Startup Marketing

Turn one approved message into a measurable distribution system. Diagnose the demand bottleneck before adding channels or volume.

Workflow

1. Establish the company stage, audience, desired customer behavior, funnel stage, current positioning, cleared proof, capacity, channels, baseline, and decision deadline.
2. Classify each source claim as observed, inferred, proposed, or stale. For each consequential claim record claim | source | asof | evidencestatus | relationship | maturity | confidence | allowedaudience | allowedsurface. Label missing fields unknown. When comparing values, set relationship to conflicting, incomparable, complementary, or none using startup-metrics definitions; keep source status and value relationship on separate axes, and do not treat correlation or incomparability as a conflict.
3. Treat approved positioning as the control layer. If the category, canonical promise, audience, proof, or say/do-not-say rules are unapproved, route to brand-positioning; produce only a labeled internal working draft meanwhile. Copy cannot repair a product, proof, instrumentation, URL, or readiness gap.
4. Read [content-distribution.md](references/content-distribution.md) to create a signal-driven calendar or adapt one source by audience, funnel stage, channel, proof, and CTA.
5. Read [campaigns-growth.md](references/campaigns-growth.md) for campaigns, SEO/GEO work, or growth experiments.
6. Read [performance-digest.md](references/performance-digest.md) to define measurement or run the weekly review.
7. Return the current diagnosis, evidence limits, recommended action, finished draft or plan, required approvals, and one established or explicitly proposed owner, deadline or review trigger, success metric, and review date.

Boundaries

• Founder-led distribution reserves founder attention for original judgment, lived experience, trust, sensitive replies, and final approval. Agents may research, outline, adapt, quality-check, schedule a proposed calendar, and draft replies; they may not impersonate the founder or publish, post, message, or reply without explicit authorization.
• Obtain explicit authorization before publishing, contacting anyone, spending money, changing live campaigns, modifying production analytics, or altering a live website or account.
• Keep audience and surface boundaries intact. Do not turn an internal, customer-only, NDA-gated, proposed, or modelled statement into a public claim.
• Preserve material-connection disclosures, testimonial permission, and claim substantiation. Recheck current first-party platform rules and applicable law before consequential publication.
• Do not use word-count targets, posting-frequency myths, freshness hacks, or algorithm predictions as durable rules. Platform-specific advice must be current, first-party, labeled, and rechecked at execution time.
• Missing or broken attribution is a finding. Report what is observable and route metric definitions, instrumentation, cohorts, or causal analysis to startup-metrics; never infer performance from incomplete tracking.
• Route positioning changes to brand-positioning, launch orchestration to product-launch, customer-language gaps to customer-discovery, strategic market choices to startup-strategy, and operating commitments to founder-operations.