Setting useful marketing OKRs for early-stage tech startups

#4 - 3-step process to set objectives in under 30 mins:

1. Articulate your medium-term business milestone.
   

   • This is how you will measure success of your business over the necessary time period.

   • If you don’t have one already, reflect upon the following:
     What do I want to be able to say the business has achieved in the medium term? You may be saying this to your stakeholders e.g. investors, or to yourself if you are self/revenue funded.

   • Examples: $1M ARR in 18 months; 100 paying customers with 2+ months retention in 9 months

   • This milestone should be your driving north star across your business including product, marketing, sales and others.

   • Often this will align with a bigger picture milestone such as validating your business idea, or hitting profitability.
     

2. Set one to two marketing objectives for the month.
   

   • The most critical part here is to define objectives that align with the business milestone, but break it into chunks you can reasonably achieve given your resources this month.

   • Eg. If you want to get to 100 customers or $1 million in ARR, your objective this month might be to get 15 customers or $10,000 in MRR, and next month your objective might be to grow 2x month over month as you progress to the objective.

   • These objectives are also a way to ‘sniff test’ if your milestone is realistic - can you hypothetically imagine reaching your business milestone given the objective you are setting for this month? If not, reflect on which one needs to change.

   • I suggest at least one marketing objective every month, even if you are raising or focused on product so you don’t lose momentum.

   • More than two marketing objectives is usually unrealistic for founders who are running their own marketing, especially alongside product or other aspects of the business.

3. Prioritize activities that align with the objective.
   

   • If you are like most founders, you have a never-ending list of marketing ideas. The goal here is to prioritize the right ones.

   • For this final step, list out all your ideas that will help you move the needle on the OKR for the month.

   • From this list, prioritize the ones that will have the highest impact for a specific objective with the lowest effort.

   • Everything is a hypothesis until proven so be prepared to pivot during the month if the key results are not trending in the right direction.

🤔 FAQs from founders in the Founder-Led Marketing Club:

What is the recommended timeframe for business milestones?

• Pick the time period you need to realistically achieve your desired ambitious milestone. E.g. can you hypothetically acquire 100 paying customers in 9 months? If not, you’ll need to lower one of the two numbers. Setting an unrealistic milestone can be very demotivating for many, so strike the right balance between ambitious and realistic.

• As a rule of thumb, you want to set them on a medium-term horizon. This can be subjective. For 0-to-1 marketing, I suggest no less than 6 months, and no more than 18 months. Often founders align it with their financial runway.

How do you identify the right numbers - targets and metrics?

• Previous data: If it exists, look at previous months’ performance as a baseline from which to improve.

• Benchmarks: You can find relevant benchmarks for various channels, funnel metrics, and even business milestones in reports and case studies. The best data will often come from other founders at the same stage (such as through the Founder-Led Marketing Club).

• Resources: Do we have sufficient resources to achieve our target? Most commonly this is a percentage of the founder’s time allocated to marketing/sales, and sometimes there is a small budget or contractors.

• Gut: The more you work with the above three, the stronger your intuition will get. (Ask your advisors, or book a session with me).

#5 - How to use OKRs during the month

(I recommend coming back to this section after setting your OKRs)

🧩 Always ask: How does this tie back to the objective?

The most important part of this process is to ensure that you stay focused on the objective(s) you have identified for the month. If new ideas come up, ask: how does this help us move forward our objective? If it isn’t aligned, it doesn’t go on the list for this month. You can collect them under other relevant objectives.

• In rare cases, an opportunity or challenge might come up that requires changing the monthly objective, identifying new key results and prioritizing activities accordingly. With a monthly timeframe this is unlikely but as well know, time moves differently in startup land!

🧩 Operationalizing OKRs during the month:

• Take 15 mins of your weekly marketing time to define your marketing priorities. Which monthly marketing objective(s) does it align with?

• As you complete activities, track results against the key results you had identified e.g. 80 of 100 customers acquired.

• At the end of the month, conduct a rapid retrospective. Did you achieve your objectives? What did you learn from each activity and across all of them? What does this mean for next month’s OKRs?

• As a rule of thumb: Allocate some percentage of time at least 3 wks/months. i.e. if you have 20 hours, split it into 5 hrs/wk over 4 wks to allow for the essential iterative process.

🧩 Peer feedback and accountability can be instrumental in staying motivated and achieving your objectives. This is where the Founder-Led Marketing Club comes in. Apply for an invitation to join other smart, kind founders running marketing at their tech startups!

P.S. Was this issue helpful? What can be improved? Feedback and ideas are much appreciated via email or DMs!