The first marketing hire at a startup doesn’t get a playbook. It’s usually a mix of gut instinct, too many tabs open, and praying the Wi-Fi doesn’t crash during your one big launch. Looking back, there are things Sylvia LePoidevin would approach differently, call them hard-earned upgrades from the school of trial-and-error.
For starters: systems over chaos. Instead of hacking things together every time, she’d have built a tidy library of reusable assets from day one: Figma kits, Canva templates, slide decks, even a messaging guide that could train both teammates and AI. A single source of truth? Game changing.
And then there’s the classic trap: chasing ready-to-buy leads. She learned the hard way that the 5% who are actively searching dry up fast. The real magic? Warming the 95% who haven’t started looking yet. Think storytelling, not just search intent.
One of her favorite pivots? Letting the humans behind the brand speak. No more polishing everything into oblivion. Sales engineers posting on LinkedIn? Designers live-tweeting product drops? That kind of honesty wins hearts faster than any polished campaign ever could.
She also started lurking on sales calls, not just for intel, but for gold. Customers were writing her copy without realizing it. Their voices shaped the headlines, sparked campaigns, and drove action. Authenticity, no thesaurus required.
Instead of building community after product-market fit, she’d go early. Slack channels, meetups, even a comment thread that doesn’t feel like a ghost town. Real users create better momentum than any help center bot.
Her north star? Solve the biggest bottleneck, don’t over-engineer a funnel if no one’s in it yet. Just unblock that one thing. Then move.
And when it came to brand perception, one bold move, a podcast, a billboard, a spicy op-ed, went further than scattered tactics. People remember bravery.
Finally, she swore by one old-school tool: the sticky note. Three things that must move the needle each day. If it’s not on there, it waits.
Breakthroughs, not busywork. That’s the redo.
