The systems you build for marketing should be indistinguishable from the product.
Most founders think of the product as this sort of glowing orb of wonder that floats above everything else, but when they go to sell it they have a problem – a product plus market access equals a business.
This “market access” piece is critical – i.e. the ability to market and sell your product – but designing the product in isolation from the systems you need to scalably and reliably access your market is a mistake.
For example, you will need some combination of drip email marketing, lead magnets, landing pages, analytics, marketing automation, a content calendar, SEM, SMM – probably all of it, and an improvable strategy to sit on the top of it.
One key challenge for B2B SaaS businesses – which is at least 80% of the time the types of businesses that non-technology founders are trying to set-up, is that you have to get someone to know the app is there and sign-up, and you need to make it sticky enough for them to actually become a paying customer.
We start to blend “customer success” and “marketing” at this point, but at a minimum you need to get a very fine-grained meshing between where the marketing part of the flow meshes into the product.
So, don’t consider the things you need to build to support marketing as being separate from the product.