Get over yourself.
The case for Low-Ego Marketing.
A lot of people associate marketing with big egos. Billboards! Flashy colors! Famous people!
But in my experience, exceptional startup marketing actually requires an extraordinary amount of humility. I call this Low-Ego Marketing, and it mostly comes down to asking the right questions.
Not sure how you’re doing? Let’s go through a few examples of things your ego might make you say while trying to run marketing. If these all sound totally absurd, congrats! You’ve successfully moderated your ego. If these sound eerily familiar, you’ve got some room to grow!
“First, let me tell you about us… We are awesome.” (Brand narrative)
If your landing page reads like a flex, you’re doing it wrong.
This is the key insight from Donald Miller’s super popular StoryBrand framework: Your company should not be the hero of the brand story! It’s natural to want to make the company or product or even the founder front and center of every key marketing surface. A lot of websites look like a thinly-veiled version of those highway billboards that are just a big picture of some lawyer’s face and their name in giant letters.
But customers don’t care about you… they care about what you can do for them.
As the StoryBrand structure points out: If you’re telling the Star Wars story, your customer should be Luke Skywalker. You’re Obi-wan (or Yoda). They’re Frodo, you’re Aragorn (or Gandalf). Aside from getting to be the objectively cooler characters in these epics, you should be framing yourself as a guide to help them achieve their objectives.
This shift also resolves one of the biggest fears I hear from people who are starting to take marketing seriously: “I don’t want to be too ‘salesy.’”
That’s a beautiful thing about Low-Ego Marketing: if you take yourself out of the equation, it can really only be about the customer. “Hey, I’m awesome, buy my thing” is a (bad) sales pitch. “Hey, you’ve got this problem, buy a thing we built to solve it.” is … well, also a sales pitch, but it doesn’t feel as gross.
If you’re feeling sad about not being able to make all of your startup marketing about yourself, at least take some encouragement from the fact that you can actually do the marketing itself without coming across like a used car salesman.
“We should be everywhere.” (Audience selection)
If the first example was about the main character in your story, this one is about where you tell your story.
This is one more example of startups imitating big companies in an unfortunate way: When you’re trying to get mass-market attention, you need to go broad. But when introducing a new product or company, you need to focus on just the people who already want what you have.
“We should be everywhere!!” is an approach driven by the desire to seem cool or impressive. But you really do not need to be everywhere.
Marketing campaigns are not the time to prove that you’ve made it, or show your parents/exes/haters that your company is actually super impressive. Your goal is to reach the specific people who could buy your product and, ideally, already want to buy your product. A great campaign is just letting them know what it is and where to get it.
Unfortunately, this is also one of the most expensive mistakes: Not only is brand advertising literally very pricey and not cost-effective… but the opportunity cost for startups is massive. Again: The issue with putting up billboards around the country to get your name in front of people who will never buy from you is not just the direct cost (which keeps going up, as you bid against Bob Loblaw’s ‘I’ll fight for YOU’ campaign). The actual cost is all of the targeted opportunities you’re giving up, to go deep with your best potential customers. That means fewer real shots on goal while you eat up your runway and your chance to find the right path disappears. Yikes.
“That was my idea.” (Choosing projects)
I get that the constant firehose of “Have we tried…” and “Why don’t we…” requests from your intern, your co-workers, your CEO, your customers, and random airplane seatmates can be exhausting. Some of these are obviously terrible. Many of them are just a form of imitation. But… some of them will be good.
If you just dismiss all of them out of hand, you’re relying on yourself to come up with innovative ways to push the business forward.
Instead of just rejecting all of these, you need to build a filtration system to capture inbound ideas and suggestions, analyze them, and then feed them into a prioritized roadmap. This is a great example of Emily Kramer’s foundational principles: Marketing is more like product than sales.
Yeah, good leaders need to have a sense of intuition and being able to navigate by gut feel is important. But the process for gathering and selecting marketing campaigns, should not be a “Bring your paltry suggestions before the throne of the genius marketing king, peasants” kind of vibe. Or even a “One person in the room, thinking their smart thoughts” exercise.
Sourcing and selecting marketing initiatives is a team sport, and the more of you can do in public, the more credible you’ll be.
As one fun example: Back in 2018, I moved all of my organization’s marketing project management into… GitHub. Not exactly what you’d expect (at least, before Claude Code), but it turned out to be a big unlock. It gave the product and engineering teams the ability to (a) easily submit their own suggestions and ideas, (b) see that those ideas were triaged and processed, and (c) see the logic of why (or why not) we were focusing on certain projects. This helped to reiterate our strategy for everyone… and it turned out that some of our devs had some borderline genius marketing ideas up their sleeves?? You don’t know, unless you ask!
And if you insist on being the one to generate/choose all the marketing ideas, you’ll never ask.
“Just trust me.” (Experimentation, or lack thereof)
Okay, now we’re getting into more tricky territory. Because doing any kind of experimentation is actually a step in the right direction.
The most ego-driven move is to not test anything. “It’s my idea, I’m sure it’ll be great, just ship it” typa stuff. Or even refusing to invest in campaign retrospectives and analysis, to see if what you’re doing is working. If it stings too much to find out that something you tried didn’t work, why even ask the question?
But assuming that you are doing some kind of testing - on channels, on messaging, on campaigns, whatever - ego can still creep in. And this mostly looks like skewing tests to validate your assumptions, instead of actually challenging them. This looks like:
Running a test without a prior hypothesis - your guess can’t be wrong, if you don’t make a guess!
Presenting the results in a way that confirms your hunch, regardless of what an objective party would say: “Yeah, 17% of our beta group said they’d continue using this feature… that’s great! Let’s go find more people like them!”
There are all kinds of ways that “objective data” can be skewed to support your personal whims. But the hard truth is that the market doesn’t lie: Eventually, your product or service will actually need to persuade real people to use and buy your product. If your ego tricks you into avoiding reality in the testing phase (or avoiding the testing phase altogether!), you’re just setting yourself up to be crushed by the total apathy of potential customers when you excitedly reveal your big new release.
“It’s not ready yet.” (Execution cadence)
The heart of perfectionism is ego. I feel comfortable saying this because I’m so guilty of it. Yes, maintaining an extremely high quality bar is important. Yes, the little things matter. Yes, commitment to the craft leads to all kinds of intangible benefits that you can’t measure.
But… in so many cases, the reason for not shipping something is that we’re afraid of what presenting something subpar will say about us.
And this is fatal if you are operating in the context of a startup or new product. Because this traps you in a vicious cycle: You spend more time refining and fixing and adjusting your thing, so then, when it’s finally out there, you can’t just kill it. If that ad video with the meticulously crafted script gets no conversions when it goes live? Ah, must just be the post copy that went with it. Or, maybe it would be better on another platform?
You may not notice it, but there’s a devastating (and compounding) opportunity cost to this approach. Every extra week of polish on a creative variant is a week that variant isn’t being tested in the market. And since most variants lose, you spend a week perfecting something that no one will ever see again, anyway. Plus, the team gets burned out, resetting and shifting and investing themselves in things that pretty clearly don’t matter. It doesn’t feel like “We’ll just ship next week, instead” hurts that much, but that’s how P0 projects from annual planning end up getting barely squeezed in for Q4, if not pushed back to next year. Your best stuff never actually gets out there!
In this case, you can actually do your ego a favor by falling in love with rapid iteration. Build things in small increments and see how it goes. If it doesn’t work out, no sweat. Try again. This is a positive cycle that reinforces itself.
So, how’d you do?
If you’ve actually used this article as a mirror to reflect on your approach and ended up wincing the whole time… well, first of all, congrats. One of the fatal flaws of a big ego is the inability to receive critical feedback. So if you’re struggling with stuff above, at least you’re willing to engage with that possibility.
And I also hope you realize that… you’re not alone! I’m not unaware of the fact that this whole article, which confidently asserts a lot of things about how marketing should and shouldn’t work is… sort of an effort in flattering my own ego. I’m not saying all of this because I’ve personally solved it or am above it, myself. And beyond us, most marketing teams (and businesses and all of culture, really) take an ego-first approach. It’s the water we swim in.
How to fix it
If you’re expecting me to tell you how to completely manage your ego in one tight paragraph at the end of an Internet essay about marketing… I have bad news for you.
But I will make two suggestions that have been helpful for me:
Ask yourself. If you’re egotistical, you love mirrors! Use yours. Look yourself in the eyes when making big decisions and ask: “Is this in the best interest of our customers? Of our team? Of the company, as a whole? Or… is this about me?” Keep asking yourself and see what you have to say. Sometimes, even externalizing your own opinion (writing out the pros and cons, recording a specific hypothesis that you actually review after the test, etc) is enough to check yourself before you wreck yourself.
Ask others. As a leader, no one is going to give you hard feedback by default. You have to actively invite it. I’ve made it a practice with every team I’ve led to ask each of my reports (every month, if not more often): “What am I missing? Is there something we’re doing wrong that I’m not seeing?” This may seem obvious to you, but it’s difficult for them. You may not be able to see your ego getting in the way of things, but your colleagues and reports certainly can.
So, go and be curious. Learn some humility so you can move quickly enough to survive.
Don’t let your ego kill your company.
BONUS: Am I wrong?
In the interest of checking my own ego, I tried to ask myself… what if I’m wrong? Is there a good reason for marketing to be ego-centric? Here are the counter-arguments I considered:
Counterpoint 1: Legendary founders (with iconic marketing) generally have massive egos. Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, etc. Doesn’t that suggest that ego is necessary for success?
I thought through this one for a while, but then realized: Hey, if my natural point of comparison for myself is Elon or Jobs, then yes: I have an ego problem. Sure, you need confidence in yourself and your team, but don’t let one-in-a-billion outliers skew your perception. And if you’re the marketing leader but not the founder of your company… well, there’s even less room for you to have an ego in those leadership meetings!
Counterpoint 2: The example statements aren’t always ego issues. “It’s not ready yet” might be true, and “Just trust me” is often the right answer. Perpetual self-doubt and second-guessing isn’t helpful, especially in a startup context.
I guess this comes back to balance. But I think there’s a difference between confidence and ego. I’d say the cleanest way to distinguish them is to look at how you react when someone pushes back. If you experience excitement when others challenge you, that’s confidence. If you experience irritation or anger, that’s probably ego.
Counterpoint 3: Is this whole post only relevant for PLG companies? Sales companies do need to look cool.
Sort of. There’s definitely a difference between how this is applied for a Product-led Growth company, vs. more traditional companies where growth is driven by sales.
A consumer product company can focus on the value of the product and the company/people behind it may be largely invisible. But for a sales team, familiarity and credibility are important. All of that “brand advertising” is less direct by nature, because it’s trying to influence enterprise buyers and persuade them that your company is worth a big check. The pros know how to factor in human psychology and create a sense of FOMO (or Mimetic Desire, if you want to get philosophical). So they may cast a wider net to create a sense of broad availability and popularity.
BUT… that approach is very expensive and very slow, which means it’s not a good fit for startups and new products. Plus, even when doing those things, the best brand campaigns still put the spotlight on the customers, not the company.
Counterpoint 4: What about building in public? And if authentic, personality-focused content is the best way to build trust… don’t you have to talk about yourself?
I guess this one needs a bit more nuance: Yes, especially in Sales-led companies where you need to build trust with B2B buyers, establishing the credibility of your identity is valuable. But there is still some degree of ego management there, because guess why most companies don’t do BIP? Because it’s scary. It’s embarrassing to share the real, unfiltered reality of figuring things out, as you’re doing it. Applying the traditional marketing polish to all of those elements takes too much time and effort to be cost-effective - and makes it seem less credible, anyway. So, yes, it is a strategy that puts you or your team in the spotlight… but it does require enough humility to look dumb in public.
Counterpoint 5: What about personality-driven products? Mr Beast’s burger company, or any celebrity-branded product.
Yep, this one is a bit more complex. And… yeah, I guess that is a legit strategy. I guess my conclusion would be that, if you take this approach, don’t do it halfway. If you want to actually be a celebrity or media figure who sells commodity products largely through brand association, that can work. But unless that’s actually your primary plan, don’t waste time serving your ego. (And also realize that ‘Become famous and monetize that’ is a different ambition from the ‘Make the world a better place’ aspirations that most startup types claim.) But as personality-driven businesses become more and more common, these lines are getting more and more blurry. And there’s nothing more low-ego than saying “I don’t know” so… yeah, I don’t really know!
(Was this little imaginary FAQ with myself interesting, or just weird? Let me know! And if you’ve got your own counterarguments… I’d love to hear them. At the end of the day, startup marketing is all about listening and learning, and you can’t do that with your ego in the way.)