What Startups Get Right (and Wrong) About Marketing
Lessons from Vesper Marine to now — what the startup world taught me about speed, focus, and knowing when to ignore best practice.
I spent several years at Vesper Marine, a New Zealand marine tech startup that eventually caught Garmin’s attention and got acquired. Before that, I was at Navico Group — a bigger operation, but still within the marine electronics world where small, focused companies punch well above their weight.
Those years taught me things about marketing that I couldn’t have learned anywhere else. They also taught me where startup thinking breaks down. Now that I work across multiple SMBs, I see both sides constantly — and the lessons from startup-land are more relevant than most business owners realise.
What startups get right: speed
The single biggest advantage startups have in marketing is speed. When I was at Vesper Marine, we could go from idea to published in hours. New product feature? Blog post that afternoon. Competitor makes a move? Response on social media before lunch. Trade show next week? Let’s build a landing page tonight.
There was no approval chain. No brand review committee. No “let’s schedule a meeting to discuss the timeline for the campaign planning workshop.” We just did it.
This sounds chaotic, and sometimes it was. But the output was remarkable. We produced more marketing content with three people than companies ten times our size managed with full departments. Not because we were better — because we had fewer reasons to slow down.
Most SMBs I work with now have accidentally built the worst of both worlds. They’re small enough that they should be fast, but they’ve layered in processes borrowed from big companies — approval workflows, brand guidelines nobody reads, quarterly planning cycles that take longer than the quarter they’re planning for. They’ve got startup resources with corporate speed.
The fix isn’t complicated: shorten the distance between idea and execution. If something needs three rounds of approval, ask whether it actually does — or whether that’s just how it’s always been done.
What startups get right: focus
At Vesper Marine, we couldn’t market to everyone. We didn’t have the budget. So we had to be ruthlessly clear about who we were talking to and why they should care. Every piece of marketing had a specific audience and a specific job to do. We didn’t create content for the sake of having content. We created it because a particular customer segment needed to understand a particular thing.
That focus made the marketing sharper. When you can only afford one shot, you aim carefully. When you have unlimited budget for LinkedIn ads — well, nobody has unlimited budget, but the more you have, the easier it is to spray and hope.
I still apply this principle with every client. Before we create anything, I want to know: who specifically is this for, what do we want them to do after seeing it, and how will we know if it worked? If we can’t answer those three questions, we’re not ready to create anything yet.
What startups get wrong: brand consistency
Here’s where the startup instinct goes sideways. When you move fast and empower everyone to create, you end up with a brand that looks like it was designed by a different person every week. Because it was.
At Vesper Marine, our trade show booth, our website, our product packaging, and our social media all looked like they belonged to loosely related companies. The messaging shifted depending on who wrote it. The visual style depended on who had Canva open that day. We were fast, but we weren’t coherent.
This matters more than startup culture wants to admit. Brand consistency isn’t about being rigid or corporate. It’s about recognition. When a potential customer sees your content three times over two months, do they recognise it as coming from the same company? If not, you’re spending marketing effort without building cumulative value. Every impression starts from zero.
The SMB version of this problem is the business that redesigns their flyer template every time they need a new flyer. Or the team where the owner writes LinkedIn posts in one voice and the admin writes email newsletters in a completely different voice. Or the website that was last updated two years ago while the social media shows a different logo and colour palette.
You don’t need a fifty-page brand guidelines document. You need a one-page cheat sheet: these are our colours, these are our fonts, this is how we sound, and here are three examples. That’s enough to keep things coherent without slowing anyone down.
What startups get wrong: long-term planning
Startups are optimised for the next three months. What’s the next release? What’s the next trade show? What’s the next campaign? This short-term focus is a strength when you’re finding product-market fit — you need to iterate quickly and not over-commit to strategies that might be wrong.
But it becomes a liability once the business stabilises. I watched it happen at Vesper Marine, and I see it in SMBs all the time. The business has been running for five or ten years, but the marketing still operates in startup mode — reactive, campaign-by-campaign, with no underlying strategy connecting the dots.
The result is a lot of activity that doesn’t compound. Each campaign starts from scratch. There’s no content library building over time. No SEO foundation growing month by month. No email list being nurtured. Just a series of sprints with rest days in between where nothing happens.
The shift that needs to happen — and it’s a mindset shift more than a budget shift — is thinking about marketing as infrastructure, not events. What are we building that will still be working for us in twelve months? That blog post about a common customer question will generate traffic long after the trade show booth is packed away.
The synthesis
The best marketing I’ve seen in SMBs borrows from both worlds. Startup speed with grown-up consistency. Startup focus with long-term compounding. The energy of a small team that can move fast, channelled through just enough structure to make the work cumulative.
If you’re running a small business and your marketing feels stuck, ask yourself two questions. First: where are we being too slow? What approvals, processes, or habits are adding drag without adding value? Cut them.
Second: where are we being too reactive? What should we be building now that will still deliver results in a year? Start there.
The startups got half of it right. The trick is figuring out which half — and borrowing the rest from somewhere else.