Four months ago, you made the hire you’d been putting off for a year. Your first marketer. Maybe a marketing manager. Maybe a “growth” person. You posted the role, ran the interviews, and found someone who seemed sharp, hungry, and ready to build.

You were relieved. Finally, someone to take over the lead generation you’d been doing alone since day one. Someone to own the pipeline so you could get back to product, to strategy, to the work that actually got you to $2M ARR in the first place.

But it’s been four months. And nothing has changed.

Pipeline is flat. Your calendar is still full of founder-led sales calls. And when you ask your marketing person the one question that matters—“What’s working?”—you get a pause, then something like:

That’s the moment it hits you. Not that you hired the wrong person. But that you sent them into a building with no foundation and asked them to put up walls.

This Isn’t a Marketing Problem. It’s an Infrastructure Problem.

We’ve talked to dozens of B2B SaaS founders who look exactly like you. Post-product-market fit, 15–25 employees, somewhere between $1.5M and $3M ARR. Every single one of them got to this point the same way: founder-led sales, word of mouth, a strong network, and a product that sells itself once people see it.

None of them needed marketing to get here. So none of them built any marketing infrastructure.

Then they hire their first marketer—usually a mid-level generalist—and expect them to “figure it out.” But here’s what that person walks into on day one:

Your marketer isn’t failing. They’re doing random acts of marketing because they have no infrastructure to do anything systematic. They’re posting on LinkedIn, sending a few emails, maybe running some Google Ads. Each campaign is a one-off firefight that starts from scratch. And you can’t tell what’s working because there’s nothing in place to measure it.

What This Gap Is Actually Costing You

Most founders think of the marketing problem as a nuisance. A puzzle to be solved eventually. But the numbers tell a different story.

But the money is just the beginning. Here’s the timeline most founders don’t see coming:

This isn’t speculation. We’ve watched it happen. The founder who spent $25K on Google Ads but can’t tell you if a single customer came from it because conversion tracking was never set up. The marketing manager who gave two weeks’ notice after seven months, saying “I need an environment where I can actually be successful.” The board meeting where the founder couldn’t answer “What’s your CAC?” and the room went quiet.

You’ve Tried the Obvious Answers. None of Them Fit.

Every one of these solutions assumes you already have marketing infrastructure. They’re all layer-two solutions applied to a layer-zero problem. It’s like hiring a Formula 1 driver when you haven’t built the car yet.

Marketing Is a System. You Need to Build It Like One.

You didn’t build your product by throwing features at the wall. You followed a process: research, architecture, build, test, iterate. You wouldn’t ship code without version control, CI/CD, and monitoring. So why is marketing the one function in your company running without systems?

What you actually need—before more budget, more campaigns, or more headcount—is foundational marketing infrastructure. The analytics, the tracking, the automation, the testing framework, and the data architecture that lets every marketing dollar be measured and optimized.

This is what we do at Lux Marketing. We don’t run your campaigns. We build the systems that make campaigns measurable, repeatable, and scalable.

The result: your marketing person goes from drowning in tactical execution to operating within a system that tells them exactly what to do, when to do it, and how to measure whether it worked. You go from guessing to knowing.

And when your board asks about CAC, you have the number.

We Don’t Replace Your Marketer. We Make Them Dangerous.

Your marketing person isn’t the problem. They’re probably doing everything they can with what they have. The problem is they were handed a blank slate and told to produce pipeline.

Our engagement is designed specifically for B2B SaaS companies at your stage—post-product-market fit, first marketing hire, no infrastructure. We come in for a focused engagement, build the systems, train your team to use them, and hand you a marketing operation that actually functions.

This Engagement Is Specifically Built For Companies That:

Your Marketer Isn’t the Problem. But They Will Be Gone If You Don’t Act.

Here’s the hidden cost nobody talks about: your marketing person is already thinking about leaving. Not because of you. Not because the pay is bad. Because they took this job to build something, and instead they’re spending every day doing random tasks they can’t measure, getting asked about ROI they can’t prove, and watching their skills atrophy.

They will leave. And the next person you hire will walk into the same empty room and start the same cycle.

Unless you build the foundation first.

You didn’t need marketing infrastructure to get to $2M. You absolutely need it to get to $10M. The founders who figure this out now will be the ones who raise their next round, hire their next ten people, and build companies worth acquiring.

The founders who don’t will be stuck wondering why marketing “never works” for them.