I’ve watched startups blow through six figures on marketing before they could explain what they sold. The budgets weren’t wrong. The priorities were.
Gregory Kennedy has one of the cleanest frameworks I’ve seen for fixing this. He is a fractional CMO in the San Francisco startup scene, with experience at InMobi, NextRoll and Sojern, and we have been trading notes on messy go to market problems for a while. He also claims Irish roots. I’ll believe it when I see the paperwork.
Over to Gregory.
A founder’s guide to marketing budgeting
Founders always ask me
How much should I spend on marketing?
That is the wrong question.
The better question is
What actually matters at our stage?
I have seen pre seed startups spend $5,000 a month on Google Ads when they did not even have a functional sign up page. I have watched seed companies hire a full time content person before they knew what content they needed, never mind what converted. I have also seen a Series A startup run an expensive outdoor campaign aimed at developers when the company could not explain the product clearly in a 30 minute Zoom call.
Your budget is not only about how much you spend. It is about what you are trying to prove and where the next dollar has the best chance of helping.
These figures are starting points, not rules. The detailed spreadsheet lets you adapt them to your business.
Pre seed at $10,000 a month
At pre seed, you are not really doing marketing. You are running science experiments with a credit card. Your job is to find out whether anyone wants what you are building before you run out of money.
A sample split looks like this:
• Content marketing: 40%, or $4,000
• Digital foundation: 25%, or $2,500
• Lead generation and events: 20%, or $2,000
• Brand development: 15%, or $1,500
The aim is to get the website and tracking working, sharpen the message, create useful content and run small tests. You are not trying to look like a large company. You are trying to learn which customers care, what they respond to and where your assumptions are wrong.
Seed at $35,000 a month
You have raised some money. Congratulations. Now comes the hard part: spending it so it has an impact.
At seed, you have enough traction to be dangerous. The focus shifts towards amplifying the messages and channels that show early promise.
A sample split is:
• Growth marketing: 45%, or $15,700
• Content marketing: 21%, or $7,300
• Marketing technology: 13%, or $4,500
• Digital foundation: 11%, or $4,000
• Brand development: 10%, or $3,500
This is where paid media, events, newsletters, partnerships and referral experiments can start doing more work. But the budget should amplify evidence, not compensate for confusion. More distribution will not rescue a message customers do not understand.
Series A $100K/month (or building the machine)
At Series A, you have real traction. The job is to operationalise go to market and build systems, processes and predictability around what already works.
A sample split is:
• Growth marketing: 45%, or $45,000
• Brand development: 20%, or $20,000
• Content marketing: 20%, or $20,000
• Marketing operations: 15%, or $15,000
This is where you invest more seriously in paid acquisition, search, brand, content, automation, CRM, analytics and testing. You are building a machine, but it should be based on real customer behaviour rather than a spreadsheet that looked convincing at the board meeting.
These budgets are not rigid rules
The best founders I work with know there is no prize for following a template precisely. They use it as a starting point, then adapt it based on what is working.
Maybe most of the budget should go into paid advertising. Maybe your market moves through events, technical communities or hackathons. Maybe the website and messaging need more work before you increase distribution.
The point is to understand what matters now, invest in the fundamentals and make every dollar count.
Martin again.
The framework is Gregory’s. The underlying truth is one I keep seeing too. Most early stage companies have a clarity problem dressed up as a budget problem.
At pre seed, money should help you learn. At seed, it should help you test whether early traction can be repeated. At Series A, it should help turn evidence into a system.
A larger budget can make a good strategy move faster. It can also make confusion considerably more expensive.
Big thanks to Gregory for putting this together. Follow him on X or subscribe to Vibe Your SaaS.
See you out there.
Martin
If you want more from Gregory, follow him on X or subscribe to Vibe Your SaaS.
My take:
At pre-seed, the question isn’t “how much should we spend?” but “what progress must we make before any spend actually matters?”
For me, pre-seed is where you earn problem–solution fit or early product–market fit mostly on your own burn rate or FFF money. And in that stage, marketing isn’t about distribution. It’s about learning (with or without credit card). You dig into how your first user cohort discovers new solutions, what channels shape their decisions, and how they evaluate alternatives in order to switch to you, stay with the existing alternatives or simply do nothing. If you want to avoid building a sales-dependent organization later, this is the moment to validate those assumptions with tiny, targeted marketing bets.
Marketing is not the budget line item — it’s a way to expose your business model to reality.
Small tests tell you who cares, when they care, and what message actually resonates. That evidence is worth more than any template.
Once you raise a real seed round or a Series A, the job shifts. You shouldn’t spend to “look like a grown-up company.” You scale what you’ve proven. You amplify mechanisms that already work. That's when budget becomes a multiplier instead of a bonfire. And guess what, your investor needs to see evidence of scale of his/your marketing budget, so you better get it proven before.
The danger isn’t under-spending — it’s scaling a pre-mature system you haven’t validated yet.
Where do you included branded merch? Brand development?