I took a year off recently so I could go backpacking. It was as simple as that really. No existential crisis, no falling out of love with marketing. Just fancied bed bugs and ramen at 34. I’m happy to report it was everything I hoped it would be. But when I got back I realised that my time at Yonder was probably over.
I started this newsletter right at the beginning because the kind of marketing help I wanted didn’t exist. When I became Yonder’s first marketer, I had experience from Monzo and Wise, but those were different companies at different stages. Yonder was pre-everything.
So now it’s over it feels like a nice time to reflect on everything I’ve learned there over the years. So here it is, the ten things I wish someone had told me on day one.
When we started Yonder, we didn’t know what we wanted to build. We just knew who we wanted to build for.
The founding insight was that expats moving to London couldn’t access good credit products. They got locked out of some of the best financial products on the market. So we built this profile:
Late twenties, probably from Australia or New Zealand. Professional career, planning to be in London for two or three years. Travelling around Europe several times a year, trying to see as much as possible, one or two big international trips. Exploring London the rest of the time. New restaurants, weekends with friends, ordering Deliveroo more than they’d like to admit.
And then we spent the best part of the rest of the year just talking to people. Yeah, we asked about their financial lives but that almost came secondary to understanding what the rest of their lives looked like. We learnt so much about how they felt about other credit products and it gave us laser focus on what we needed to build.
Most startups have the product in mind already. And it’s the reason that so many vibe-coded apps never get used by anyone. They skip the most important bit.
Read → How To Launch A Startup
I started my career working for a non-profit in San Francisco. Part of our fundraising model involved taking equity in startups that used our cause in their marketing. “This chocolate fights human trafficking.”
People bought once, out of guilt usually, then never again. The chocolate was crap. People buy things for two reasons and two reasons only: it’s cheaper, or it’s better. That’s it. You can layer values and mission and all your brand storytelling on top of that, but it won’t make them choose a worse or more expensive product.
‘Better’ can also mean different, which makes it better. For us that meant offering rewards points to use at nice restaurants or on gym classes or massages. It was better than Amex, because it was different.
When I’m advising startups now, this is the first thing I ask. No amount of marketing brilliance can solve this problem. Get this right first. Then do the rest.
The more features a product has, the more pressure there is for a marketer to talk about all the things it can do.
We packed Yonder full of features in an attempt to satisfy every need of our comically-specific target customer. Epic rewards they could use when they were in London and amazing travel benefits like comprehensive insurance no FX fees when they went abroad. Plus a light sprinkling of how Yonder could help to build their credit score provided they paid it off monthly and on time.
Eventually we stripped it down to one key message – epic rewards where you live. It’s never easy telling the product team who built that great feature that you don’t plan on sticking it on the website. But the more you try to say, the less you’ll cut through. It’s important to say one thing really, really well. Then layer on the other messages over time.
If you’re struggling to explain what your product is or you’re running out of room on your website. Then you’re trying to say too much.
Read → Say Less Better
Strategy used to terrify me. It was the one big thing I felt I’d never wrangle, inevitably holding me back from more senior roles. It always felt like trying to predict the future in a document that would definitely be wrong.
What I eventually worked out, after a lot of overcomplicating it, is that good marketing strategy is just aligning your budget and resources to how your customers actually make decisions. It really is that easy.
At Yonder we learned that financial products take a lot of touch points before someone commits. People don’t impulse-buy a credit card. They research, ask friends, check Trustpilot, then do it all over again. We mapped those moments and came up with a long list of comparison sites, forums, influencers, and other channels we could then prioritise.
Then you just split your spend roughly around how much of your audience is in market or not. Growth Now, capturing people who are actively comparing and deciding or Growth Later, building awareness and preference with the people who aren’t in market yet but might be in the next twelve months.
This is probably the most important lesson we learned as an organisation.
When most people talk about growth, they’re actually talking distribution. More ads. Better targeting. Funnel stuff. That’s really just one part of it.
There are, in fact, just three ways to grow.
Better distribution, which is the stuff above and the one marketers spend all their time on.
New products dropped into existing distribution, which is how we doubled our growth overnight when we launched the free Yonder credit card without changing anything else.
And new markets, where you take your existing product and your existing understanding of distribution and show up somewhere fresh, which is how we grew when we opened up Manchester and Bristol.
If you want to become a CMO, you’ll need to have a point of view on all three levers. More A/B tests isn’t going to get you there, pal.
When everyone in your company understands this, it takes the pressure off in a healthy way. Marketing doesn’t drive growth by itself. Growth is an outcome of everything an organisation does: the products you build, the market you exist in, the channels you distribute through, and how you show up in all of them. Marketing is one part of that system.
Whenever I read a LinkedIn post about “the great debate of which is better, brand or performance” I immediately know they don’t know what they’re talking about. Might start dropping links to Ritson’s MiniMBA.
But while the theory is well established, there’s little evidence on what the right split looks like at early-stage startups.
Finding the balance was hard. After years of trial and error we landed on roughly 50/50. Half of our marketing budget into things that drive customers in the next 30 days. Half into things that drive demand in the next 6 to 12 months.
Is that right for your business? Probably not. But the process for figuring out your split is the same. What percentage of your target market is actively looking to buy right now? Work backwards from that. If only 10% are in market at any given time, you probably shouldn’t spend 80% of your budget on them.
You can either win on media spend or creativity. Are you really going to outspend a gigantic conglomerate with a bigger marketing budget than the GDP of some small European countries? They will outspend you indefinitely.
We made a deliberate decision early on to compete on creativity rather than spend. We didn’t have the budget to buy our way in front of everyone. So we had to earn attention instead.
Most financial education is dry and forgettable. We knew people needed to understand APR and we knew they’d scroll past anything that looked like a leaflet from their bank. So we put our 39-year-old founder in a bubble bath, explaining interest rates.
The creative hustle you build when you have no money is one of the most valuable things a startup marketer can develop. Money will arrive eventually. The instinct to make something genuinely interesting, rather than just buying your way in front of people, is harder to hold onto than you’d think.
I assumed that the people around me had a working model of how marketing actually works. That the CEO understood why brand building matters. That the finance team got why we weren’t measuring everything on last-click attribution. My ego took a beating when I realised they didn’t think about marketing at all really.
But the more I explained things, the fewer questions came back. I’d say the same things over and over. I don’t think you’ve over-shared on marketing enough until you’re absolutely sick of the sound of your own voice.
People are busy. They don’t retain the context for why you made a decision two months ago. They won’t remember the brand rationale when the CPA spikes and the pressure is on to cut spend. If they don’t get it, that’s your fault.
Maintaining a shared understanding of how marketing works across the whole organisation is part of your job. CEO, finance, product, everyone.
Read → How To Write A Marketing Update So You Don’t Get Fired
The skills that make you a great individual contributor, like a strong instinct for creative or a feel for what resonates with customers, aren’t the same skills that make you good at running a marketing function.
Running a function means building a team, allocating resource across things you’re not personally doing, reporting up, managing sideways, and holding a lot of decisions in your head at the same time without doing all of them yourself.
Brand marketers know how to build something people love but can struggle to show it in the numbers. Growth marketers know how to make the graph go up but sometimes find it hard to make anything that isn’t being optimised. Product marketers, and this was me, tend to think the product will do the marketing’s job for it if it’s good enough. Spoiler, not true.
The best marketing leaders I’ve seen have one thing in common: they know what they don’t know. They build teams that cover their blind spots instead of hoping those blind spots don’t matter.
Read → What Makes You a Good Marketer Could Make You A Bad CMO
When our budgets went up, decisions got harder, mistakes got more expensive, and there were a lot more people who needed to be in the room when I was about to spend money.
Money makes you lazy. When you have no budget, you have to think. You write better copy because you can’t afford to run mediocre ads at volume. The creative hustle you develop when you’re skint is genuinely valuable, and it starts to atrophy when you can solve problems by spending more.
Opportunity cost explodes and the big calls need more people. Early on at Yonder I didn’t speak to the finance team much about marketing decisions. Towards the end we’d need everyone in the room on big marketing bets.
The skill that keeps you in the seat as the company grows isn’t your creative instincts. It’s whether you can manage risk, trade-offs, and stakeholder buy-in at bigger and bigger numbers.
Read → More Money, More Problems
My name is Tom. I’ve launched and grown products at some of the UK’s most loved consumer brands and was part of the founding team and VP Marketing at Yonder, a modern-day rewards card.
If you’re a senior marketer at a startup, this Substack is for you. I write about what actually works in startup marketing (and what definitely doesn’t) for marketers on the verge of breakdown.
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