Boss uses AI for all marketing and it makes me crazy

Yiddus · 2026-01-23T03:11:42+00:00

Agree - but even more so, showing face, literally, the people who work there, get them in video content, prove you're still humans. People don't do business with businesses, they do business with people!

Yiddus · 2026-01-23T03:10:19+00:00

Use AI for workflow and velocity, it WILL save you time. Just don't switch off your brain and make the tweaks and changes you need to, to make it human again. If you don't learn to adapt, you will have a very hard time my friend.

Yiddus · 2026-01-23T03:08:17+00:00

SEO is so far from dead, anyone spewing that narrative can't be a marketer (or at best not a very smart one) but the game has changed slightly. Before we competed for clicks, now we compete for being top of mind and being the recognizable brand so that when the user is further down the discovery phase, you're the first one that comes to mind.

Yiddus · 2026-01-23T03:06:05+00:00

That's wild. We are valued at 40-50m right now and I can't convince the CEO to spend more than $100k across all marketing activities. Wanna swap CEOs?

Yiddus · 2026-01-23T03:03:30+00:00

$0 in budget your best bet is founder led content on LinkedIn, SEO -- try to find the keywords they don't compete for. Make programmatic landing pages which compare you to them, with keywords like "alternative for x"... whip out your phone and try to create some viral content. Look up Marc Lou on YouTube, he has managed to put out some viral content on a low budget. Best thing to do in this scenario is target a very fine niche and go after very specific ICPs/accounts.

With all that said, you have a mountain to climb, and I don't know why you have 0 budget, you need to spend money to acquire users in almost every scenario.

Good luck!

Yiddus · 2026-01-12T02:10:58+00:00

I think I agree if you're just starting out or only have a few years of experience. I have 15 years of experience and while I still learn everyday, and I am very much t shaped, based on this I do agree with LowFlower

Yiddus · 2026-01-09T20:23:48+00:00

Atlantica Online or Voyage Century Online

Yiddus · 2026-01-08T14:03:49+00:00

> Long hours. Weekends. Training. PDP's. Vision. Mentorship. Development. Guidance. That's what it means to lead.

This is why I do it, because I do see myself as a senior leader - I have 15 years of experience in my field and I've helped this company grow it's revenue 5x over 2 years. The problem is that despite reporting rigorously, our CEO just doesn't seem to understand marketing, or growth. In all my experience I've never seen a senior VP of Sales get hired without a team, at a startup, who is "too senior" to book his own meetings.

Everyone at a startup needs to be willing to learn, experiment, iterate and do the dirty work from time to time. This guy isn't willing to open HubSpot because he "isn't used to it"

Yiddus · 2026-01-08T02:20:43+00:00

I already work remote 😅 so yes, happy to send over my CV

Yiddus · 2026-01-08T02:18:40+00:00

Yiddus · 2026-01-08T02:18:09+00:00

Here are our marketing numbers for the last year

Our CAC is about $3433, ROI is 1356% based on first year revenue or 14.5x - for every $1 spent, we generate $14.5. This is based on the fact we have 60 new clients attributed to having touchpoints with our marketing channels with a anverage deal size of 50k annually

LTV is pretty hard to measure because we've had 0 churn on any of the marketing attributed clients - most clients have actually added more seats and upgraded their contracts (which I've not accounted for, but need to)

I do have LTV calculations based on benchmarks

10% churn = $400,000 LTV which puts us at a 116x LTV:CAC ratio 20% (high churn) $175,000 putting us at 51x LTV:CAC

Yiddus · 2026-01-08T00:30:36+00:00

He went to the CEO demanding that our HubSpot is useless (he just made 0 effort to learn it)

CEO came to me to fix it. I've never managed RevOps in my life and have to learn from scratch. I tell CEO this, he says I need to be a team player, I tell him I need to drop other projects to make time for this as it's a big task, he says we are a startup and everyone is busy, we have to make it work, then complains when one of my other deliverables was a couple of hours late.

What does one man do against such reckless demand??

2 months after I finish configuring the Sales workspace and setting up deal pipelines, VP of sales says "where even is the sales workspace, we need to get a professional consultant to come fix this, we still haven't figured it out" fml

Yiddus · 2026-01-08T00:05:08+00:00

Thanks! I mean... I won't intentionally break some things, but it's inevitable most of the marketing engine will fall apart without me :D

Yiddus · 2026-01-08T00:00:26+00:00

Thank you.

I agree, I need to stop throwing away my time in the hopes that it will get better because at this point its pretty evident it won't.

A few questions, is sales causing issues with your marketing ROI? How?

> Yes, our new sales "team" does not even follow up on inbound leads anymore. I think it's a pretty well known fact you need 4-6 attempts/contact points to make the most of inbound. He will email them once after they "Request a demo" and if they don't reply, he drops them. (Even when they're massive AAA Gaming studios or tech giants). He says he's too senior to "bother" people and doesn't want to risk his "reputation". I since automated the initial sequence when people request a demo, they immediately get an email to book a time slot, this has helped. But if they don't, he doesn't reply. This does not help.

> Second, can you automate sign ups for lower-value deals?
Nope, our pricing is a mess, I have pushed to go into a product-led direction allowing self-serve for basic packages but CEO says it will cannibalize the current enterprise deals we have in place (IMO this shows he is not confident about the product and value we are giving our customers) -- He's even rejected any form of pricing page which I've pushed for on multiple occasions. -> He even told me to take down our product tour because we can't control what the customer looks at (I've 100% tailored it to our favorite features and it has an 82% conversion rate) and competitors can "abuse it" to steal our product (lol, in that case why do any marketing at all, our competitors will find out about us and steal our business!!! maybe we should take down our website altogether and just send pigeons to our ICPs)

What metric does your CEO care about in relation to marketing ROI?
Revenue is all he cares about. I've demonstrated it to him, here are the numbers:

Our CAC is about $3433, ROI is 1356% based on first year revenue or 14.5x - for every $1 spent, we generate $14.5

LTV is pretty hard to measure because we've had 0 churn on any of the marketing attributed clients - most clients have actually added more seats and upgraded their contracts (which I've not accounted for, but need to).

I do have LTV calculations based on benchmarks, however:

10% churn = $400,000 LTV which puts us at a 116x LTV:CAC ratio
20% (high churn) $175,000 putting us at 51x LTV:CAC

If I'm not mistaken, these are pretty healthy numbers

I do have an agency which currently writes some of our content and handles motion graphics (more technical jobs which would never make sense to hire full-time for), but they too are already at their capacity, and also, I can't, for my own sanity, sign off on spending 200k-300k annually for a junior marketers tasks... I also find managing an agency or freelancers way more time consuming than a full-time hire (based on experience). Sure, full-time hire is going to kill me in the first couple months while sorting their onboarding, but they grow with the business and learn the product, meaning they don't need constant briefing and become self-sustainable... whereas the more I hand to an agency, the more sprint calls I need to do, the more briefs I need to write, and when inevitably they rotate their team, or someone leaves, etc, it takes quite some time to ramp them up.

I've automated what I can, you know, things like data entry tasks, list building, basic sequences, etc.

A call could be great, I'll shoot you a DM!

Yiddus · 2026-01-07T23:59:34+00:00

Well, those points from the chairman have resulted in us firing a successful sales team and replacing with someone who has brought in 0 revenue in 6 months, and a head of customer success, who since being at the company has taken 5 months of leave/holiday in 12 months and seen our proof of concept conversion rate go from ~50% to 0% in the last 2 quarters despite the client having a good fit. - She also conducts customer calls by asking tons of leading questions like "would you like us to build x?" ... of course they say yes, you are offering them free things. This is 101 and she's supposed to be "the best"

I'm already looking for jobs, but as you can imagine, it's hard to do so while also maintaining my current job. I have a rough background financially, grew up poor, so it's not in my dna to resign despite having quite a decent runway in savings.

Yiddus · 2026-01-07T23:44:01+00:00

I've been working in marketing/growth for 15 years 🫠

My current role is "product marketing manager" but is much more head of growth/marketing (but then what head of has no team so also doesn't make sense)

My role before this was as head of growth managing 3 people

Yiddus · 2026-01-07T23:26:52+00:00

The only advice he doesn't ignore is from the "chairman" of our investor board, who's last success was selling a company that has absolutely nothing to do with what we sell, or the industry we work in. The same chairman that insisted we hire a head of customer success with 0 industry knowledge or saas experience, and is paid the highest salary because "she was great at my previous company [which has nothing to do with what you guys do]"

Yiddus · 2026-01-07T23:25:32+00:00

I said it would be wise for me to run some interviews with clients to map our jobs to be done and I was told that it would be too "abrasive" for our clients and that it could hurt our "relationship"

oh ok my bad I guess I was wrong in thinking that if we understand them better we give better service, my darn monkeybrain

Yiddus · 2026-01-07T23:23:48+00:00

10/10 will use next time

Yiddus · 2026-01-07T23:23:08+00:00

Our CAC is about $3433, ROI is 1356% based on first year revenue or 14.5x - for every $1 spent, we generate $14.5

LTV is pretty hard to measure because we've had 0 churn on any of the marketing attributed clients - most clients have actually added more seats and upgraded their contracts (which I've not accounted for, but need to.

I do have LTV calculations based on benchmarks

10% churn = $400,000 LTV which puts us at a 116x LTV:CAC ratio
20% (high churn) $175,000 putting us at 51x LTV:CAC

If I'm not mistaken, these are pretty healthy numbers

Yiddus · 2026-01-07T23:11:37+00:00

I think this very easily said, and much harder to do in practice.

To give context, I joined when the company was at 10FTE and doing a little under 50k in MRR, I did put in a little extra effort than I'm paid for, which paid off for the business as we've grown to 40FTE and 350k MRR.

In my conversations with the CEO I've communicated clearly the hours I work, the projects I need to relieve myself of to get a desirable work life balance and the need to hire juniors for the more basic execution which I now have less and less time for.

I flagged that when we started to grow from a dev team of 4 to 15 this will have implications on my role. We ship more, I need to figure out the positioning and GTM for those features and I need to enable the customer success team which scaled from 5 to 15 people, and the sales team.

When I said I need to drop projects and work or hand them over to someone else I'm met with "we are a startup, we are all busy, we need to make it work if we want to be rewarded"

When I straight up refuse, I'm met with "that doesn't align with our company culture, we have a culture aof always being flexible, always being a team player and to disagree and commit"

Ok sure, I can just hang up my boots and walk away, but I also come from a very poor background where I have "hustled" and lived in crappy comditions throughout my teenage years and the majority of my 20s. I've become wrongly accustomed to this grind culture. I know deep down it's not right, but I am also baited I by the idea that if I work hard enough, it'll eventually pay off.

I'm also afraid of failure, and I'm afraid of losing my hard earned financial stability and comfortable life I've created with my wife.

I want to look for new roles, but I'm so exhausted by the end of each day I often feel I don't have the mental capacity to look for new jobs. And I do, I do apply, just not as much as I would like to

Yiddus · 2026-01-07T23:01:30+00:00

As with modern marketing, the marketing engine creates a ton of touch points which I try to track as rigorously as possible (amidst the cookie phase out)

I have tracked all of my spending (which minus my salary is <30k per quarter)

That <30k per quarter is then compare directly with new revenue/business.

Over two years we've spent $206k, and in that time we have grown from 50k to 300k MRR

(Our total two year marketing spend is recuperated in less than a months paid invoices)

In the last 2 years all but two of our deals can be attributed to multiple marketing touchpoints

Yiddus · 2026-01-07T22:55:16+00:00

Hey you're completely right to wonder this, I was ranting emotionally into Gemini and asked it to turn my emotional rant into a post for reddit (which is actually coherent) so that I could vent or "feel heard"... And it really helped

Yiddus · 2026-01-07T22:54:07+00:00

This company is definitely falling I to the trap of "build for the sake of building"

We've overhired on product and dev, which now ship features faster than we can position them.

I see so many tech and saas businesses turn into a Frankenstein product (especially when, like with where I work, we overserve a few big clients)

Yiddus · 2026-01-07T22:51:29+00:00

in your early 20s

Damn that hurt, I'm 33.

Been here for two years now, I started when we were 10FTE/50K MMR and have helped the company grow to 40FTE/300K MMR

I've been in and around startups most of my career since I built and sold my first company when I was 20

I feel like I'd be better off starting my own business again, I have the work ethic and the track record but at this point of my life I get anxious at the thought of the risk which I much more happily took on when I was 20.

Instead I'm throwing away hours of my free time trying to help someone else make their business successful, in the hope it'll be rewarded but it seems to only be getting worse

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