Marketing Aperitivo: A VC and a Brand Strategist on What Founders Get Wrong About Marketing
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By Roberta Tihomirova (Eleven), in conversation with Mirela Hincu (Heraldist)
Eleven and Heraldist go back a while.They’re the partner we bring in when a portfolio company is executing well, the product is strong but the story isn’t landing.
What’s stuck with me is how often we run into the same founder challenges from different angles. And a lot of the time, these problems are avoidable.
That’s how Marketing Aperitivo was born – two marketing ladies, myself and Mirela Hincu (Managing Director at Heraldist), sitting on two different sides of the table, sharing what we’ve learned so founders can make better marketing decisions earlier.
The questions below are the ones founders tend to skip when moving fast. And the ones that are expensive to ignore.
The conversation: from “doing marketing” to making marketing decisions
Roberta : Mirela , founders often say “we need marketing,” but they can mean ten different things. Where do you usually start?
Mirela : I start by separating marketing as production from marketing as decision-making. Many startups hire a marketer and immediately judge success by visible output: posts, copy, visuals, campaign launches. But marketing is supposed to shape the choices behind those outputs.
If marketing isn’t shaping who you’re targeting, how you’re positioned versus alternatives, and what outcomes you’re aiming for, it is not marketing, it’s communication.
Roberta : That resonates. In board meetings, we’ll talk about PMF, GTM, growth… and half the time we’re actually talking about marketing problems, just without calling them that.
Mirela : Exactly. Marketing sits upstream of many “founder topics.” If those upstream choices aren’t clear, teams compensate by activity: more messaging variants, more channels, more campaigns – hoping volume will create clarity. Usually, it does the opposite.
A simple test is: what strategic decisions is marketing influencing right now? If the answer is only “content and campaigns,” you’re underusing marketing.
Customer understanding is a habit.
Roberta : Let’s talk about customers. A lot of founders feel they know their customer deeply – sometimes because they are the customer, or because they’ve lived the problem. Yet that’s not always the case. Why?
Mirela : Because being close to the product creates bias. Founders and product teams naturally see the world through what they’ve built and what they could build next.
"The customer’s world is messier. They don’t wake up thinking about your category, they wake up thinking about their day."
Mirela Hincu
Managing Partner, Heraldist
The companies that scale fastest tend to have one strength that looks boring on paper but changes everything in practice: they keep their customer understanding fresh. Not once a year or as a positioning exercise. As a habit.
And that requires humility: being willing to admit, “we don’t fully understand our customer yet.”
Roberta : What does “fresh” look like in a practical sense? Most teams won’t run big research cycles.
Mirela : They don’t need to. Small, frequent conversations are often more valuable than occasional large studies. Talk to three recent customers and ask questions that reveal how they decided:
- What problem were you trying to solve when you started looking?
- What alternatives did you seriously consider?
- What made you choose us?
Then share those answers internally. Patterns appear quickly, and they often change bigger things than messaging: pricing, packaging, prioritisation, onboarding, sometimes even product direction.
Competition is rarely who you think it is.
Roberta : Another place where startups get stuck is competition. You ask “who are your competitors?” and you either get a long list of similar-looking companies or “we don’t really have competitors.”
Mirela : Both answers usually point to the same issue: the company is defining competition from a product lens, not a customer lens.
The question isn’t “who looks like us?” It’s “what would the customer use instead?”
Sometimes that “instead” is a direct competitor. Often it’s an internal workflow, a spreadsheet, an agency, a patchwork of tools, or doing nothing. If you don’t understand the real alternative, you end up positioning against the wrong thing, and you waste time on feature comparisons customers don’t care about.
Roberta : We’ve also seen teams avoid a positioning angle because they assume a competitor owns it, when customers don’t even see the market that way.
Mirela: Exactly. Perception matters more than category maps. A practical way to ground this is to ask sales: who do we most often lose to, and why? And ask customers what else was on the shortlist. You’ll often discover you’re competing with a different set of “alternatives” than your team expects.
The toughest competitor: “good enough”
Roberta : Let’s go one layer deeper. Even when the product is clearly better, customers still don’t move. This is one of the most frustrating founder experiences: “Why wouldn’t they adopt this?”
Mirela : In B2B, the status quo is often the strongest competitor. Even if it’s inefficient, it’s familiar, and familiarity is a form of safety.
There’s research suggesting that a large share of customers who intend to buy never act. Some think the current solution is good enough. Others see the change journey as too much effort. Many fear responsibility: if they act and it fails, they own the consequence.
It’s counterintuitive, but in business, people often fear regret from acting more than regret from inaction.
Roberta : So in practical terms, what should founders do with that?
Mirela : Stop assuming “better” is enough. Map the friction around the buying decisions. Ask: Is the barrier fear, effort, or comfort? Then build your GTM to reduce that specific barrier – through proof, onboarding, procurement support, implementation pathways, even the way you frame the problem.
“So what?”: the fastest way to improve positioning
Roberta : One of my favourite ideas from your work is “intelligent naïveté.” Explain it, please.
Mirela : Founders can get trapped inside the technical beauty of the product. Intelligent naïveté is the discipline of asking simple questions that keep you on the customer’s side – especially “So what?”
For each feature: So what? What does it change for the customer? What pain does it remove? What becomes easier, faster, safer, more meaningful, more valuable?
A useful framework here is the Benefits Ladder:
- Functional benefit: what it does day-to-day
- Emotional benefit: how it makes the customer feel (control, relief, confidence)
- Role in their world: the bigger purpose it enables
If you can’t translate a feature up that ladder, it’s either not important, or you don’t yet understand why it matters.
Roberta : And this is where messaging starts to feel obvious instead of forced.
Mirela : Yes. When teams truly understand the customer, value translation becomes natural.
Brand in the AI era: faster building, noisier markets
Roberta : We also can’t ignore the AI backdrop. Founders can build faster than ever. How does that change marketing and brand?
Mirela : It changes the baseline. If many teams can ship quickly, features get copied faster, and product advantage gets thinner. That pushes differentiation into how the market understands you: your positioning, your experience, your brand codes, your consistency.
And I don’t mean “brand” as an aesthetic project. I mean: do people remember you, trust you, and recognise you when they’re ready to buy?
A few essentials matter more than ever: solve a meaningful problem, build beyond the product (UX, onboarding, support, reliability), articulate a clear value proposition, and design a brand that stays distinctive in a cluttered environment.
Roberta : What’s the smallest action a startup can take without turning this into a rebrand?
Mirela : Pick one distinctive element – tone, a signature UI pattern, a core message, and use it consistently across touchpoints for a while.
"Consistency is one of the easiest advantages to create, and one of the hardest for teams to maintain."
Mirela Hincu
Managing Partner, Heraldist
What we’re really trying to do with Marketing Aperitivo
If there’s one thread running through all of this, it’s that startup marketing becomes lighter when it’s built on clear decisions.
When founders treat marketing as a production line, they end up shipping a lot and learning little. When they treat it as a way to choose – who they’re for, what customers compare them to, what change they’re asking them to make, and what value they truly deliver – execution becomes more coherent, and the company wastes less motion.
Marketing Aperitivo is our attempt to make that kind of clarity a habit – something founders can revisit regularly without turning it into a “marketing project.”
If you’re building and there’s a question you keep circling (or avoiding), send it over. We’ll include it in the next edition.
