Be skeptical of "Marketers"

So as someone who's given over most of my working life to making companies look good, instead of my own self, I have some advice for anyone paying handsomely for marketing firms. This is especially true for anyone starting up a business in the crypto industry, because the marketing money pit is digging into crypto more and more.

Marketers hide their craft

Marketing breeds love to hide their skillset from average people. Most people think good PR and marketing are like magic. Really, it's a few basic ingredients from a broad range of skills, but the expensive firms would have you believe they have the secret sauce to get you endless customers. Regardless, do your own ROI, because they usually are a huge money pit.

They do not have any secret knowledge that you can't get or get for a lot cheaper. There's no special school or diploma or credential that gives anyone or any group a special edge over others. Look at costs and the results like any other investment. If they don't have much to show, they aren't a good investment.

Marketers are ideas people

They'll love to charge you a hefty consulting fee to give you a lot of ideas and a couple of pretty-looking Photoshop comps. That's cool. But who's going to actually implement these ideas? Who's actually going to bother testing them? Looking pretty is different when you throw a thousand hits of traffic at the idea every hour.

Oh, definitely not the marketers! That's not their job! If they must, they'll farm it out to a (hopefully) competent development company to do it, while they take a nice cut off the top of what they charge. So now you're paying for a development team and a marketing team separately.

Marketing should scale along with your company

A moving company doesn't need Ferraris for sales calls . Instead, they'd do fine with a Honda to move their sales people around to close a deal.

That's your plan. You need the basic ingredients to ensure clear branding, colors, and messaging for starters. Then scale up from there. The process can be as simple as follows.

I'm starting Crypto Startup Inc. I'm on a budget. I've got a frontend developer, blockchain developer, and a chief meme officer. My creative flex is limited. But here's a good base for making sure new users know who my company is,

• Color Swatch - say 5 complementary colors with enough flexibility for skinning a website.
• A logo. I mean we don't need to blow away the world here. Google is using a multi colored letter G, and they have enough money to get much more creative than that.
• A font family. Pick a Google Font or another open source font family or two that you will use across your assets. The main takeaway is that consistency makes you appear much more professional and it's easier to pick these out and use them from the get-go.
• Mission statement.
• Tagline.
• Twitter handle (even if I don't plan on using it yet. Just register a good name while you can.)
• Domain name.

Bam, I'm done. If my startup takes off, I'll get more fancy and drop more cash as needed. Otherwise, I'll be glad I'm not in the red before I even begin because a marketing firm has goosed me of all my capital with very little to show for it.