MKT1 Capital is a new $5M+ fund founded by marketing leaders, Emily Kramer & Kathleen Estreich. We invest in $100-$250K in Seed & Series A SaaS startups who want help building their marketing function.
We actually help you build out marketing.
We’re marketing leaders, who have taken startups from 0 to 1 & $1M to $100M. We've also advised and invested in over 50 startups.
We make sure you have the right marketing strategy, then help you bring on contractors and hire your first marketing leader.
We help you identify & accelerate marketing advantages (think network effects & category creation).
Our fund has lots of marketing leaders as LPs. They're available for questions, referrals, & recommendations too.
Once you hire, we serve as mentors to your Head of Marketing. This is a unique benefit for your marketing hire.
We've worked at some of the most successful SaaS companies over the last 15 years, building marketing and operations teams.
Asana, Carta, Astro (acq. Slack), Ticketfly
Emily has led marketing teams at Seed to Series E startups with $0 to $100M ARR. She built the marketing teams and function from scratch at Asana, Carta, and Astro (acquired by Slack).
While leading Asana's marketing team for 4 years, she launched their first paid product for teams in 2013 and their rebrand in 2015. At Astro, she launched the company and first product, which won Product Hunt's mobile app of the year in 2017; Astro was acquired by Slack a year later. While at Carta, she developed their gender equity gap data studies and launched the Table Stakes initiative in 2019, which has been covered in 50+ top tier publications.
Emily is also a board member at non-profit Empower Work, a text line for people facing challenges in the workplace.
Box, Intercom, Scalyr, Facebook
Kathleen has built and led marketing and operations teams at several high-growth startups including Intercom, Box, Facebook and Scalyr. She has experience on both the marketing and business operations side, bringing a holistic view to help founders grow their early business teams.
While at Scalyr, she helped grow the business and team from seed stage to Series A, owning marketing, recruiting, finance, HR and business operations. At Intercom, she helped the company scale from ~100 employees to over 270. At Box, she ran the Platform Business team, where she oversaw platform marketing, programs and partnership, and started and ran the Box Developer Conference. She spent six years in marketing at Facebook, including roles in corporate communications, platform marketing, and engineering marketing, as the company grew from 15 million to more than a billion users.
Kathleen loves helping founders and companies scale in deliberate ways, focusing on building great products and team environments.
Your website is your #1 most important marketing asset by a mile. Yet, many (most?) websites, especially for early and growth-stage companies are ineffective. They don't tell visitors who the product is for, what problem they solve, and what the product does.
Read moreTo build a successful marketing function you need to produce great fuel and craft a well-running engine. Your fuel needs to be custom made for your engine and your engine needs to be custom made for your fuel.
Read moreOur perspective on early-stage marketing compensation in an attempt to make this process easier for both marketers and founders. We share salary & equity benchmarks for Seed & Series A marketing roles, plus how to evaluate your equity offer.
Read morePerceptions guide your marketing efforts so you stay focused and tell a repeatable story that is uniquely your own. Perceptions trickle down and shape marketers’ goals, messaging, and content roadmap.
Read moreWhen you are planning a campaign, writing a blog post, deciding the focus of an event, or creating anything longer than a Tweet, you probably need a GACC. Writing the GACC in advance helps give your future creation focus, sets context for reviewers, and ensures you have a plan for driving results.
Read moreWe’re shocked by how many marketing leaders don’t have clearly defined goals, only have lead and revenue target goals, or set goals that aren’t focused on impact—like “make 10 blog posts...
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