Emily Kramer
Co-Founder, MKT1 · 1 appearance on the record.
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founderinvestoroperatorexecutiveauthor@emilykramer ↗LinkedIn ↗mkt1.co ↗
Emily Kramer advises early- and growth-stage B2B SaaS startups and writes the MKT1 Newsletter, leveraging her experience building marketing functions at Asana, Carta, Astro, and Ticketfly. She also co-founded the venture fund MKT1 Capital and teaches B2B marketing courses on Maven.
23statements → 0claims → 0claims resolved → 3.78/5average certainty → 2.3/5average debate potential → ≈4.0/5argument clarity, estimated → 6said about them ↓
2 opinions · 21 insights · every statement was checked. none of them is a claim the record can settle: opinions, insights and disclosures never carry an assessment.
The record, in short
What the tape says about how Emily argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.
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We measure speaking style by listening to the audio itself, and a fair number needs at least 2,000 words from one person on tape we have measured. There is too little of Emily Kramer on measured tape to publish a rate. This says nothing about how they speak.
Everything Emily Kramer said on Lenny's Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
Kramer: Startups should hire 'Pi-shaped' marketers with two depth spikes
“You want to hire pie shaped marketers and not pie, like a dessert, but pie, like 3.14, where the pie symbol has two vertical lines. So like a T, but it has an extra line. And it's because you want the first marketer to be an expert in one of those three areas …”
Kramer: Product-led growth requires larger early marketing teams, not fewer marketers
“I think that product led growth is a misnomer. I think people will do anything they can possibly do and not call marketing marketing. I think we always see this. And so I think that product led growth really means not as much sales. Which means product plus ma…”
Kramer: Business model experience matters more than industry experience when hiring marketers
“I think having the right, the same business model experience is almost more important than having like industry experience or experience with that audience. And I think often people are like, I need someone who's, you know, marketed to HR or marketed to, you k…”
Kramer: Interactive tools and templates outperform blog posts in content marketing
“And I think people have this limited view of contents where they think blog posts and blog posts are one part of content. Like content should be tools, resources, templates, like calculators, those kinds of things do better in all the cases.”
Kramer: Hiring Big Tech veterans as early startup marketers is a mistake
“I see this mistake all the time. Like you don't want to go out and hire someone super senior who's like only worked at a public company. Like that's the wrong person. And often VCs are, you know, sort of lead investors that aren't in a certain niche. Like they…”
Kramer: Product PMs should own in-product experimentation over marketers
“The product experiments and the product tasks, that's a person with a product skill set because they know how to work with other PMs. They know how to work with engineers and marketers don't.”
Kramer: Hardcoding websites or using marketing-inaccessible CMS is a huge problem
“The website is something that's gonna need to be updated, like, 5000 times, and it needs to be on, like, Webflow, preferably at this point, or CMS that's easy to update, and if it's, like, built into the code base, that's like, or it's on a headless CMS, or it…”
Kramer: Marketers are often poor at internal company communication
“I find that marketers, even though they're often good at communicating with the audience, they're not good at communicating internally.”
Kramer: Founders who write early content need growth engine hires
“Sometimes founders are really great at making the original sort of content and writing the early positioning, and they're the best suited to that. And they just need someone to help them get that stuff out. And that's when they need an engine person.”
Kramer: Marketers skilled in both content and growth are exceptionally rare
“Really hard to find someone that's Content marketer that's also really good at growth. Like that pie shape marketer exists a lot less frequently. Maybe it's someone who's like really amazing at content distribution or like really amazing at FDO, but they don't…”
Kramer: Demand gen focuses top-of-funnel while growth marketing is full-funnel
“Demand gen is probably more top of funnel and growth marketing is probably more full funnel at its simplest form, but it's definitely different there.”
Kramer: First marketing hire should usually be a growth-literate product marketer
“The most common archetype that I say you want to hire is, is, is a product marketer, even though I joke that everyone's like setting a product marketer, but it's actually understanding what that is first. That understands growth marketing as well.”
Kramer: Do not hire marketers during bespoke founder-led sales
“Marketing is really good at accelerating growth and sort of doing things that scale sort of like one to many. So if you're still in the very like bespoke, like founder led sales, founder led marketing, like I'm doing discovery with each of these potential cust…”
Kramer: Product-led startups need to hire marketing earlier than enterprise models
“I think you need them earlier in product growth models because you're not gonna hire a salesperson then. So it's more like thinking about go to market holistically and saying, Like, you know, do I need one or two people here? And what is that? And so if you're…”
Kramer: Early B2B brand ownership splits between product marketing and design
“Usually the person that in B to B, the person that kind of owns the brand is, is the positioning story side of brand is owned by product marketing. And the design side of brand is either just sort of like owned by the product designer at first, or like working…”
Kramer: B2B marketing teams should hire dedicated brand marketers at 10-15 people
“Eventually like on B to B teams, when I've run teams class, you know, like 10, 15 people. I'll have a brand person that is working really closely with the designers and kind of like making sure, sure that everything that we're producing on sort of like the con…”
Kramer: PLG companies need marketers driving inbound and web conversion
“For PLG, I think you want to have a marketer that is responsible for getting into the pro people into the product. That's a marketing profile. That's using all these channels. That's driving inbound. That's focused on web conversion making sure your website co…”
Kramer: Companies need clear lists of ownership beyond job titles
“Having clear ownership is what this comes down to, but it's one thing to have clear ownership, but it's like quite another tip for other teams to know like who that clear owner is. So I think having a clear list beyond titles and just like who owns what is rea…”
Kramer recommends using the GACCS brief before major marketing projects
“This is just a marketing brief that, that I recommend you do before you make anything and make anything big in marketing or do any big projects. And it's just, what are the goals? What's the audience? What's the Creative or unique angle or like what's the like…”
Kramer: Website hero sections must state product, differentiation, and target audience
“And like, also if you're like writing positioning at your company, or if you're on marketing your company and you can't tell me what the product is, why it's better, who it's for, like,
Go figure that out.
Like that's what the homepage of your website should c…”
Kramer: Big company product marketers have an overly siloed view of marketing
“Because what happens at later stage companies or at public companies is when you're a product marketer, like you don't see what's going on in the rest of marketing at all. Like you have a very siloed view of it.”
Kramer: Marketing-to-product handoff is critical for PLG user experience
“We talk about like the marketing to sales handoff all the time on the go-to-market side, but there's a marketing to product handoffs, and that's the handoff that's really important in PLG. And if that feels weird to a user, like it's two different teams inside…”
Kramer: April Dunford's 'Obviously Awesome' is essential reading on positioning
“I think April Dunford's obviously awesome is sort of becoming one of those books that every marketer should have read on positioning.
It's really helpful.
Even if you're not like a product marketer or doing positioning, I think it's really helpful.”
The other half of the tape: Emily Kramer's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 6 times in 5 episodes on Lenny's Podcast. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Lenny Rachitsky 4Zoelle Egner 2
Every mention by year
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2026 1 mention in 1 episode
2023 2 mentions in 1 episode
Appearances (1)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| How to build a powerful marketing machine | Emily Kramer (Asana, Carta, MKT1) | Sep 11, 2022 | 51m |