Your first marketing move after a seed round: head of marketing, fractional CMO, agency or AI (a scorecard)

What is the real question after a seed round?

Money changes what you can afford. It does not change what you know about your buyer.

The round creates pressure to hire, because hiring is the visible way to turn money into progress. But the marketing hire that works at seed depends less on the money and more on how much you already know. A person, a firm or a tool can only scale what someone has already figured out. If nobody has figured it out yet, the first job is learning, and learning is a different job from scaling.

Before you compare options, answer five questions honestly. They take an hour and they decide most of the choice.

• Can you describe your buyer in one sentence: role, company type, and the moment they start looking?
• Can you say where your last ten customers first heard of you, from records rather than memory?
• Do the same two or three reasons for buying come up again and again in sales calls?
• Is there one channel that produces conversations without the founder personally starting each one?
• Could you write a one-page brief that a stranger could act on without a meeting?

Mostly yes means you have something to scale, and a full-time, hands-on marketer can take it further than you can. Mostly no means you are still learning, and a permanent hire will spend their first months doing discovery on a full salary, often without the authority or context to finish it. Somewhere in between is the most common answer, and it is where fractional help or founder-plus-AI earns its place.

Write down which of four things you are short of: knowledge of the buyer, judgement about marketing, hands to do the work, or time. Every option below rents one or two of those. None of them rents the first one. Buyer knowledge stays with whoever talks to customers, which at seed is usually you.

How do the four options compare?

Judge each option by what it should hand you in 90 days, not by what it promises in the first call.

Two patterns are worth noticing in that table. First, founder time never drops to zero. Even the most hands-off option needs your decisions, and the cheapest-looking option is the one that uses the most of your week. Second, the options are not mutually exclusive. A common and sensible sequence is founder plus AI while you learn, a fractional lead to turn what you learned into a role, and then the full-time hire, with an agency brought in for one defined job at any point.

The cheapest-looking option is the one that uses the most of your week.

How can you tell a hands-on marketer from a slide-deck consultant?

Ask what they shipped with their own hands in the last six months, and ask to see it.

At seed, whoever you bring in will have to do the work, not only direct it. The title does not tell you which kind of person you are talking to. Their evidence does.

Questions that separate the two, for a head of marketing or a fractional CMO.

• Walk me through something you wrote, built or launched yourself recently. What did you do, and what did someone else do?
• Here is a real problem we have. What would you do in your first two weeks, and what would you need from me?
• What would you stop doing here, based on what you have seen so far?
• Tell me about a campaign that did not work. How did you find out, and what changed?
• Who can I speak to who worked for you, not just above you?

Listen for specifics: named channels, real numbers stated with their sample, work they can show. Be careful with answers built around frameworks, team structures and tooling. Those matter later. At seed, a candidate who cannot point to recent work they did personally is telling you how the next six months will go.

For an agency, the same idea applies to the people rather than the firm. Ask who will work on your account week to week, meet that person before signing, and ask what happens if they leave.

How do you compare quotes when nobody publishes a price?

You do not need a benchmark. You need three quotes built the same way, and the hours they will cost you.

Prices for this work vary widely by market, seniority, scope and how much the provider wants the account. Published ranges online are usually marketing by the people selling the service. A more reliable number is the one you build yourself: ask for comparable quotes and add the costs the quote leaves out.

Ask every provider or candidate for the same things in writing.

• The deliverables, named and dated, for the first 90 days.
• Who does the work, and how many hours a week they commit.
• What the fee includes and excludes: tools, ad spend, freelancers, design, travel.
• The minimum term, the notice period and what you keep if you stop: files, accounts, data, logins.
• What they need from you each week, in hours and decisions.
• How they will report progress, and against which measure.

Then compare total cost over the same 90 days, not the headline fee.

• Cash: the fee or salary, plus any recruiting cost and the employer costs your finance lead can estimate.
• Extras: tools, ad spend, contractors and anything the quote excluded.
• Ramp: the weeks before you expect useful output, since you pay for those too.
• Founder time: your weekly hours on this option, multiplied by the weeks, valued at whatever an hour of your time is worth to the company.
• Exit: what it costs to stop if it is not working, in notice, lost work and restart time.

For a full-time hire, ask two or three recent candidates what they expect and speak to founders who hired the same role in the last year, in your region. For fractional and agency quotes, get at least three for the same written brief. The written brief is the trick: quotes built against different scopes cannot be compared, and a provider who will not quote against yours is telling you something.

What does a 30-day decision process look like?

Four weeks, four outputs, one decision you can explain.

Run it week by week.

• Week one, evidence: answer the five readiness questions, list where your last customers came from, and name what you are short of. Write a one-page brief of the problem you want solved.
• Week two, shortlist: speak to two or three people or firms for each option that fits your answers. Send them the brief and ask for written quotes in the format above.
• Week three, test: pay for one small piece of real work from your top one or two candidates, or run the founder-plus-AI test in parallel with your hours logged.
• Week four, decide: score each finalist on the card below, choose, and write down the 90-day checkpoint before anyone starts.

Score each finalist from one to five on these five lines. Add them up, but read the lowest score first.

• Fit: does it supply the thing you wrote down that you are short of?
• Evidence: did the test produce real work you would have used?
• Founder time: can you give it the hours it needs without dropping sales?
• Total cost: is the 90-day total affordable inside your runway plan?
• Reversibility: if it fails, how quickly and cheaply can you stop?

The checkpoint matters more than the choice. Write down three things you expect to see by day 90, such as a messaging document in use by sales, one channel producing booked conversations, or a hiring plan for the permanent role. Put the date in the calendar. If the three things are not there, you have learned something useful for the price of a quarter rather than a year.