How to build a powerful marketing machine | Emily Kramer (Asana, Carta, MKT1)

Emily Kramer, who built marketing teams from scratch at Asana, Carta, and other B2B startups, explains how founders can assess and construct effective marketing functions. Drawing from her experience as an early marketer at scaling companies, she offers frameworks for diagnosing needs, hiring, and collaborating with product teams, emphasizing business model differences like top-down sales versus product-led growth.

Fuel and Engine Framework

Marketing splits into fuel—value-adding creations like positioning, website copy, blog posts, templates, webinars, and tools—and engine—distribution via channels, email segmentation, SEO ops, social, paid ads, and marketing operations like HubSpot setup. Most initiatives involve both, but startups often imbalance them: building engine without fuel yields poor outbound results, while fuel without engine wastes content. Founders diagnose by checking top-performing assets—if positioning is unclear or distribution absent, prioritize accordingly. Fuel typically precedes engine, but top-down sales may start with SDR engine, needing fuel next; PLG often needs engine to capture inbound traffic.