors are online, where are they not? What channels is their potential? What channels are really crowded? And I come up with a plan and a strategy of where we should start first and what channels we should tap. I think a common misconception is sometimes startups in the early stages. They're like, we just need to be everywhere, and they do everything, but not that well. And at the early stages, like I said, resources are tight, so focusing on a couple of channels is really key because it's better to do a couple things really well and get those customers coming in and that ROI, and then build out from there. So normally, even when startups are like, we need to just build our marketing and tap every channel. I, I try to focus on a couple different places, and that's normally where it ends up. So yeah, we we kind of evaluate where what channels have the most opportunity for early stage startups too because budgets are tight and everything matters. Sometimes runways are not very long. Of a company, you know, has six months to a year, and that's a really important time period for them. So normally within the first 90 days too, I'm looking at channels that can drive the biggest ROI. Like organic can be a little bit harder for early stage startups because it's a channel that takes a lot longer to see results, and sometimes startups don't have that time frame. So I look at okay, where can we get some quick wins and get some customers, and then push that ROI back into some other channels that might take a little bit longer.

Robert Plank 7:42 Very good, so you figure out a couple of channels based on the competitors, what's crowded, what's wide open, and so as far as these companies, like, are do you work with SaaS or apps or like, you know, what do they usually create?

Lara McKeithan 7:55 Yeah, so all tech companies, all like software, but kind of across industries. Like you said. I'm all B 2b, so business to business. Normally, I focus where you can have the most fun with marketing in the early stages. Is a bit more small to medium sized businesses too. Like enterprise is a little tougher at the early stages. Like if you're selling to Coca Cola, it's probably better to have a sales process where you have Those relationships, and so for marketing more SMB, where we can reach people online, and all software across like health tech, fintech, a lot of AI now, obviously, yeah, kind of runs the gamut; SaaS Software, yeah.

Robert Plank 8:43 Nice, so you've seen some things. I'm, I'm curious about if you have a story in you that you think would be useful for us today. Do you have you seen anything where it's like catastrophically failed, or maybe you you jumped in and saved the day, or what do you have for us as far as an exciting podcast story?

Lara McKeithan 9:00 Well, I, I want to be conscientious to not share anything that would hurt any client, so I I might not tell anything too specific. But you know, building an early stage startup is hard. There's definitely lessons learned. I think one thing that I can kind of say from my own experience as a business owner, having run this business now for nine years, worked with 50 plus startups. I think in the beginning, I really, even though I came from the startup world, came from an accelerator and VC firm. I I really thought at the beginning days, like building a successful business was, oh, this is an interesting product. This sounds like a good idea. You know, when we think of entrepreneurship and and startups, we're like, oh, that sounds like a cool idea. But what I've been surprised of time and time again is how much it really depends. On the founders for the success of a company, and there's a few things that I've kind of seen with founders that make founders more successful or find that it's harder to work. I think founders who are very collaborative, who can be part of the process early on, like at the seed stage, it is still really important that there is some founder-led marketing, and I'm very much a partner with the founders that I work with. And I think when it has not worked so well is when a founder is like, "Okay, you go do it and come back to me, and then I'll say yes or no, and go back. It needs to be a collaborative partnership. Like for example, there's so many times where I'll look at like an ad campaign, and I say, "Oh, I see that you know. In our Google Ads, people are really searching for X, Y, Z, and then I'm meeting with the founder on a weekly basis, we're having a regular communication. They're able to provide insight into the other parts of the company, like oh, we're also getting that feedback from our product or from our sales team. So I think a collaborative partnership is is really important. That's where I've seen success and failure on both sides. And then too, like there's also the reverse of a founder can be try to do too much, and you have to kind of let things you have to leave the reins to someone else a little bit too, where like you can't just nitty grit every single blog post and look at every single word. You have to trust the people that you're working with and delegate and build a team around you to help you succeed too, even at the early stages. So, so those are some things that I can impart of where things have kind of crashed and burned. Where I do feel like in partnership with the founder, and what you're building is so important, even more so than what the idea is of what you're creating.

Robert Plank 12:08 Oh, nice! So the personality, the habits, the success factors are really important, and that that tricky nuance of kind of like helping where you're needed and collaborating, but also staying out if the help is not needed, right? If someone just needs to do the work, then you know, butt out and let them do it. But you know, jump in if if it's necessary. And so you you have like this real kind of the the specific ICP to use your term, right? You you know like who's for you. You know when the relationship starts. You know when it ends. And like why why that decision? Like it seems like you're real specific on like like exactly your lane, and some some people make the mistake of like kind of like being too agreeable and like moving outside of that. And so why did you? Why are you saying like okay, here's my exact person, what's that decision like?

Lara McKeithan 12:58 Well, it's from a lot of trial and error. I've done this for nine years, so I've I've worked with the founders before. They have a launch product, and I can help you set up your company for launch. But I've just found that so often in startup world, it's like things get delayed, things get delayed, things crash, timelines change, and it's just really hard to bring someone in in those stages because you're investing in someone who's not able to do what you asked of them. So that's why I typically now just work post launch and B 2b that decision. I was doing more B 2c work, and it's still, I love that world, but that's changing so much. Like B2C really relies now on social media and influencer marketing and learning channels. That staying on top of educating yourself on channels that are moving really quickly and changing rapidly, and so I've kind of focused on B2B because I I have a formula that I keep myself up to date on the latest trends and channels, and kind of stay in my lane that way as things move quickly and change all the time.

Robert Plank 14:19 Great, we can learn a lot from you that you've niched down because there's so much to keep track of, anyways. And then so that's like you differentiate yourself, and you also kind of know a lot of the nitty gritty because you you said you've decided what you're going to say no to, right? What kind of companies? What kind of people? And I'm curious about your own personal transformation because, as you said, the last few years have been crazy, right? All the all the the things that have changed with the internet, things we need to keep up with, and so like, how are you now compared to like 510, years ago, how have you changed?

Lara McKeithan 14:53 Personally, how I feel like I've changed over the last nine years off running my businesses, I think there's built a lot of confidence in knowing what I'm doing and knowing how to help folks succeed. I think in the beginning, I you know I put I it's easy to hide behind helping other folks too, and it keeps you busy of helping other people build your businesses, and it's it's been harder to focus on building my own business and putting myself out there and and growing myself professionally. So I think that's something that I is still learning and still working on is building my brand as well, and over the last year, I rebranded my company, and my goal with that is to really kind of build a brand around these early stage startups and marketing, and kind of this niche of helping founders.

Robert Plank 15:59 Oh, very nice, and it's relatable to be buried in the client work, and then when you devote that percentage of time to enhance or refresh your personal brand, it almost feels selfish, right? It feels like you're goofing off just because it's like it's kind of not an immediate result versus well, I have to get this client work done versus like, hey, now I'm planning for more of the long-term future, so it's great that you've devoted that time, and and that's what what you're even doing in this moment, right? It's your time, Miss Lara, it's your time to humble brag and and tell us what you're all about. And in the spirit of that, you've seen so much, you've helped all these companies, and you solved a lot of problems. So in this conversation we're having, do you think there might be a missing question about all this that I should be asking you, I just don't know what to ask you.

Lara McKeithan 16:45 One question that I've been getting a lot that I don't know if I added there would be like, how is AI affecting your job with marketing, and how do you see AI affecting marketing for startup founders.

Robert Plank 17:03 Oh, that's a good one. So, how is AI changing all this?

Lara McKeithan 17:06 Yeah, so, I think what, yeah, I'm getting that question a lot, obviously. And AI is totally opening up so many opportunities, especially for early stage founders. There's so much more that you can do to build your business, and so many tools. Like, you know, even as simple as now, you can drum up a website, you know, in you know 10 seconds, whereas before a website build would take three months. So I think it's helping founders move faster and do things better, and I still feel like there's like an opportunity with marketing where I feel like marketers are moving as more into like a project management strategy directing role, where instead of hiring contractors to get things done on the actual execution, a lot of that can be done now through AI. But it still needs someone to direct a strategy of, you know, how do we build out our marketing? What's our plan? And then how do we get this done? How do we stay on top of it? What do we need to do now? What do we need to do next? And and keeping the team aligned on that. So I've seen that really change in my business over the last year or two of my role from more execution to more project management, which has always been part of my role, but even more so.

Robert Plank 18:37 Even more important now, yeah. And it's it blows my mind just the as you say every week AI changes and I'm just like like the whole way that like the parallels between like writing and coding right like when AI when we all first started using it it was kind of positioned as like okay it's this writing tool wait makes graphics okay but then it also like kind of connects to other things where it also writes code, and code can mean you say, "Hey, I'm a founder. I'm a startup. Here's let me just pile in the all the documentation. Let me let me just like like talk to it for half an hour, and then it'll make all the bootstrap, CSS, mobile responsive code, all the files, and it's like ready to go. And then you can say, 'Hey, well, here's my proof of concept, use it as is, or like this will work for now until we make an actual website. But you don't even really like need to. And so what that does, well, it frees us up to, as you say, the more managerial and what are the steps and the deadlines and where we headed. And it's like, but it can also it also opens up a lot of ways to go wrong and get confused and get overwhelmed. That's exactly why we need someone like you, exactly, Miss Lara McKeithen from PierForStartups.com: that's P-I-E-R-F-O-R startups.com, and you have 50 plus seed stage startups, $250 million raised, 15 years in the trench. And so, if someone says, "Okay, I'm I'm curious. I'd like to take some next steps here and find out about the future possibilities with Miss Lara and PierForStartups.com. Where should they go? What should they do?

Lara McKeithan 20:13 Yeah, they can go to my website that you mentioned, PierForStartups.com, and there is links on there to book a call with me. I love talking to startups, so I would be more than happy to hop on a call, learn more about your business and where you're at, and provide some recommendations of how I would tackle marketing, whether to use my services or just to to to guide you if you're having hurdles that you're looking to jump, I love talking to founders.

Robert Plank 20:46 Very nice, and to get that clarity, right? Because like we we've been chatting about AI, but sometimes you say, "Oh, AI, give me a plan, and it gives you like 20 pages, and you're like, "I can't even make sense of like I'm even worse off than when I started asking the AI for advice. So sometimes you need to talk to a human and just figure out a few things.

Lara McKeithan 21:03 Well, I'm also seeing too like AI is saturating everything, and people are really craving realness too. So I think it's really clear when things are AI slop now, you know, and people want like you know things to feel genuine and human and speak to them, and so there's still a lot of creativity and thought and intentionality that needs to go into marketing, even more so now, I would say.

Robert Plank 21:33 Oh yes, even more important, 100%. So it's time to go to PierFortStartups.com, and you can claim that free 30-minute discovery call to tell Lara about your goals and challenges, and she can tell you about what might work best for you if you're a good fit. There's also a strategy session you might do for 60 minutes, where she can audit your current marketing in detail and develop this custom roadmap that you can use even if they don't partner and map out exactly what's needed to hit your goals, and so you can go to PierForStartups.com and get educated, and then take those next steps if it makes sense to you. And it's been such a blast, my Lara, just discussing the B2B startup world and and marketing and the way things can go right or go wrong. And in the final seconds of our conversation. It's time for the scary part of the podcast, where I try to stump you. I try to put you on the spot by asking you about a fun or interesting quote or lesson that has served you. So, what comes to mind as far as a fun or interesting quote or lesson?

Lara McKeithan 22:34 A fun or interesting lesson, and in the startup mentality, is like you don't know until you try, and I think so many, like myself included, you know, you can get an analysis paralysis or overthink things, and it's important to just go for it and just try and take steps and launch. And even when you do, there's going to be a lot of lessons learned. So it's not. I would be careful for dwelling in things too much, you know, with myself. Like when I get something started, I think the hurdles that I'm gonna come across they're different than what those actually are, and it's fun to to try to build something on your own, and I know this. A lot of the listeners are entrepreneurs and business owners themselves, and so I think everyone can relate to a lesson of just get started, get going, and test and try, and and become an entrepreneur yourself.

Robert Plank 23:38 Yeah, just do it. And there's the known unknowns in front of you, but the unknown unknowns are what's more exciting, right? The the things you really are unexpecting, and the only way to get there is to take some action. And the action that we want you to take out there in podcast land is going to your browser or click the link below this podcast and go to PierForStartups.com: PierFortStartups.com. and have that chat with Lara McKeithen about the future of your company and your startup. And you'll be glad you did. You'll have a lot of fun, and there are exciting future possibilities in store for you. So thank you so much, Miss Lara, for showing up, stopping by, being authentic, and having a fun educational conversation, I'm glad we did this.

Lara McKeithan 24:22 It was great chatting with you, Robert. Thank you so much.