Marketing Decision Guides

Free tool by AAJ - three founder decisions, answered

Three interactive guides for the decisions founders ask about most: which marketing channel to start with, whether to make a marketing hire and which one, and which marketing tools to set up now. Each asks only the questions that change the answer, then gives a recommendation, what to leave alone for now, and the AAJ tools and playbooks that carry it out. It runs in the browser and nothing is saved.

Use the tool at aajconsult.com/tools/marketing-decision-guides.

Which channel should we start with?

Eight questions: whether you have chosen the one segment you are going after first, whether people can try the product themselves without talking to you, whether buyers already search for a product like yours, what a customer pays in the first year, whether you can name the accounts you want, whether a partner or community already has your buyers' attention, what you can spend on paid acquisition, and whether a founder will write and talk in public. The answer names the channel to start with, the one to add once the first is predictable, and the ones to leave alone. It chooses from seven channels: search, founder-led outbound, a partner's audience, founder-led content and community, paid social, product-led loops and referrals, and industry events and in-person communities. If you have not chosen a segment, the result starts with a step to choose one first and links to the Customer Segmentation Playbook. Every result ends with a test plan: set a pass mark, fix a budget and a window of usually four to eight weeks, and measure qualified meetings, activated trials or pipeline created, not clicks. When no channel fits, it says so, and points to borrowing an audience first.

Do we need a marketing hire, and which one?

Five questions: the company's stage, whether the positioning is settled, whether a channel already repeats, who does marketing today, and the budget for people. There are four answers: stay founder-led with senior help on positioning, bring in a senior part-time leader to find the first channel, hire a hands-on marketer to scale the channel that works, or hire a full-time head of marketing.

Which marketing tools do we need now?

Five questions about tracking, the CRM, email, lead volume and how customers buy. The answer is the next three things to set up, in order, starting with tracking whenever it is not yet trustworthy, and the tools that can wait.

Worked example: Example Co.

Example Co. is a fictional seed-stage B2B SaaS startup whose software automates the month-end close for finance teams at companies with 50 to 500 employees. It charges about $1,500 a month (about $18,000 a year), a typical deal takes about 45 days, and all its numbers are illustrative. It has chosen its segment, its product cannot be tried alone (it connects to the accounting system and IT reviews security first), buyers' search demand is unchecked, it can name target companies, accounting communities and outside accountants already have its buyers' attention, it can spend under $5,000 a month on paid acquisition, and one founder will post on LinkedIn every week. The guide returns founder-led outbound first, a partner's audience second, and a product-led motion on the avoid list. Its test plan assumes an 80% gross margin and a 12-month payback goal, so it can pay at most $14,400 per new customer, and one in five qualified meetings becoming a customer gives a pass mark of about $2,880 per qualified meeting. Founder-led outbound gets six weeks, and because a typical deal takes about 45 days the test is judged on qualified meetings and pipeline created, not closed deals.

The self-serve question separates two motions. Atlassian's 2015 IPO filing describes the product-led end: "We rely on word-of-mouth and low-touch demand generation to drive trial, adoption and expansion of our products within customers" (Atlassian F-1, 2015). That is what the filing says, not an account of how Atlassian made its choices internally.

How the guides decide

The rules encode AAJ's judgement from working with seed to Series B companies. They are not drawn from a survey and they are not benchmarks. The same answers always give the same recommendation, and every link the guides offer is checked against the site on each build.

Run this in your agent

The free AAJ agent skill Campaign Orchestrator does this job inside a coding agent, on your own data. Install it with npx skills add sarojkjha/aaj-marketing-skills --skill campaign-orchestrator.

Using Claude or ChatGPT instead? Add the AAJ engines as a custom connector, with no install: https://aaj-engines-mcp.sarojkjha10.workers.dev/mcp

Related resources

Marketing Maturity Scorecard - Marketing Leadership Cost Comparator - Foundations Playbook - Go-to-Market & Growth Planning hub - All free tools

A guide gets you to the decision. The work starts after it.

See the Growth Audit.

More in Go-to-Market & Growth Planning

Part of the Go-to-Market & Growth Planning hub - see all 27 resources on this topic.

Also useful in Marketing Ops, AI & Team, Paid Media.