[fhd2]

I prefer to formulate goals as something I want to achieve, not something I want to do. For me, this year, the number one goal is to become competent at marketing.

When I started last year, I told myself I need to get competent at sales, or I will always need some CEO by my side and never have a business that's truly my own. Now I'm pretty decent at sales, but I can't fully leverage that since I don't have enough prospects to truly scale things. So figuring marketing out seems like my biggest lever.

How, I don't know yet. Pretty sure I won't post anything on LinkedIn I consider to be cringy :) What I already did is hire a fractional CMO to coach me - getting help from people already good at this seems like a reasonable tactic.

[virczl]

Did you find the fractional CMO's advice useful? I'm always worried that it's too high-level or not adapted to early-stage start-ups.

[fhd2]

We had only two calls - I'd say it was pretty eye opening so far, for someone pretty far away from marketing like me at least. She focuses on startups though. I think it'll be a few more sessions before I can really tell if it was useful.

But I'd definitely exercise caution: Most marketing people I met have been the "let's do fancy rebranding, post on social media and go to events" types. Took me a while to find someone more suited to what I'm looking for. More strategic, less... arbitrary.