Have you hired out your marketing efforts?

Founders that don't enjoy or themselves don't focus sales, lead gen, marketing, advertising tend to have more of a challenge growing their companies (and rarely raise investment capital). But, if you don't enjoy it, you don't enjoy it. If you hire a person/company to do this, make sure the initial engagement is short term (30-90 days) and relatively low cost with great upside to the person/people doing the work. Perhaps a monthly base of $XXXX and a high commission kicks in once revenue from their activity exceeds $XXXX monthly. Perhaps they get 100% of the third months revenue from a client (showing they are finding rather committed clients) then a 15-25% commission after that, for as long as they are working with you. Many good ways to generate a wonderful compensation program that works for "both sides" without your needing to offer a super high base salary/retainer. Results are paramount. (happy to chat via DM if you'd like)

I enjoy marketing a lot.
It's one of the tasks I help founders with.
Check out my site: https://www.chiefofstuff.online
If it sounds like a service that makes sense to you, happy to chat more.

You can checkout https://ion8.top/
If you need reason for getting excited about marketing, I can make you feel understand the value of them.

Marketing is the biggest part of a business and thinking of it as a 3rd party job will bite you in the future. Better get your sleeves up and start diving in. Its a huge world out there of marketing, don’t think it is avoidable.

I do all the marketing myself going around multiple social media platforms. Definitely not scalable but I have acquired a few hundreds users on my platform doing so :)

I've hired marketing agencies for lead generation in the past. It did work and brought in qualified leads. I'd recommend researching agencies specialized in B2B SaaS; costs vary based on services, but some operate on a retainer or cost-per-lead model. HubSpot Partners or specialized B2B agencies like Directive or SmartBug Media might be worth exploring.

I am also looking for the same for my design subscription agency https://www.pentaclay.com

I talked with a couple of marketers, but I don't feel the energy with them.
I am open to commission-based, clients you can get me, I am willing to pay 10% of each plan.

But not many interested people I'm getting yet.

I just recently hired an Indian agency with Upwork. Unfortunately, the results were not what I was looking for in terms of quality, but the overall communication and collaboration went pretty smoothly.
I would consider doing something similar in your case, but first ask for reference and detailed description of past work to make sure they can deliver what you hope for.
In terms of pure knowledge reading keyword analytics, copywriting, etc. freelancers are totally fine, as long as you are able to communicate your business, product and customers clearly.

I started building my first product 6 months ago and am probably in a quite similar position as you are. Hope this help a bit.

Cheers

Hey! So I've been the marketing partner of 3 SaaS businesses and here are the pitfalls I've found.

First case: Was to be a partner but we sort of handshook and had no real clarity on what the cap table would look like, ownership, etc.

I took on cold emailing but I didn't have the bandwidth to do demos and he didn't want to do it either so that went nowhere. He was also quite resistant to my ideas which defeated the point.

I got the impression that what he really wanted was free labor to do cold emails & demos. Called it off amicably.

Lesson learned: Be clear with incentives, and ownership.

Second case: I was gonna be their agency/ fractional CMO.

We agreed on a heavily discounted first month. I called it off after one week.

Similar to the first example, they didn't seem willing to let go of ownership of marketing so why bother hiring a growth specialist?

Additionally, there was misalignment with the expectations. They were expecting me to put in time & effort you'd expect from a co-founder or maybe an employee. I was neither.

There was a lot of talk of "long term partnership" but we both had different ideas what that meant. I leaned more into agency partnership, they viewed it as more of a fractional CMO partnership. The problem with the latter is they weren't paying me enough and it wasn't very clear to me what my future incentives were.

I refunded them and parted ways amicably.

Lesson learned: As a SaaS founder looking for a marketing partner, you should learn to give that partner their space to do what they do best. Also, clearly agree on what "long term partnerships" mean. Does the marketer get equity? What's scope of work? Who owns what?

Third case: Co-founder with expectations of sweat equity plus cash equity

So the third and hopefully final partnership I'm now in, is a co-founder track. I was looking to buy a startup, founder was looking to sell. We realised we had a lot of synergies and decided to work together and discussed how equity split and ownership would work.

Currently we're in a 2-month dating period which will earn me my sweat equity and then I'll potentially buy in.

This one is the best so far. While there's discussions on what to do as far as my marketing plans go, there is clear deference to me to make the final call on all things marketing. There's also a relatively clear idea of what I'm supposed to expect from a "partnership" instead of just dangling the word around.

Lesson learned: Have clear expectations of what incentives are there, give your marketer their space, but don't commit to anything until a 2 month dating period. Make it a win-win.

TL;DR

1. Ownership - Have very clear expectations on what to give ownership on
2. Incentives - Be very clear what's at stake for the marketer
3. You get what you pay for - Whether it's an agency, a consultant or a potential co-founder/equity partner