The Minimum Viable Marketing Plan for Pre-Seed Startups

You’re a founder. You’re building, you’re coding, you’re trying to will a product into existence that solves a real problem. The last thing you have time for is 'marketing.' The word itself probably conjures up images of bloated budgets, complex funnels, and fluffy brand campaigns that have zero relevance to your reality: finding your first 10 paying customers.

Forget all that. You don't need a 50-page marketing plan. You don't need a huge budget. And you definitely don't need to be on every social media platform.

What you need is a Minimum Viable Marketing Plan (MVMP). It's the same principle as your MVP: the smallest, most focused set of activities you can perform to start learning from the market. The goal isn't to build a massive, scalable marketing machine. The goal is to get your first handful of ideal customers, validate your assumptions, and find a repeatable path to your next 10.

This is your playbook. No fluff, just action.

Stop Thinking Like a Marketer, Start Thinking Like a Founder

The biggest mistake early-stage founders make is trying to copy the marketing of a Series C company. You see them running ads, sponsoring conferences, and producing slick video podcasts, and you think you need to do the same. You don't.

Your marketing at this stage has one job: learning. Every action you take should be designed to answer a critical question:

Who is my actual customer?
What is the real pain I'm solving for them?
Where do these people 'live' online?
What language do they use to describe their problem?
Are they willing to pay to solve it?

This is the lean startup methodology applied to go-to-market. It’s a series of rapid, low-cost experiments designed to de-risk your business. Your marketing isn't about broadcasting; it's about systematically searching for answers. Everything else is a distraction.

The Core Components of Your MVMP

Your MVMP isn't a long list of tasks. It's a simple framework built on three pillars. Get these right, and you have a foundation for everything that follows.

Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) - Be Brutally Specific

If your answer to "Who is your customer?" is "small businesses" or "SaaS companies," you've already lost. That's not an ICP; it's a ZIP code. You need to get microscopically specific. The tighter your focus, the easier everything else becomes—your messaging, your channel selection, your product decisions.

Bad ICP: "We sell to HR managers."

Good ICP: "We sell to Heads of People at North American B2B SaaS companies with 150-400 employees that use Greenhouse as their ATS and have posted at least 2 new engineering roles in the last 60 days."

See the difference? The second one is a real person you can find. You know what they care about, what tools they use, and what their challenges are. You can build a list of these exact people on LinkedIn Sales Navigator or Apollo.io in an afternoon.

Action Item: Spend 30 minutes right now and write a one-sentence ICP description. Be ruthlessly specific. It’s a hypothesis, not a tattoo. You can and should change it as you learn.

Your Core Message - The "One-Liner" That Actually Works

Stop talking about your features. Nobody cares about your "AI-powered, synergistic platform." They care about their problems. Your one-liner must connect their pain to your solution in a way they instantly understand.

Use this simple formula:

We help [Your Specific ICP] achieve [Desirable Outcome] by eliminating [Primary Pain Point].

Let's put it to work.

Bad One-Liner: "AgentWeb is a next-generation AI marketing automation solution."

Good One-Liner: "We help pre-seed B2B SaaS founders get their first 20 customers by executing a data-driven marketing plan they don't have the time to run themselves."

One is jargon; the other is a value proposition. One is about you; the other is about them. Your one-liner should be the headline on your website, the first line of your cold emails, and your answer to "What do you do?" at a meetup.

Action Item: Draft your one-liner using the formula. Test it on five people who fit your ICP. If they don't get it immediately, rewrite it.

Your One Metric That Matters (OMTM)

At this stage, your OMTM is not MRR or LTV/CAC. Chasing those metrics now will lead to bad decisions. Your OMTM must track your rate of learning.

Pick one of these:

Number of qualified demos booked per week.
Number of positive replies to cold outreach.
Number of new trial users who complete a key activation step.

Choose the metric that sits closest to the 'Is this thing valuable?' question. A qualified demo is a chance to learn directly from your ICP. A positive reply is a signal your messaging is resonating. An activated trial user is a signal your product delivers on its promise. Pick one, put it on a dashboard (or a sticky note), and focus all your energy on moving that number.

The MVMP in Action: Choose Your Battlefield

You are a tiny army. You cannot fight a war on ten fronts. You will lose. You must pick one, maybe two, channels where your ICP is highly concentrated and focus all your firepower there. This isn't about being everywhere; it's about being unmissable in the few places that matter.

Channel 1: The Outbound Engine (Direct & Scrappy)

This is your proactive channel. You are not waiting for customers to find you; you are going to them. For most B2B SaaS, this is the fastest path to your first conversations.

List Building: Use your hyper-specific ICP to build a target list. LinkedIn Sales Navigator is your best friend here. Tools like Apollo.io or Hunter.io can help you find email addresses. Aim for a starting list of 100-200 highly qualified prospects.
Cold Email: Keep it brutally short. Three to five sentences max. Your email has one goal: get a reply. Personalize the first line based on their LinkedIn profile, a recent company announcement, or a shared connection. Focus on their problem, not your solution.
Example Template:
Subject: Question about [Their Company]'s sales process
Hi [First Name],
Saw your recent post on LinkedIn about scaling your SDR team. Congrats on the growth.
Founders in your space often tell me that as they scale, their reps spend more time on data entry than on selling. It's how my last company nearly failed.
We're building a tool that automates CRM updates from call transcripts, giving reps back ~5 hours a week.
Curious if this is a pain point you're feeling at [Their Company]?
LinkedIn Outreach: Don't pitch in the connection request. Send a simple, personalized request. Once they accept, follow up with a message that provides value or asks a smart question. The goal is to start a conversation, not to close a sale.

Channel 2: The Inbound Signal (Content & Community)

This is your long-term leverage play. It builds your reputation and makes people come to you. Don't think 'blogging.' Think 'being helpful where my ICP already hangs out.'

The Watering Hole Strategy: Identify the top 1-2 online communities where your ICP seeks information and advice. This could be a niche subreddit (like r/sales), a Slack or Discord community (like RevGenius), or an industry forum. Your job is not to spam your link. Your job is to become one of the most helpful people in that community. Answer questions, share your expertise, and build relationships. People will notice and check out what you're building.
High-Signal Content: Forget writing a generic blog post on "10 Tips for X." Instead, take the specific, non-obvious insights you have from building your product and share them on LinkedIn or Twitter. Document your journey. Write about the problems you're solving in detail. A high-quality, insightful LinkedIn post that gets engagement from your ICP is worth more than 20 generic blog posts that nobody reads.

Building Your Minimum Viable Presence

Your outreach and content efforts need a place to land. This is your digital storefront. It doesn't need to be a masterpiece, but it needs to be professional and clear.

The "Good Enough" Website

Your pre-seed website has one purpose: to convert a visitor who knows your name into a demo or trial. That's it.

Above the Fold: Your one-liner as the H1. A sub-headline that clarifies the outcome. A single, unmissable Call-to-Action (CTA) button.
The Narrative: A simple 3-step section: 1. Here's the painful problem. 2. Here's how our solution works (in simple terms). 3. Here's the amazing outcome you'll get.
Social Proof: Even one testimonial from a beta user is powerful. Use their headshot, name, and title. If you don't have one, use logos of companies your beta users work for (with permission).

The Optimized LinkedIn Profile

When you do outbound, the first thing a prospect does is click on your profile. It's your new business card.

Headline: Use your one-liner formula. Instead of "Founder at [Your Company]," use "Helping finance teams close their books in 2 days instead of 2 weeks."
About Section: Don't list your resume. Tell the story of why you're obsessed with solving this specific problem.
Featured Section: Link directly to your website's demo page, a case study, or a high-value video.

The System: Tools, Time, and Budget

You don't need a complex or expensive MarTech stack. You need a few simple tools to execute and measure your MVMP.

Your Pre-Seed MarTech Stack

CRM: A Google Sheet or Airtable base is fine to start. A free HubSpot account is a step up.
Outreach: Lemlist or Apollo.io for sending and tracking email sequences.
Analytics: Google Analytics to see where traffic is coming from. Set up one goal: demo requests.
Scheduling: Calendly. Don't waste time with back-and-forth emails.

The Build vs. Buy Decision

As a founder, your most precious resource is time. You have to decide where to spend it. When it comes to executing this plan, you have a few options.

DIY: This is the default. You do everything yourself. It's the cheapest in terms of cash but the most expensive in terms of your time. For founders who prefer a hands-on approach and want to construct their own marketing systems, a self-service platform like
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https://www.agentweb.pro/build
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can provide the necessary tools and frameworks to get started efficiently.
Hire: Don't hire a marketer until you have found a repeatable GTM motion. Hiring too early means they'll spend their time (and your money) trying to figure out what you should be figuring out right now.
Done-for-You Service: For many founders, your time is far more valuable when spent talking to customers and building the product than it is running A/B tests on email copy. A 'done-for-you' service can be a founder's best friend, executing this entire MVMP playbook while you focus on what you do best. If you're slammed and need an expert team to just get it done, a specialized agency like
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https://www.agentweb.pro
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can act as your outsourced marketing arm from day one.

Your Budget and Time

Your cash outlay can be minimal. Most of the tools have free or cheap starter plans. You can get this entire stack for under $200 a month. To see how this investment compares to hiring or more comprehensive solutions, you can explore different service tiers and what's included in our pricing.

In terms of time, block out 5 hours per week. No more, no less. Use it deliberately: 2 hours for outbound, 2 hours for content/community, and 1 hour to review your OMTM and plan the next week. Consistency is everything.

This MVMP isn't a silver bullet. It's a systematic process for finding the truth. It forces you to be specific, to focus, and to measure what matters. Execute this plan with discipline for 90 days, and you'll not only have your first customers, but you'll have something far more valuable: a validated, repeatable foundation for growth.

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.