From 0 to 1: The Marketing Playbook for Pre-Product-Market Fit

You’ve done the hard part. You’ve wrestled with code, designed a database schema, and pushed a functional MVP. It’s alive. But now you’re staring at a user table with one entry:

Plaintext

you@yourcompany.com

The silence is deafening. You’re trapped in the classic founder’s paradox: you need users to get feedback to find Product-Market Fit (PMF), but you need PMF to get users. It feels like trying to start a fire with wet wood.

Let's cut the crap. Most marketing advice is useless for you right now. It’s written for companies that already have a working engine. They talk about scaling, optimizing, and growth hacking. You don't have an engine yet. You have a collection of parts on the garage floor.

This is the playbook for building that engine. Forget vanity metrics. Forget big-budget campaigns. Pre-PMF marketing has one job and one job only: to accelerate learning. It's not a sales function; it’s a product function disguised as outreach. Let’s get to work.

The Pre-PMF Marketing Mindset: You're Not Selling, You're Learning

Before we talk tactics, we need to align on the strategy. If your mindset is wrong, every action you take will be a waste of time and money. The goal is not to get 1,000 signups. The goal is to get 10-20 high-quality conversations that either validate or invalidate your core hypotheses.

Why 'Growth Hacking' is the Wrong Frame

'Growth hacking' implies you have something that works, and you're just looking for clever loopholes to scale it faster. It’s about optimizing conversion rates in a funnel that’s already proven to convert. You don't have that. Your funnel is a single landing page with a 'contact us' form that goes straight to your inbox.

Trying to 'growth hack' at this stage is like trying to tune a car engine that's missing a piston. You'll spin your wheels, burn through your cash, and learn nothing. Your job isn't to hack growth; it's to discover if there's any potential for growth at all.

Your Only Goal: High-Quality Conversations

Every single marketing activity you do should be reverse-engineered from this one goal: Does this get me into a conversation with someone who I think has the problem my product solves?

That's it. That's the only KPI that matters pre-PMF. Not website visits, not Twitter followers, not email open rates. The output you're looking for is a calendar full of 30-minute Zoom calls with your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).

Why? Because in these conversations, you'll hear the specific words they use to describe their pain. You'll hear their objections. You'll discover their real 'job to be done'. This is gold. This is the raw material you'll use to refine your product, your messaging, and your entire go-to-market strategy.

Stage 1: The "Do Things That Don't Scale" Playbook

Paul Graham’s advice is timeless for a reason. In the beginning, you need to do things that are completely unscalable and manual. This is how you find your first believers and earn the right to build something bigger.

Finding Your First 10 "Believers"

Your first users won't find you through SEO. You have to find them. This is a manual, surgical process. Your goal is to find 10 people who will give you 30 minutes of their time.

Manual Outreach: Stop thinking about 'cold email' as a marketing channel. Think of it as starting a conversation. Your email should not feel like marketing spam. It should feel like a personal note from one smart person to another.

Here’s a framework that works:

Observation: Start with a specific, genuine observation about them or their company. “Saw your post on LinkedIn about the challenges of SOC 2 compliance…” or “Noticed you’re hiring for a new data science team…” This proves you’ve done your homework.
Hypothesis: State your hypothesis about a problem they might have. “Teams I talk to in your position often struggle with X. It leads to Y, which is a huge time sink.”
The Ask (for advice, not a sale): This is the key. Don’t ask for a demo. Ask for their expertise. “I’m building a tool to solve this exact problem. As an expert in this space, I’d be incredibly grateful for 15 minutes of your time to get your feedback on our approach. No sales pitch, I promise.”

Leverage Niche Communities: Your ICP lives somewhere online. Find that place. It could be a specific subreddit, a Slack community, an industry forum, or a LinkedIn group. Do not go in there and spam your link. You will be banned, and you will deserve it.

Instead, become a valuable member.

Listen first: Spend a week just reading. Understand the culture, the common problems, the inside jokes.
Add value: Answer questions. Provide helpful advice. Share resources (that aren't yours).
Gently introduce your work: When someone asks a question that your product directly solves, you’ve earned the right to say, “This is a common problem. I’m actually working on a tool for this. Happy to share what I've learned or show you what we're building if you're interested.”

Content as a Conversation Starter, Not a Lead Magnet

Forget about pillar pages and keyword-optimized blog posts for now. Your early content has one purpose: to prove you understand the customer's problem better than they do. It’s a magnet for your specific ICP and a repellent for everyone else.

The "Point-of-View" Article: Write an article with a strong, defensible opinion about a problem in your industry. Challenge a widely held belief. For example, if everyone uses Tool A, write about the fundamental flaws of Tool A's approach and propose a new mental model. This is an incredible filter. People who disagree will ignore it. People who secretly agree will see you as a thought leader and reach out.

The "Build in Public" Log: As a technical founder, this is your superpower. Document your journey. Share your architecture decisions, your early user feedback, your fuck-ups. Write about how you're building, not just what you're building. Other technical people in your target market will respect the transparency and expertise. This builds trust and authority before you even ask for a sale.

Turning Conversations into Product Insights

Getting the meeting is only half the battle. You need to run these user interviews like a scientist, not a salesperson. Your goal is to extract unbiased truth.

Use the “Jobs to be Done” (JTBD) framework. Don't ask future-facing questions like, “Would you use this?” People are liars (or, more charitably, bad predictors of their own behavior). Instead, ask past-facing questions:

“Tell me about the last time you had to [accomplish task your product helps with].”
“What was the hardest part of that process?”
“What other tools or methods did you try to solve this?”
“If you could wave a magic wand, what would your ideal solution look like?”

Record these calls (with permission). Transcribe them. Put the key quotes, pain points, and feature requests into a simple Notion or Airtable database. This database will become the single source of truth for your entire company.

Stage 2: Building Your Minimum Viable Marketing Funnel

After 20-50 of these manual conversations, you'll start to see patterns. The same pain points, the same language, the same objections. Now, you can start building a system—a Minimum Viable Funnel—to create these conversations more predictably.

The 'Signal > Content > Conversation' Loop

This is a simple, repeatable motion for early-stage B2B SaaS. It’s more effective than generic content marketing and less spammy than generic cold outreach.

Identify a Trigger Signal: What event happens that makes a company an ideal customer for you right now? Examples: they just raised a Series A, they just hired a VP of Engineering, they posted a job with a specific keyword, they started using a complementary technology (check BuiltWith).
Create Micro-Content: Create a small, valuable piece of content that directly addresses the problem associated with that signal. This isn't a 3,000-word blog post. It could be a one-page PDF, a short video walkthrough, a Notion template, or a well-written LinkedIn post.
Outreach with Value: Your outreach is now warm. “Hey [Name], saw your team just hired a new Head of Security. Congrats! My team and I just put together a quick checklist for the first 90 days in that role, focused on [the problem you solve]. Thought it might be useful. Happy to share it.”

This loop turns marketing from a guessing game into a systematic process of identifying intent and delivering value.

Your First Landing Page: A Litmus Test for Messaging

Your landing page is not primarily for converting visitors into users. It’s for converting visitors into data points. It's a laboratory for testing your value proposition.

Keep it brutally simple: a powerful H1 headline, a sub-headline, maybe 3 bullet points, and a single Call-to-Action (CTA).

Test Your H1: This is the most important copy on your entire site. Run a simple A/B test. Does “AI-Powered Code Review” get more clicks than “Ship Bug-Free Code 2x Faster”? You won’t know until you test it. Use a tool like Posthog or Google Optimize. The winner tells you what your market actually values.
The CTA: Don’t use a generic “Sign Up” button that leads to a self-serve onboarding flow you haven't perfected yet. The only CTA should be to talk to a human. “Book a 15-min Walkthrough” or “See if [Your Product] is a Fit.” This forces conversations, which is still your primary goal.

The Founder-Led Webinar

Don’t call it a webinar. That sounds boring and corporate. Call it a “live workshop,” a “founder Q&A,” or a “live build session.”

Pick one very specific, tactical problem your product helps solve. Spend 45 minutes teaching people how to solve that problem, showing them the theory and best practices. You can even show them how to do it manually. Then, in the last 15 minutes, say, “Now, let me show you how our tool automates this entire workflow in 3 minutes.”

This builds massive goodwill, establishes you as an expert, and attracts a highly qualified audience. The Q&A at the end is another goldmine for user feedback.

What NOT to Do: The Pre-PMF Resource Traps

Just as important as knowing what to do is knowing what not to do. Your most precious resources are your time and your cash. Don't waste them on activities that are premature optimizations.

Don't Hire a Full-Time Marketer (Yet)

This is a classic founder mistake. You think, “I’m a product person, I’ll just hire someone to do the marketing.” It never works. Pre-PMF marketing is product discovery. A marketer can’t discover your customer for you. The founder must be the first marketer and salesperson. You need to internalize the customer's voice. Once you have a repeatable playbook, you can hire someone to run it. Not before.

Don't Run Paid Ads

Running Google or Facebook ads at this stage is like setting a pile of cash on fire. You don't have a proven value proposition, your messaging is a guess, and your landing page isn't optimized for conversion. You'll pay a fortune for clicks that go nowhere, and you'll learn very little in the process. Wait until you have a funnel that converts organically before you pour gasoline on it.

Don't Obsess Over a Content Calendar and SEO Keywords

Long-term SEO is critical, but it’s a Stage 3 activity. At this point, you don’t have the authority to rank for competitive keywords, and you don’t have enough data to know which keywords are the right ones anyway. Your content should be opportunistic and driven by your conversations, not a rigid calendar dictated by a keyword research tool. Write to start conversations, not to please an algorithm.

When You're Ready to Scale... a Little

As you run these plays, you'll find something that starts to work consistently. A specific email template gets a 10% meeting rate. A certain type of LinkedIn post gets shared by your ICP. Now, and only now, do you start thinking about scaling.

Systematizing What Works

Scaling doesn't mean hiring a 10-person team. It means taking a manual process and making it 10x more efficient.

That successful email template? Use a sales automation tool like Apollo or Lemlist to send it to 500 hyper-targeted prospects instead of 50.
That successful article? Turn it into a talk, a Twitter thread, and three smaller LinkedIn posts. Repurpose relentlessly.

This is the beginning of building a real, repeatable marketing machine. It’s also the point where many founders, buried in product and fundraising, realize they can't do it all themselves.

Deciding on Your Next Move: DIY vs. Done-For-You

Here you have two paths. The right one depends on your resources and where you want to focus your time.

One option is the DIY path. You can piece together the tools, hire a freelancer or two, and manage the process yourself. This is a great choice for founders who want to keep their marketing knowledge in-house and have the bandwidth to build the machine themselves. For those who want to get their hands dirty with powerful automation, a self-service platform like ours at AgentWeb Build can provide the tooling to execute these playbooks.

Alternatively, you can choose a 'done-for-you' path. This is for founders who recognize that their highest leverage activity is talking to customers and building the product. For many, the fastest way to get from 0 to 1 in marketing is to partner with an expert team that has a proven playbook for this exact stage. A specialized service like AgentWeb can install and run this entire marketing engine for you, turning your insights into a scalable system while you focus on what you do best.

Thinking About Investment

As you move from manual effort to systemization, you'll need to invest. But it's no longer a speculative bet; it's an investment in amplifying a signal that you've already found. Whether you're paying for tools, freelancers, or an agency, you need to understand the economics. To get a clear picture of what this investment can look like at different stages, you can review different service models and their pricing to make an informed decision for your startup's runway.

Ready to put your marketing on autopilot? Book a call with Harsha to walk through your current marketing workflow and see how AgentWeb can help you scale.