Startup Marketing: 6 Proven Frameworks Founders and Fund Managers Use to Drive More Sales and Close Investors
Startup marketing is the single most overlooked variable separating funded companies from forgotten ones, according to Eric Hazard, founder and CEO of Vested Adventures and corporate Venture Capital investor in early-stage fintech.
Key Takeaways for Startup Marketing Success
- Understand why startup marketing begins with audience clarity, not product promotion, and how the Vested 360 exercise helps founders identify who they are actually selling to before spending a dollar on promotion.
- Discover how the PESO model — paid, earned, shared, and owned channels — gives early-stage founders a structured startup marketing framework that requires minimal capital to activate.
- Learn how startup marketing to venture capital investors requires a compelling founder story, honest competitive analysis, and a clear vision for the company five to ten years out.
- Explore why telling investors you have no competitors is one of the fastest ways to end a startup marketing conversation and what to say instead to demonstrate market depth.
- Consider how corporate VC models like Vested Adventures combine capital with marketing communications infrastructure to support portfolio companies across all startup marketing channels simultaneously.
Startup Marketing Begins With Audience Clarity, Not Product Promotion
Global, national, or regional reach?
Institution or individual buyer?
Pain points · Benefits · Current perceptions · Desired perceptions
Outcome-first language, not product-first language
Framework: Eric Hazard, Vested Adventures
Startup marketing, according to Eric Hazard in this episode of Making Billions Podcast, fails most often at the very first step: founders do not know who they are actually talking to. Hazard describes this as one of the most consistent and costly blind spots he encounters when working with early-stage fintech companies. Without a defined audience, every subsequent startup marketing decision lacks a foundation.
Hazard introduces what he calls the Vested 360 exercise, a simple three-column framework any founder can run independently. The exercise begins by identifying where your audience is located — global, national, or regional — and then progressively narrows to whether that audience is an institution or an individual. Startup marketing that skips this step, according to Hazard, produces messaging that resonates with no one.
Once the audience segment is identified, Hazard recommends placing that persona at the center of a quadrant and populating it with pain points, perceived benefits, current perceptions, and desired perceptions. This startup marketing discipline forces founders to articulate not just what their product does, but what problem it eliminates for a specific human being. According to Investopedia, defining a target market is one of the foundational requirements of any effective go-to-market strategy.
Hazard offers a concrete example of how this startup marketing reframe changes the pitch language itself. Rather than saying “we are the leading retirement provider to 44-year-olds,” the more effective message becomes “we help people manifest their dreams and visions by creating clear paths to a financially free future.” Startup marketing built around outcomes and emotion connects far more directly than product-centric language.
This distinction, Hazard argues, is not cosmetic — it determines whether a potential customer stops scrolling or keeps moving.
Startup Marketing and the PESO Model: Four Channels Every Founder Must Activate
| Channel | What It Is | Cost to Start |
|---|---|---|
| P — Paid | Google Ads, digital advertising for brand visibility | Pay per click only |
| E — Earned | PR, media placements, inserting into news cycles | Time & relationships |
| S — Shared | Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook — all platforms | Zero cost |
| O — Owned | Company website, blog, content hub | Near zero cost |
Framework: Eric Hazard, Vested Adventures
Startup marketing becomes significantly more actionable when founders understand the four channels available to them, and Hazard presents the PESO model as the organizing framework for that activation. PESO stands for paid, earned, shared, and owned, and Hazard explains that each channel plays a distinct role in how a company’s startup marketing message reaches its audience. This startup marketing model is widely used across the communications industry and applies directly to fintech founders and Fund Managers alike.
The owned and shared channels, Hazard explains, are the two startup marketing channels that founders can activate immediately and at nearly zero cost. Owned refers to a company website, and shared refers to social media platforms including Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, and others. Hazard’s guidance is direct: open every account you can tie to your company and begin publishing the same core startup marketing message across all of them consistently.
Earned media — what most people think of as public relations — is the most misunderstood startup marketing channel, according to Hazard. Founders often approach journalists expecting them to write profile stories about a new product, but Hazard is clear that media organizations exist to serve their readers with news, not to amplify product launches. Startup marketing through earned media requires inserting your company into an existing news cycle rather than expecting the media to create one for you. According to the Wall Street Journal, earned media credibility is among the most valuable assets a growing company can accumulate.
Paid startup marketing, the fourth channel, includes digital advertising such as Google Ads. Hazard notes that founders can use paid placements strategically even without an immediate call to action, simply for brand visibility. The important insight he shares is that you do not pay for a Google Ad until someone clicks it, which means brand-oriented startup marketing through paid channels can deliver impressions at a fraction of the cost of conversion-focused campaigns. Hazard encourages founders to treat these four startup marketing channels as a system, not as isolated tactics.
Startup Marketing for Investor Pitches: Why Your Story Is the Product
Startup marketing is not limited to customer acquisition — it applies equally to Raising Capital, and Hazard makes this point with particular clarity in this episode. When founders approach Venture Capitalists at the seed fund or pre-seed stage, Hazard explains, the product itself is often too early to evaluate on its merits alone. The Investors are evaluating the founder, which means the startup marketing of the founder’s own story becomes the pitch.
Hazard describes the story framework he recommends to early-stage founders as following a simple arc: I saw a problem, I thought of a solution, and I am the right person to execute it. He illustrates this through Vested Adventures’ Investment in a company called YouNest, founded by a mutual Fund industry veteran named Cassini Medina. Medina identified that 529 college savings plans were unnecessarily complex for families to open and manage, built a simplified app-based alternative, and came to investors with a story grounded in personal expertise and genuine market frustration.
That startup marketing of the founder’s own credibility and insight, according to Hazard, was what made the investment compelling at the seed stage. This approach to startup marketing in investor contexts aligns with how many institutional investors evaluate early-stage opportunities. According to Harvard Business Review, narratives that connect personal experience to market opportunity consistently outperform data-heavy presentations in early-stage fundraising contexts.
Startup marketing that centers the founder’s journey gives investors an emotional and logical anchor for their conviction. Hazard reinforces that this is not about performance — it is about honesty, clarity, and preparation. Founders who invest in crafting that story with the same rigor they apply to their product roadmap will find their startup marketing conversations with investors consistently more productive.
Ryan Miller adds in this episode that financial projections in early-stage startup marketing contexts serve a different purpose than founders often assume. Investors do not expect the numbers to be precise. What they are evaluating is the quality of the founder’s thinking — whether assumptions are conservative or aggressive, whether the model reflects a deep understanding of the market, and whether the founder has considered multiple scenarios. Startup marketing through a well-constructed financial narrative demonstrates intellectual rigor even when the figures themselves are speculative.
Startup Marketing and Competitive Intelligence: Never Say You Have No Competitors
Startup marketing credibility collapses the moment a founder claims to have no competitors, and Hazard is unequivocal about this in the episode. He describes it as an immediate signal that the founder has either failed to conduct proper market research or is too overconfident to be a reliable partner. Either interpretation, he explains, ends the investor conversation. Effective startup marketing always acknowledges competition and uses it as evidence of market valuation.
Hazard recommends that founders approach competitive analysis as one of the most productive startup marketing activities available to them. By studying what competitors offer, how they communicate their value, and which channels they use to reach their audiences, founders gain free market intelligence that can directly sharpen their own positioning. Startup marketing that is built in contrast to a clear competitive set demonstrates market awareness and strategic thinking simultaneously.
The practical startup marketing application Hazard describes is to study what competitors emphasize and then identify what they do not address. Using a hypothetical smartphone analogy, he notes that if an established competitor has locked up ease of use and design, the startup marketing opportunity lies in identifying the dimension of value that the incumbent has not claimed. Startup marketing built around a genuine gap, supported by evidence from competitive research, is far more credible than a claim of uniqueness without context. According to the SEC, understanding competitive dynamics is a fundamental element of due diligence for both investors and founders in early-stage companies.
Hazard also recommends that founders look at the cap tables and investor rosters of their closest competitors as part of their startup marketing and outreach strategy. Understanding who funded similar companies, which firms led those rounds, and where those investors present publicly can help founders identify the right rooms to enter and the right conversations to initiate. Startup marketing in the venture capital context is partly about positioning — being present in the right forums, reaching the right audiences, and framing your differentiation against a backdrop investors already understand.
Startup Marketing Through Channel Strategy: How Founders Drive Qualified Leads
Startup marketing that generates actual leads requires more than good messaging — it requires a deliberate channel strategy that matches the right message to the right audience in the right place. Hazard makes this point explicitly in the episode when discussing what he looks for in later-stage investments: founders who can articulate not just what they are selling, but how qualified buyers will find them and what the cost of acquiring each customer looks like. Startup marketing maturity, in his view, is reflected in how clearly a founder understands their funnel.
For founders who are still early in building that startup marketing infrastructure, Hazard’s guidance is to begin with what he calls the search behavior insight: customers do not search for products, they search for solutions to problems. A 44-year-old worried about retirement does not type the name of a financial product into Google — they type a question about how to solve their retirement problem. Startup marketing content that answers those questions directly is what gets discovered, read, and acted upon.
This search-based startup marketing approach is validated by how the most successful digital platforms operate. Hazard points to Google and Amazon as companies whose entire value proposition is built on matching problems to solutions, and notes that their algorithms have become sophisticated enough to anticipate what users need before users articulate it clearly. Startup marketing that operates on the same logic — putting solution-oriented content in front of problem-aware audiences — benefits from the same underlying behavior that drives Billions of dollars in commerce daily. According to Forbes, content-led startup marketing strategies consistently produce lower customer acquisition costs than paid-only approaches.
Hazard also notes that startup marketing channel strategy becomes a direct conversation topic as companies move up the funding chain toward Series A and Series B rounds. At those stages, investors expect to see evidence that the company understands how to convert awareness into revenue, how to measure that conversion, and how to project its trajectory. Startup marketing fluency at the channel level is not a nice-to-have for later-stage founders — it is a prerequisite for credible fundraising conversations.
Startup Marketing Inside a Corporate VC Model: The Vested Adventures Approach
Startup marketing support is built directly into the Vested Adventures investment thesis, and this is what distinguishes it from traditional Private Equity models. Hazard explains that the firm emerged from a recognition that what early-stage founders most needed was not just Capital — it was the communications infrastructure to take their product to market effectively. Startup marketing capacity, in other words, became a core component of the firm’s value proposition to portfolio companies.
Vested Adventures operates within a holding company called Vested, which includes a portfolio of communications-focused businesses. These include Quoted, a proprietary technology platform that matches journalists with expert sources; Red Lab, a digital agency; Scribe, a content agency; and Financial Narrative, a networking community for financial communications professionals. Every portfolio company that Hazard invests in through Vested Adventures gains access to this startup marketing infrastructure as part of the investment relationship.
The Quoted platform, Hazard explains, is particularly powerful for startup marketing in the earned media channel. Journalists using the platform submit requests for expert sources on specific topics, and founders who have built out detailed profiles on the platform can be matched directly with those requests. This effectively automates a significant portion of the startup marketing work that would otherwise require a full-time PR professional or agency relationship. According to Bloomberg, earned media placement in credible financial publications remains one of the highest-value signals a fintech company can send to institutional audiences.
Hazard is transparent about the Funds structure in this episode, noting that Vested Adventures is funded by profits from the broader Vested platform rather than through external capital raises. Typical investment sizes are approximately $25,000, and the firm generally comes in at the pre-seed or seed stage — above friends and family but before institutional venture rounds. Startup marketing support, rather than check size, is the primary differentiator that Vested Adventures offers to founders who fit its thesis of using finance as a force for good and expanding financial literacy and access.
Startup Marketing and the Six-Step Launch Framework: A Summary for Founders and Fund Managers
Geographic and demographic targeting
Early career, mid-career, pre-retirement, etc.
Income, assets, liabilities, constraints
Pain points, fears, and friction points
How you want your audience to see your brand
Solve the problem better than anyone else — say so clearly
Framework: Eric Hazard, Vested Adventures
Startup marketing for a product Launch, as synthesized by Ryan Miller in this episode, can be organized into six practical considerations that apply whether you are commercializing a fintech product or raising a fund. The framework Hazard presents throughout the conversation resolves into a clear sequence: know where your ideal customers are located, understand where they are in their financial lives, identify their financial realities, understand what obstacles they face, define how you want them to perceive you, and then build your startup marketing message around the problems you solve better than anyone else.
This six-step startup marketing framework is not linear in execution but it is linear in preparation. Hazard’s point is that founders and fund managers who shortcut this process almost always produce messaging that is product-centric rather than problem-centric, which means it speaks to no one in particular. Startup marketing that is grounded in specific audience understanding, by contrast, speaks directly to the person experiencing the problem, and that specificity is what creates the emotional resonance that drives action.
The episode also highlights that startup marketing is an ongoing discipline, not a one-time launch activity. Hazard describes working with portfolio companies starting from the very beginning of their journey to establish not just what they are saying today but what the company will look like five to ten years from now. Startup marketing that plants early seeds of that long-term narrative gives investors, customers, and media a consistent story to follow and amplify.
According to the SEC, transparent and consistent communication with stakeholders is a hallmark of well-governed early-stage companies and a meaningful signal to prospective investors evaluating risk. Founders who build their startup marketing around that principle of consistency earn trust faster and retain it longer than those who treat communication as a one-time event.
Miller closes the episode with a reminder that startup marketing is not about making noise — it is about being present where the right people are already looking. Whether the audience is a potential customer typing a question into Google or a venture capital partner attending a demo day in New York, the startup marketing objective is the same: deliver the right message in the right channel at the right moment. Founders who master this discipline, Hazard and Miller agree, are the ones who will be well on their way in their pursuit of making billions.
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About the Guest
Eric Hazard is the founder and CEO of Vested Adventures, a corporate venture capital fund that makes direct investments in early-stage fintech companies, with a particular focus on founders building products that expand financial access and financial literacy. His career spans financial services, journalism covering defined benefit and defined contribution plans as well as global custodian markets, and marketing communications, giving him a rare cross-disciplinary perspective on how fintech companies can build credibility and reach the audiences that matter most to their growth.
Hazard is also a senior leader within the broader Vested holding company, which includes communications businesses such as Quoted, Red Lab, Scribe, and Financial Narrative. Through Vested Adventures, he combines startup marketing infrastructure with direct capital to support portfolio founders at the pre-seed and seed stages. Listeners can learn more about his work through the Vested platform and connect with him via his professional network.
Questions Answered in This Article
What is the biggest thing stopping you from making more sales?
The biggest obstacle stopping most people from making more sales is a failure to clearly identify and address the root causes of poor performance rather than symptoms. Ryan Miller breaks down how fund managers and business owners alike often confuse activity with effectiveness, spending time on the wrong actions without diagnosing why deals are not closing. Recognizing that distinction is the first step toward building a sales process that consistently converts.
Hear the full breakdown on Making Billions with Ryan Miller — and fund managers ready to implement join the Fund Raise Capital community of fund managers and deal syndicators learning first-hand from Ryan Miller, The Wolf of Alt Street.
Why am I not succeeding in sales despite consistent effort?
Consistent effort does not guarantee sales success when the underlying approach is misaligned with what buyers actually need. The episode highlights that effort without self-awareness and honest diagnosis keeps professionals stuck in cycles of activity that produce little results. Addressing the gap between effort and outcome requires examining both mindset and method with equal rigor.
Hear the full breakdown on Making Billions with Ryan Miller — and fund managers ready to implement join the Fund Raise Capital community of fund managers and deal syndicators learning first-hand from Ryan Miller, The Wolf of Alt Street.
What are the top obstacles holding you back from achieving sales goals?
The top obstacles holding professionals back from achieving sales goals include unclear positioning, weak follow-through, and a lack of honest self-assessment about what is and is not working. Ryan Miller emphasizes that most barriers to getting more sales are internal before they are external, rooted in habits and assumptions that go unexamined. Identifying and removing those barriers is central to the framework discussed in this episode.
Hear the full breakdown on Making Billions with Ryan Miller — and fund managers ready to implement join the Fund Raise Capital community of fund managers and deal syndicators learning first-hand from Ryan Miller, The Wolf of Alt Street.
How can a business increase sales when growth has stalled?
A business can increase sales when growth has stalled by returning to fundamentals and diagnosing exactly where prospects are dropping out of the process. The episode stresses that stalled growth is rarely random and almost always points to a specific, fixable breakdown in the sales sequence. Systematically identifying that point and correcting it is more effective than adding volume or new tactics without a clear diagnosis.
Hear the full breakdown on Making Billions with Ryan Miller — and fund managers ready to implement join the Fund Raise Capital community of fund managers and deal syndicators learning first-hand from Ryan Miller, The Wolf of Alt Street.
What mental blocks are holding you back from sales success?
Mental blocks such as fear of rejection, reluctance to ask for the close, and self-doubt about the value being offered are among the most common psychological barriers to sales success. Ryan Miller addresses how these internal constraints quietly undermine performance even when external conditions are favorable. Building awareness of these patterns is a prerequisite for anyone serious about getting more sales on a consistent basis.
Hear the full breakdown on Making Billions with Ryan Miller — and fund managers ready to implement join the Fund Raise Capital community of fund managers and deal syndicators learning first-hand from Ryan Miller, The Wolf of Alt Street.
Why do businesses struggle with sales and how to overcome them?
Businesses struggle with sales most often because they have not built a repeatable, structured process that can be evaluated and improved over time. The episode makes clear that without structure, problems in the pipeline become invisible until they have already cost the business significant revenue. Overcoming these challenges starts with installing a process that creates visibility into every stage of the sales cycle.
Hear the full breakdown on Making Billions with Ryan Miller — and fund managers ready to implement join the Fund Raise Capital community of fund managers and deal syndicators learning first-hand from Ryan Miller, The Wolf of Alt Street.
What causes low sales and fewer deals closing in business?
Low sales and fewer deals closing typically trace back to a breakdown in trust, clarity, or follow-up at a specific point in the buyer’s decision process. Ryan Miller explains that prospects rarely disappear without reason, and tracking where and why they disengage reveals the true cause of underperformance. Addressing those specific failure points directly is far more productive than broadly increasing outreach volume.
Hear the full breakdown on Making Billions with Ryan Miller — and fund managers ready to implement join the Fund Raise Capital community of fund managers and deal syndicators learning first-hand from Ryan Miller, The Wolf of Alt Street.
How do you identify the root cause of poor sales performance?
Identifying the root cause of poor sales performance requires an honest audit of each stage in the sales process to pinpoint exactly where momentum is being lost. The episode outlines how self-assessment combined with data on prospect behavior can surface the real bottlenecks holding a business back from getting more sales. Once the root cause is isolated, targeted corrections produce far more reliable improvement than generalized adjustments.
Hear the full breakdown on Making Billions with Ryan Miller — and fund managers ready to implement join the Fund Raise Capital community of fund managers and deal syndicators learning first-hand from Ryan Miller, The Wolf of Alt Street.
Topics Covered in This Article
- Startup marketing fundamentals and why audience clarity must precede every other decision
- The Vested 360 exercise for defining customer personas and pain points
- The PESO model — paid, earned, shared, and owned startup marketing channels
- Startup marketing strategies for early-stage founder pitches to venture capital investors
- Why claiming no competitors destroys startup marketing credibility with investors
- Competitive intelligence as a startup marketing and positioning tool
- Channel strategy and customer acquisition frameworks for later-stage fundraising
- The corporate VC model and how Vested Adventures integrates startup marketing with capital
- The six-step startup marketing framework for product launches and fund raises
- How earned media and the Quoted platform support startup marketing for fintech founders
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