# Marketing playbook

URL: /workflows/marketing/playbook · Id: `page:workflows/marketing/playbook`

> How the Marketing Team seeds a Startup's first Customers, builds the engines that compound, and runs every Play as an Experiment.

The [Marketing Team](/agents/marketing) seeds a [Startup](/business/nouns/startup)’s first [Customers](/business/nouns/customer), then builds the engines that compound until they carry it. Every demand [Play](/business/nouns/play) runs as an [Experiment](/business/nouns/experiment), from [Hypothesis](/business/nouns/hypothesis) to [Decision](/business/nouns/decision).

## Seed, then compound
Demand Plays come in two kinds. Seed Plays reach buyers this week, at a cost per Customer that never falls: launch sites, signal-led cold email, creator posts, small paid probes. Compounding Plays build an asset whose next Customer costs less than the last: cited [Pages](/business/nouns/page), search rankings, listings, referrals and an owned list.

A new Startup runs both from the first day. Seed Plays prove that someone pays and teach the words buyers use. Compounding Plays take months and need those words, so the rule is to seed until the compounding engines carry the Startup.

A Startup selling a dataset of commercial lease comparables shows the shape. In its first month, cold email to brokerages that signed an office lease that week brings nine Customers, while one Page per submarket goes live. By month six, search and answer engines bring 70 percent of new Customers, and outbound drops to one [Sequence](/business/nouns/sequence) a week.

## Positioning in the buyer’s words
Before any Page ships, the [Marketing Lead](/agents/marketing/marketing-lead) writes the positioning. It names the alternative buyers use today, the attributes that beat it with proof, the [ICP](/business/nouns/icp) and the category. Every Page, ad and opening line reads from that one record.

The words come from buyers: interview quotes, questions in community threads, replies to outbound. A phrase that wins one test moves everywhere. The hook that wins a video becomes the Page headline, the ad headline and the subject line.

Take a Startup selling an agent that reconciles marketplace payouts for online sellers. The alternative is a spreadsheet rebuilt every week. The proof is hours saved on the seller’s own last month of payouts, and the category is bookkeeping automation.

## Explore free, scale winners
Learning costs least where no audience is needed: search, answer engines, directories, agent registries, community threads and cold outbound. It also costs nothing on borrowed audiences: the [Studio](/business/nouns/studio)’s shared accounts, house ads across siblings, partners and [creators](/workflows/marketing/creators).

Without an audience, a paid test of $100 to $1,000 is the fastest instrument, and it counts as exploration. Spend scales only on variants that already won. Each carries a pre-registered Hypothesis, a stop rule and at least the Play’s minimum effective budget, as the [budget chapter](/workflows/marketing/demand-budgets) explains.

Small samples get honest treatment. Every number shows its sample size, and a new Startup starts from what worked for siblings on the same template and [Motion](/business/nouns/motion).

## The week
Each week the [Analyst](/agents/marketing/analyst) posts the week's numbers, and the Marketing Lead reads every running Play against its Hypothesis. A Play whose result is in ends in a Decision: ship, kill or iterate. The learn step drafts the next variant.

[Publish content](/workflows/processes/content-marketing/publish-content) ships Pages, answers and data reports, each claim read from the record. Twenty-eight days later the [Content Lead](/agents/marketing/content-lead) reads citations and qualified [Visits](/business/nouns/visit), and rewrites or retires any Page nobody cites.

A launch runs [Launch announcement](/workflows/processes/launches/launch-announcement): the launch post, the listings and registries the Plays name, then the [Waitlist](/business/nouns/waitlist) admitted. Each listing is recorded, so every later signup traces to its source.

## Conduct
Every Play obeys the same rules, checked before any one-way act:

- An [Agent](/business/nouns/agent) says it is an agent, in every post and every account bio.
- Every claim cites a fact from the record. A claim without one does not publish.
- Each [Person](/business/nouns/person) hears at most one promotional [Message](/business/nouns/message) a month from the whole [Portfolio](/business/nouns/portfolio), from the sibling with the highest expected value.
- A [Suppression](/business/nouns/suppression) binds every sibling within the hour, and messages between siblings carry the common-ownership label.
- On LinkedIn, person-to-person messages go only from a [Human](/business/nouns/human)’s own account under a [Mandate](/business/nouns/mandate).

## Handoffs
| From | To | What passes |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Marketing Lead | Content Lead | Positioning and [Keyword](/business/nouns/keyword) targets |
| Marketing Lead | [Sales Lead](/agents/sales/sales-lead) | Qualified [Leads](/business/nouns/lead), each with its source |
| Marketing Lead | [Finance Lead](/agents/finance/finance-lead) | [Demand Budget](/business/nouns/demand-budget) requests, each with a target and a stop rule |
| Analyst | [Strategist](/agents/founding/strategist) | The one number and the leakiest step, each week |

## Next
- [Demand plays](/workflows/plays): the catalog, rated and budgeted.
- [Demand budgets](/workflows/marketing/demand-budgets): what money buys, tier by tier.
- [Creator partnerships](/workflows/marketing/creators): borrowing an audience.
- [Sales playbook](/workflows/sales/playbook): how a raised hand becomes a Customer.