Your First 90 Days of Marketing: What Seed-Stage Founders Actually Need to Do

Your First 90 Days of Marketing: What Seed-Stage Founders Actually Need to Do

You’ve closed your seed round, landed your first couple dozen customers, and now the pressure is real. Investors want traction, your team wants direction, and you’re trying to figure out what “marketing” actually looks like at this stage.

Here’s the truth: you don’t need a big marketing team or a fancy brand campaign. You need clarity. The first 90 days aren’t about scaling, they’re about learning. You’re building a repeatable system that helps you find who your best customers are, what they care about, and how to communicate that you’re the one who can solve it.

1. Identify Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)

Your ICP is not “anyone who could use the product.” It’s the narrow group of people who get the most measurable value from what you’ve already built. Start by analyzing your first 25 customers:

• Who uses your product most consistently?

• Who gets results without heavy onboarding or support?

• Who renews or expands quickly?

Document the patterns: industry, company size, buyer role, problem severity, and urgency. A clear ICP tells you who’s truly worth pursuing and helps you stop chasing anyone who’s not a fit.

2. Define Your ICP’s Core Problems

Every great marketing system starts with one simple truth: customers don’t buy products, they purchase progress.

Dig through your onboarding calls, support messages, and customer interviews. Capture the words your ICP actually uses when describing their pain. Don’t translate or polish, write it verbatim. Then ask:

• What job are they trying to get done?

• What’s blocking them from doing it now?

• What happens if the problem isn’t solved?

Once you understand those emotional and practical triggers, your entire marketing motion becomes easier to build around real problems, not assumptions.

3. Find Where Your ICP Already Is

You don’t need to create attention out of thin air. You just need to show up where your prospects already are.

If you’re selling to technical founders or product leaders, that might be:

• Niche Slack or Discord communities

• Specialized technical newsletters

• LinkedIn groups or technical forums

• Specific subreddits or GitHub discussions

Lurk first, listen, then contribute with genuine insights. The fastest way to lose credibility is to pitch too early. The quickest way to gain it is to add value before you ask for anything.

4. Craft Messaging That Proves You Understand Your ICP

This is where your empathy and positioning meet. Don’t start with your features, start with their frustration.

Instead of “We’re a powerful analytics platform for SaaS,” try:

“You shouldn’t need a data engineer just to see how users move through your app.”

That’s how you show you get it. Once they feel understood, they’ll listen when you explain how you solve it. Build 3–5 variations of your problem statement and test them in your outreach, ads, or landing pages. Watch what makes people nod and say, “Yes, that’s me.”

5. Launch One or Two Channels That Reach Your ICP

You don’t need to be everywhere, you need to be somewhere consistently. Pick one or two channels you can actually manage for 90 days and go deep. A few examples:

• LinkedIn + Email: great for founder-led storytelling and early thought leadership.

• Podcast Guesting + Landing Page: build credibility fast and capture inbound leads.

• Paid Search + Demo Page: useful if there’s existing demand in your category.

Keep the funnel simple: one offer, one landing page, one nurture sequence. Drive consistent traffic and watch what converts. That single path will teach you more than six half-built channels ever could.

6. Look at the Data and Iterate on Your ICP Messaging

At this stage, data isn’t about dashboards, it’s about direction. Track a handful of meaningful metrics:

• Qualified leads per week

• Conversion rate on your landing page

• Response rate on outbound messages

If results aren’t moving, resist the urge to blame the channel. Go back to your message. Test a new angle. Simplify your CTA. Try another pain point. Every test teaches you something about what resonates — and that learning compounds over time.

7. Launch Your Growth Engine

Once you start seeing traction with consistent engagement, demo requests, or content shares, it’s time to build the system around it. You’ve proven demand. Now you need a repeatable engine to fuel it:

• Document what’s working and why.

• Build processes so freelancers or VAs can execute the repeatable parts.

• Create a rhythm for testing and measurement every month.

Building a growth engine is tough — but you don’t have to do it alone. At RCKT, we help seed-stage founders turn early traction into predictable systems. From defining ICPs to building your first demand engine, we help you move from “what’s working” to “what scales.”

Because the real goal of your first 90 days isn’t marketing — it’s ICP definition and data.