The First 90 Days: A Product Marketing Playbook for Series A Startups Who've Outgrown Founder-Led Marketing

You've hit Series A. Your product has traction, your team is growing, and investors believe in your vision. But somewhere between celebrating the funding and planning your next marketing plan growth, you realize something: the scrappy, founder-led marketing approach that got you here won't scale to where you're going.

If you're feeling the tension between your current marketing reality and your growth ambitions, you're not alone. After 12+ years of helping startups build product marketing functions from scratch and being the first marketing hire multiple times, I've seen this inflection point play out repeatedly.

Here's what I've learned: there's a proven framework to navigate this transition successfully. In this playbook, I'll walk you through a 90-day product marketing foundation based on the systematic approach I've used to help companies like Zenhub establish the marketing infrastructure needed for sustainable growth.

No more "Marketing Bingo", throwing money at random tactics without strategy. Instead, you'll build a systematic approach that turns your tech products into clear, compelling market stories.

Why Series A Is the Critical Inflection Point for Product Marketing

Series A represents more than just funding. It's the transition from proving product-market fit to demonstrating scalable, repeatable growth. This shift demands a fundamental change in how you approach marketing.

During the pre-seed and seed stages, founder-led marketing works because you're still discovering your market and refining your product. Founders can authentically speak to early adopters who are willing to interpret features and connect dots themselves.

But as you scale, several challenges emerge:

The messaging becomes inconsistent. Without documented positioning and messaging frameworks, each team member tells a slightly different story about what you do and why it matters.

The audience expands beyond early adopters. Your Series A growth targets require reaching more mainstream buyers who need clearer value propositions and more structured buyer journeys.

The competition intensifies. As your market matures, differentiation becomes critical. You can't rely on being "the only solution" anymore. You need to articulate why you're the best solution for specific customer segments.

I've seen startups burn through their Series A funding by falling into what I call "Marketing Bingo" - investing in paid ads, sponsorships, events, and content without a cohesive content strategy connecting these tactics to actual business outcomes.

The companies that succeed? They invest in product marketing foundations first, then scale tactics strategically.

The 90-Day Go-to-Market Strategy Framework

Building effective product marketing doesn't happen overnight, but you can establish a solid foundation in 90 days. I've broken this down into three focused 30-day phases that build upon each other.

Days 1-30: Research & Discovery

Your first month is all about understanding your current state and gathering the insights that will inform your strategy. This research phase is crucial. Skip it, and you'll build your entire go-to-market strategy on assumptions rather than data.

Here's what this looks like in practice:

Audit existing messaging and brand positioning across your website, sales materials, and customer communications. You're looking for inconsistencies and gaps that confuse prospects.

Conduct customer interviews with 5-10 of your best customers. Ask about their buying journey, pain points, and how they describe your value to others. This isn't about validating what you think, it's about discovering what you don't know.

Analyze the competitive landscape to map direct and indirect competitors, their positioning strategies, and market gaps you can exploit.

Interview your sales team and customer success to uncover common objections, successful selling points, and customer segments that convert best.

Document current go-to-market strategy gaps by mapping your existing buyer journey and identifying where prospects drop off or get confused.

The goal isn't perfection. It's gathering enough insight to make informed strategic decisions in phase two.

Website photos aligned with Zenhub’s new brand positioning

Days 31-60: Strategy Development

Month two is where you transform your research into an actionable strategy. This is when you'll define the core frameworks that will guide all your marketing decisions going forward.

Define your ideal customer profile (ICP) and buyer personas based on your research, focusing on the segments most likely to drive predictable revenue growth.

Develop core brand positioning and messaging frameworks that clearly articulate who you serve, what problems you solve, and why customers should choose you over alternatives.

Create competitive differentiation strategy that positions your tech products against both direct competitors and alternative solutions customers might consider.

Build initial go-to-market strategy for your priority segments, including channel strategy, content themes, and campaign concepts.

Establish measurement frameworks to track both leading indicators (like message resonance) and lagging indicators (like pipeline contribution).

This phase requires collaboration across teams. Your positioning and B2B marketing strategy should reflect input from sales, product, and customer success to ensure it's both aspirational and grounded in reality.

Days 61-90: Implementation & Enablement

Your final month focuses on translating your marketing plan and strategy into executional assets and processes that your team can use immediately to drive growth.

Create sales enablement materials including updated pitch decks, battle cards, and objection handling guides that reflect your new positioning.

Develop customer-facing messaging by updating your website copy, creating new sales collateral, and ensuring consistent messaging across all touchpoints.

Launch your first targeted campaign or product launch using your new frameworks to test and validate your positioning in the market.

Train customer-facing teams on the new messaging, competitive positioning, and ideal customer profiles so everyone can communicate value consistently.

Set up ongoing processes and systems for collecting customer feedback, monitoring the competition, and testing messages to keep your positioning sharp.

By day 90, you should have a documented product marketing foundation that enables consistent, strategic growth rather than random tactical execution.

A Real-World Example: How Foundational Product Marketing Work Pays Off Over Time

Let me show you how this systematic approach to product marketing creates long-term value. When I joined Zenhub as their first marketing hire in 2019, they hadn't raised any funding yet and were perceived primarily as a GitHub extension. But the product had evolved into a comprehensive project management platform for software teams.

The challenge: Users and prospects still thought of Zenhub as just a GitHub add-on, limiting market potential and making it harder to justify pricing—critical issues that would become even more important as they prepared for future funding rounds.

2019-2020 - Research & Discovery: We conducted extensive customer interviews and discovered that our most successful customers were using Zenhub as their central project management hub, not just a GitHub enhancement. The internal team was already thinking bigger, but our messaging hadn't caught up.

During this phase, the product evolved significantly. We added reporting capabilities, roadmaps for project tracking, and enhanced project planning features, making Zenhub much stronger and more valuable to software teams. You can see how GitHub-focused our original positioning was:

Zenhub's original positioning in 2019: clearly focused on GitHub project management and issue tracking integration.

2020-2021 - Initial Strategy Development: We kept making the product better by listening to user pain points around sprint planning and agile ceremonies. We brought automation to remove the manual overhead that was frustrating developers. It made sense to update the look and feel to capture this sentiment while maintaining our close GitHub integration.

During this period, we raised our $4.7M seed round. With this visual direction, we wanted to capture Zenhub's drive for discovering new ways to improve agile product management for software teams. The evolution was gradual:

The gradual shift: Zenhub's 2021 messaging maintained GitHub focus while starting to highlight broader project management features.

2021-2022 - Major Repositioning & Rebrand: We launched a comprehensive repositioning project with completely new visual identity, new messaging, and a full rebrand that moved away from GitHub-specific positioning to productivity and collaboration for all software teams.

Here's the key shift: we moved away from GitHub exclusivity and opened the doors to everyone, not only GitHub users. The transformation was dramatic:

Zenhub's 2022 visual rebrand: Moving from GitHub-focused messaging to 'Connect code to strategy' with completely new branding, colors, and photography.

The result? This repositioning and rebrand contributed to Zenhub's perceived value and helped them raise their $10M Series A funding round. Investors could clearly see the market opportunity and differentiation, and customers understood the full value proposition. The systematic product marketing foundation we built enabled them to articulate their evolution from a GitHub tool to a comprehensive productivity platform.

The positioning transformation: Zenhub's 2022 messaging emphasized productivity, team collaboration, and strategic outcomes rather than GitHub integration.

Want the full story? I've documented the complete Zenhub repositioning project, including the specific challenges we faced, our methodology and detailed results in this case study.

Common Pitfalls to Avoid

Having guided multiple startups through this transition, I've observed several patterns that can derail your progress:

Trying to boil the ocean by targeting too many segments simultaneously. One client wanted to position their developer productivity tool for both individual developers and enterprise IT teams, which involves two completely different buying processes and value propositions. We succeeded by focusing exclusively on development teams first, then expanding once we had proven product-market fit and the right go-to-market approach for that segment.

Skipping customer research in favor of internal assumptions. Founders often believe they understand their customers perfectly, but I've consistently found gaps between internal perceptions and customer reality. At one startup, leadership was convinced their primary value was "speed," but customer interviews revealed that "reliability" was actually the key differentiator driving purchases.

Creating messaging in isolation without sales team input. Your sales team interacts with prospects daily and understands real objections and buying triggers. When I worked with a data infrastructure company, the initial positioning focused on technical capabilities, but sales feedback revealed that procurement concerns and compliance were actually the biggest conversion factors.

Perfectionism paralysis. Waiting for perfect research before taking action. You don't need exhaustive data to make progress. Start with directional insights and iterate based on market feedback.

The companies that succeed treat this 90-day process as the beginning of ongoing optimization rather than a one-time project.

Essential Tools for Product Marketing and Brand Positioning

Success in this framework depends on having the right tools and processes to gather insights and collaborate effectively across teams.

For customer research: Tools like Calendly for scheduling interviews, Gong or similar conversation intelligence platforms to analyze existing sales calls, Wynter for B2B messaging testing, and survey tools like Typeform or Survey Monkey for broader feedback collection.

For competitive analysis: Platforms like SEMrush and aHrefs for understanding competitor content strategy, and maintaining a simple competitive intelligence spreadsheet updated regularly.

For collaboration and documentation: Notion or Google Docs for maintaining your messaging frameworks and research insights, Figma, Miro or Whimsical for collaborative positioning workshops.

For messaging frameworks: I recommend starting with April Dunford's positioning methodology, complemented by Andy Raskin's strategic narrative framework for sales storytelling.

The key? Choose tools that your team will actually use consistently rather than complex platforms that create adoption barriers.

Measuring Success: KPIs That Matter in Your First 90 Days

Your measurement approach should balance leading indicators that show early momentum with longer-term metrics that demonstrate business impact.

Leading indicators to track immediately:

• Message clarity scores from sales team feedback

• Demo-to-opportunity conversion rates

• Sales team confidence in competitive situations

• Sales asset utilization rates (usage of new battle cards, pitch decks, etc.)

• Time-to-Value (TTV) for new users experiencing key features
  

Lagging indicators to establish baselines for:

• Marketing qualified lead (MQL) to sales qualified lead (SQL) conversion rates

• Average deal size and sales cycle length

• Customer acquisition cost (CAC) by channel

• Pipeline contribution from marketing activities

• Feature adoption rates for core product capabilities
  

Remember that meaningful changes in lagging indicators typically take 3-6 months to manifest, so focus on leading indicators for your initial 90-day assessment. The goal is to establish systems and frameworks that will drive improvement over time rather than expecting immediate, dramatic results.

Ready to Build Your Product Marketing Foundation?

The transition from founder-led marketing to systematic product marketing is challenging, but it's also one of the highest-leverage investments you can make in your Series A journey. The companies that get this right create sustainable competitive advantages that compound over time.

This 90-day framework isn't theoretical. It's the same approach I've used to help multiple startups establish product marketing functions that drive predictable growth. Whether you're building this capability in-house or working with external expertise, having a clear roadmap makes the difference between scattered tactics and strategic momentum.

If you're ready to move beyond Marketing Bingo and build a product marketing foundation that scales with your ambitions, I'd love to help you map out your specific 90-day marketing plan. Book a strategy session where we can discuss your current challenges and create a customized roadmap for your startup's unique situation.

The next 90 days will pass whether you're building strategic foundations or continuing with tactical experiments. Choose strategy.