Picture this. You're marketer number one at an early-stage company. There's no name, no website, no clear offer, and no customers to study.
So you open LinkedIn and start messaging everyone you're even loosely connected to. Old colleagues. People you met once at a conference. Folks you barely know.
"I just joined this company. Can you help me?"
That's exactly what Amrita Mathur did when she joined Superside as its first marketer and VP of marketing. She told me on the Marketing Smarts podcast that people said yes partly out of sympathy. In her words, they figured she was going to get fired in three months, so they might as well help.
She didn't get fired. Those conversations shaped the product, the go-to-market, and a growth story she described as going from zero to $30 million in under three years.
Here's what I want you to know. You don't need Superside's market or budget to use what she learned. You need a different view of what marketing is for.
Let's walk through it, one clear step at a time.
What Marketing-Led Growth Actually Means
You've heard of sales-led growth. A sales team takes the meetings and closes the deals. You've probably heard of product-led growth too, where the product itself drives signups and upgrades.
Amrita coined "marketing-led growth" for something she noticed B2B rarely talks about. And she was honest: it's her term, and she's still shaping what it means.
Her analogy is consumer brands. At a company like Coca-Cola, a brand manager can act almost like the CEO of a brand: product, packaging, campaigns, all of it.
In B2B, that rarely happens. Someone else decides what the product is. Someone else decides the go-to-market. Marketing gets handed the result and told to "make it pop."
At Superside, it was different. Marketing didn't just get a seat at the table. In Amrita's words, marketing made "most if not all of those big decisions," and she felt like she had "the keys to the castle."
Takeaway: Marketing-led growth isn't about marketing being in charge of everything. It's about marketing owning the insight into who you serve, and that insight shaping real decisions.
Build the Offer and the Go-to-Market at the Same Time
The founders came in with two non-negotiables: a subscription model and a focus on design and creative work. Everything else was up for grabs.
So Amrita's first move was to figure out the market while the product was still flexible. Who are the ideal customers? Which buyer personas matter? What would they pay? Which channels, offers, and hooks would work?
Then came the key part. What she learned changed the product.
The conversations kept pointing to one problem: teams were struggling with the execution layer of their campaigns. The everyday design work. Banner ads, social graphics, the stuff nobody wants to spend days on.
So Superside leaned in. Buyers cared about speed, so the team built around a 12 to 24 hour turnaround. Buyers cared about cost because the work was so routine, so pricing mattered.
Amrita's point is that this isn't just for creative services. Software, platforms, apps, and service businesses can all do it, if the team stays open to what the market says.
Takeaway: If you're launching a new service, offer, or package, don't lock it down before you talk to buyers. Let marketing bring back what it hears, and let that shape the offer.
The Lost Art of Talking to Humans
When I asked Amrita how she gathered those insights, her answer made me smile. She called it "a bit of a lost art."
With so much data at our fingertips, she said, everybody gravitates to the numbers. But whatever happened to picking up the phone and asking, "Can I pick your brain for 15 minutes?"
The team had built hypothesis personas with names like Designer Dan, Content Marketing Brenda, and Marketing Molly. Before going all in, Amrita wanted to test three things with real people:
- Is there real pain?
- Will they act on it? Sometimes someone has the pain but says, "That's not my job, that's Pete's."
- Do they control budget? Can they spend, or do they have to go up the ladder?
She spent about three full days messaging people and ended up with 57 detailed conversations across tech, retail, and big brands.
Fifty-seven doesn't sound huge. But it was enough to see patterns.
And one pattern surprised everyone. Designer Dan, the persona they thought would be perfect, turned out to be a likely blocker. Designers feared an outside service might take their jobs. So the team stopped targeting that persona and focused on the three that emerged as real buyers and champions.
Think about how much money and time that saved. One round of honest conversations, and they avoided building a whole go-to-market around the wrong person.
Why This Matters Even More in 2026
Here's what's changed since Amrita and I talked. B2B buying has gotten more crowded and more cautious.
Forrester's State of Business Buying 2026 report describes larger, more complex buying groups, typically 13 internal stakeholders plus 9 outside influencers. Procurement is a decision-maker in 53% of buying cycles, and more than 60% of buyers use some kind of trial before committing.
AI is in the mix too. Forrester found buyers use AI for speed, but they don't fully trust it. They validate what they find through a network of people and trusted sources.
So here's why Amrita's lost art matters now. Your buyers are talking to humans to check their thinking. If you're not talking to them too, you're guessing about a decision that now involves a whole room of people.
Takeaway: Your persona work can't stop at one buyer. Map the champion, the decision-maker, the blocker, and procurement. Then talk to each.
Optimize for Speed of Learning, Not Leads
Superside launched in September 2019. Amrita admits she was freaking out. Would anyone want this thing?
Then her boss gave her a gift. He told her to stop thinking about leads and revenue and to "optimize for your speed of learning."
That permission changed everything. She went all in on paid social because it could get in front of the right people fast. She tested Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Within about four weeks, Instagram was clearly winning, so she moved the small budget there.
Then the team did something most companies skip. Every demo booked became a lesson. The head of sales, Amrita, and a couple of others reviewed every conversation. Where did they come from? What pages did they visit? What did they ask? What objections came up?
If everyone asked the same question, it went on the homepage or landing page. Tight loop. Constant learning.
Amrita's line: the revenue will follow once you've learned.
One honest note for 2026. Paid social platforms, targeting, and costs have shifted a lot since 2019, so your best channel today may look very different. That's exactly why the principle matters more than the tactic. Test fast, then commit.
Output Before Outcomes
I asked Amrita what myth she'd love to bust. Her answer: marketers feel like they have to get everything right.
She used an example. "We have to crack TikTok this year," because it's the hot thing and you'd look foolish not to. Even when, deep down, you know your audience probably isn't there.
Her fix is to treat every new channel like an experiment with stages:
- Set basic milestones for the first three months. If you hit them, you move to the next stage.
- Focus on output before outcomes. Get your cadence, quality, and creative right before you judge leads or revenue.
- Decide in advance when to cut it. If you don't hit the milestones, you stop and move on.
That shared map does something powerful. It aligns everybody around what you're actually gunning for.
I'll add my own two cents here. I don't believe in failure. I believe in lessons. If you learn fast and pivot, you win more often than not, even when the experiment "fails."
Takeaway: Before your next big channel bet, write down three-month milestones that measure output and quality. Agree on them as a team before you launch.
The Biggest Pothole: Becoming a Support Function
When I asked about hurdles, Amrita named the one most of us have lived through.
Marketing can easily become a sales support function. Or, in a product-led company, it becomes the brand team that makes things pretty while product calls the shots.
She was clear that there's nothing wrong with support work. But you have to clarify marketing's role, tie yourself to real revenue, and build your plan around the things that actually drive it.
Then she said something blunt that I loved. If you're literally just sales support or product support, "that's not marketing."
Real talk: if your marketing team spends most of its week on one-off sales requests and pretty slides, that's a sign. Not that your people are failing. That your role was never clearly defined.
Set Targets You Can Actually Hit
So what does success look like? For Amrita, it's simple. Hitting your goals, starting with realistic ones.
At Superside, marketing helped build the revenue model and still has major input. That lets the team pressure-test every lever. She shared examples from their model: Could we lift win rate from 20% to 22%? Probably. Could we grow average deal size from $9,000 to $11,000 a month? Probably not, so set something more conservative and build in a buffer.
Once targets are realistic, two things matter.
First, celebrate the wins. When you hit the number, stop and enjoy it, and talk about what you did right.
Second, talk about missed opportunities. Amrita's example: wishing they'd invested in YouTube months earlier because it was paying off. A mature team can have that conversation without blame, so the next call comes faster.
Takeaway: Don't accept a revenue target you didn't help build. Ask which levers it depends on, and whether each one is realistic.
Your Buyer Personas Are Probably Wrong
Amrita's parting words were my favorite part of the conversation.
"Your buyer personas are probably wrong."
Not because you built them badly. Because people change, industries change, and the world keeps shifting. Superside still uses the same persona names from 2019, she said, but how those people buy and what they care about have absolutely changed.
The fix isn't a bigger persona document. It's a habit. Revisit them far more often than you think you need to, and keep talking to real humans.
How to Start Marketing-Led Growth, One Step at a Time
This is how we'd walk through it with you at Sidekick. Don't try to do all five this quarter.
Step 1: Define marketing's role in writing. One paragraph. What does marketing own, what revenue is it tied to, and what's support work that belongs elsewhere?
Step 2: Run a round of buyer conversations. Aim for 15 to 20 to start. Test pain, willingness to act, and budget control. Look for patterns, and for surprise blockers.
Step 3: Put what you learn where everyone can use it. In HubSpot, that might mean updating your persona values, logging call insights on contact records, and sharing patterns with sales so everyone works from the same truth. [LINK: persona setup in HubSpot → Sidekick how-to]
Step 4: Turn your next channel bet into a staged experiment. Three-month milestones. Output before outcomes. A clear cut line.
Step 5: Rebuild your targets from the levers up. Win rate, deal size, volume, buffer. Make sure marketing helps build the model.
Questions to Sit With This Week
- When did your team last talk to a buyer just to learn, not to sell?
- Which of your personas might actually be a blocker?
- Is your marketing team driving growth, or mostly supporting someone else's plan?
- What experiment are you holding onto that you should have cut months ago?
The Bottom Line: Marketing Earns Its Seat by Learning Faster
Marketing-led growth isn't a title or an org chart. It's a mindset.
It's the marketer who picks up the phone. The team that learns faster than the market changes. The leader who sets honest targets and celebrates the wins.
Amrita didn't get the keys to the castle because of a fancy plan. She got them because she understood her buyers better than anyone else in the room.
You can do the same. Start with one conversation.
