Playbook
How Do You Build a Marketing Strategy With Limited Resources?
A marketing strategy for startups with little money is not a smaller version of the expensive one. It is a shorter one: start from what you replace, then one segment, one category, one story, one motion, and nothing else until those four hold. The scarce resource is not euros, it is agreement.
You build a marketing strategy with limited resources by subtraction, and it begins one step earlier than founders expect: with what you replace. Name the alternative your best customers would fall back on if you shut down tonight, name the one thing only you have against it, then cut to one segment, one category, one story, one motion, in that order. Nothing goes on top until those four hold in a room you are not in.
That is not the usual answer. Search for a marketing strategy for startups and what comes back is a cheaper tactic list: content instead of ads, outbound instead of events, do it yourself instead of hiring. Any of those can be right. None is a strategy, because a tactic list assumes the argument it carries has been settled. Of the five B2B companies between seed and Series A whose positioning I reviewed recently, not one had settled it.
What those companies had too much of was not spend. It was live versions of themselves: one category on the website, another on the investor page, a different framing in every meeting because the framing lived in the founder's head. None of that costs money. All of it costs what a thin budget costs, which is a year.
Subtraction costs you something, and early: for two quarters, dropping the sectors where you have a logo you are proud of reads as a smaller company rather than a sharper one. The bill for keeping everything alive arrives late instead. That is the only reason that option keeps winning.
The decision is not really made in euros anyway. Benchmarkit's 2025 B2B SaaS Performance Metrics Benchmarks, on 2024 data, puts median annual recurring revenue per employee at $70,000 for companies between $1M and $5M of ARR, across a cut of 174 companies. The sample is mostly American, so read it as direction. The direction: at your size the resource you spend is not a budget line, it is a person's year. Every extra segment, category and motion you keep alive is paid for in those years, and nobody invoices you for them.
No benchmark I trust puts a figure on what marketing itself should cost a company that size. What moves it is seniority, local payroll, and whether you are buying a decision or a pair of hands.
The list test
How Do You Choose One Segment with the List Test?
You choose one segment by writing the list, and the list is the test. Describe the segment tightly enough that you can sit at a table for an hour and name twenty real companies that fit it, each with the function that signs the purchase order. If the twenty will not come, you have not described a segment, you have described a hope, and no amount of budget turns one into the other.
The list works because it refuses adjectives. "Mid market companies in regulated industries that care about compliance risk" produces no names. "Insurers in Spain and Portugal between 200 and 2,000 employees whose claims process is signed off by a risk committee" produces a list, and three things with it: who you can reach, what they compare you against, and how long their decision takes.
That last one is the part founders price at zero. The 16th Annual KBCM Technology Group and Sapphire Ventures SaaS Survey, on 2024 numbers and 59 respondents, reports median sales cycle and average contract value by sector: horizontal applications at five months and $44,000, vertical applications at eight months and $76,000, infrastructure and security at nine months and $64,000. Those are different businesses wearing one job title. Choosing a segment is choosing a clock. Three clocks and one pair of hands means all three run late.
The list also shows whether the segment is yours or simply the one that answered the phone. Write the twenty names, then ask the ones you serve best what they would do next month if you shut down tonight. Those answers are where the alternative you replace comes from, which is why the exercise sits before the four subtractions. It is published in full, with the two questions and how to group the answers: what your best customers would do if you did not exist. If you are still establishing whether the product has a market at all, that is a separate job, and I treat it separately in how to find product market fit through marketing research.
What I would have on one page by Friday: twenty named companies, the signing function beside each name, five names added a week until the list stops getting easier. Twenty is not permission to narrow forever. Keep the segment wider than feels comfortable until the same pattern repeats across customers you did not pick for the same reason.
Several sectors
“We sell to banks, to insurers, to energy, and there is a fund interested.”
To one: one committee, one clock, one list you can write down.
Several categories
“Platform on the website, software on LinkedIn, infrastructure in the press release.”
To one: the frame where what only you have looks obvious, and one price the buyer has in mind before you speak.
Several stories
“Every meeting gets the version I improvise that morning.”
To one: one argument that four functions can each own differently.
Several motions
“A bit of outbound, some content, events when there is an event.”
To one: one motion run long enough to produce evidence instead of anecdotes.
Start from what you replace. Then one segment, one category, one story, one motion, in that order, because each one narrows the next. The order is the strategy. What is left after the fourth is a go to market plan small enough for a company your size to actually run.
Brand without money
How Do You Build a Brand with No Budget?
You build a brand with no budget by choosing the category you are judged in, then repeating it without variation. At seed to Series A the brand is not the logo or the voice guidelines; it is the shelf your buyer puts you on and the noun they use when they put you there. The noun is not a matter of taste. The right category is the frame in which the one thing only you have against the alternative looks obvious, and every other frame makes you argue for it. Cheap to choose, expensive to change: the highest return decision available to a company with no money.
Count your own nouns before you argue with this. Open four places where your company is described: the first line of the website, the LinkedIn tagline, the investor portfolio page, the latest press release. Ignore the adjectives. Read the nouns, which tell the buyer what to compare you with. In the companies I have reviewed the count comes back at more than one, every time, and nobody chose that. It accumulated, one deadline at a time.
Several nouns is not untidy design. It is a room of several functions, each with a veto, hearing several companies at once and finding nothing to agree on. Then each one picks the noun that is easiest to compare against something cheaper.
So the budget free part of brand is a discipline, not a purchase. My recommendation for the artefact: one written page with the four places, the noun each uses today, the noun you are choosing, and the test it passed, which is that your advantage needs no explaining in that frame. Then that noun, in all four places, until buyers use it back to you. You have arrived when your champion can say what you are, in one sentence, to a colleague who has never met you. Cutting the one story into what each function has to sign is the next job, and I wrote it up in how to create materials for each stakeholder in a buying committee.
What to cut
What Should a Startup Cut First?
Cut the second motion first. Before the second sector, before the content calendar, before the events, cut whichever of your two or three ways of acquiring customers you are running at half attention, because a motion run at half attention produces no evidence, and evidence is the only thing a company your size is really buying this year.
Benchmarkit's same 2025 report gives median 2024 growth rate by go to market motion, across 149 companies: product led at 30 percent, sales led at 26 percent, hybrid at 25 percent. Five points separate the fastest from the slowest, which is as much as those medians will carry. No motion grows a company by being the correct motion. The rest is my reading, not the report's: in the companies I watch, the quarter goes missing in the motion nobody owns.
After it, three more cuts, in order of how little they will be missed. Content written per persona with no shared argument underneath it, which hands every function its own reason to hesitate. The channel you keep for how it looks to investors. And any account your segment list does not contain, including the famous one.
What you do not cut is capture. The founder keeps selling to the warm list every week, because the selling pays this month and the notes from it pay next year. Subtraction is about how many things you are claiming to be, not about how many conversations you are having.
So here is the Monday, as my recommendation and not as a benchmark. Every working day, one named company off the list gets one first contact in the motion you kept: five a week, roughly twenty a month. A lead counts only if the company is on the list and the person you reached signs, or sits on the committee that signs. Anything else is a conversation. The number you review each Monday is first meetings held with that function in the last four weeks, and you ask it to rise over a quarter, not a week.
A plan built this way is deliberately unimpressive on a slide. One alternative you replace, one segment you can list, one noun, one argument, one motion, one number on Monday. It fits on a page. A founder with three hours a week can run it. And it has the property that matters more than reach at your stage: when it fails, you can tell which decision failed.
Doing this on a thin budget is the work I have done for twenty years, four of them as CMO at HEMAV Technology, reporting to Xavier Silva, its chief executive, where I built everything a positioning and go to market project includes and more. The person who did that work is on board for all ten weeks. Xavier put it better than I would: "And in a scale-up that is essential, because you rarely have large teams or unlimited resources. So having someone who can set the direction, who sets priorities, and who at the same time rolls up their sleeves to get the work done, that is essential." Xavier Silva, CEO of HEMAV Technology, in the full interview.
That build is the work I do. The Loom is a method that weaves a company's whole go to market into one story a buying committee can follow and buy, and it runs as a ten week project: week one, diagnosis from your own calls, wins and words; week four, the positioning document in your hands; weeks five to ten, that document turned into a go to market your team runs without me. The ending is the point: one person sets the direction and builds it, and nobody rents a senior seat by the month afterwards. At week four you judge. If the positioning document has not shown you the system, you say so, the second payment never happens, and you keep everything delivered.
The Committee Readiness Audit measures those decisions in its own vocabulary. One story is the story subtraction. Value a finance lead can restate without you in the room is the category and the story together. Materials for every stakeholder is what the one story gets cut into. A pipeline that runs without the founder is the one motion. Five decisions: what you replace, one segment, one category, one story, one motion.
One of its twenty statements, exactly as it is worded there: "We can state, in one sentence, the single reason a buyer should choose us over the cheaper alternative, and everyone on the team says it the same way." Five statements per thread, each rated from 1 (not true of us at all) to 5 (completely true), a score out of 100 in one of three bands, and the loosest thread named. It is free, and one email, given before you start, opens both the interactive audit and a printable PDF of the twenty statements. It takes a few minutes. Score each statement against your last real deal, not against what you meant to build, or the number will flatter you.
Do it before the quarter picks the decisions for you, because they stay open by default and the year gets spent either way. Take the Committee Readiness Audit. If it comes back high and your Monday number is holding, your problem is volume, and you can go spend money with a clear conscience.
Sources: Benchmarkit, 2025 B2B SaaS Performance Metrics Benchmarks. 16th Annual KBCM Technology Group and Sapphire Ventures SaaS Survey. Xavier Silva interview, recorded July 2026, published at monkeyweaver.com/testimonial.
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