When to hire your first growth marketer?

Erwan Derlyn talks briefly on when you should hire a growth hacker.

But first, are you ready for growth? 

Most founders want their business to grow as fast as possible. But aiming for growth too early can cause serious growing pains and actually harm your business.

The main job of any founder is to sell their vision. In the early days of a startup, it is crucial that the founders lead sales & marketing (do things that don’t scale) in order to gain as much direct customer feedback as possible and shorten the feedback loop for product improvements. Get help from people in your network and advisors but hiring a full-time growth marketer should wait until after you've gotten some market validation for your product.
 
A good time to hire a growth marketer is when your startup has reached product-market fit. At that point, you have validated the need for your product within the target audience and it’s now time to build a solid team to work with experiments and scalable growth strategies. 

While hiring your first growth marketer is an important milestone, growth is above all the result of company-wide growth habits and culture.