Most marketing advice won't work for your startup. That's not a problem. It's the reality.
Sterling Snow, Co-Founder and CEO at Redo, has learned this lesson three times over. What worked at his first company failed at Jive. The Jive playbook crashed at Divvy. And the Divvy wins? Useless at Redo. This pattern isn't random. It's the core truth about early-stage marketing that most people miss.
The industry sells playbooks, templates, and proven strategies. Marketing leaders want someone to hand them a list of tactics that work. But here's the hard truth: great marketing only works once. "Great marketing will never work again for another company at a different time," as Paxton Gray puts it. It only works right now, for this exact audience, at this exact company.
The real skill isn't copying someone else's success story. It's building the muscle to create channels nobody else has found yet. Welcome to the anti-playbook.
Every startup begins in what Sterling calls the "haystack phase." Picture it: a huge pile of potential marketing tactics, and somewhere buried inside is the needle, the thing that actually works. The problem? Nobody knows what the needle looks like.
Most marketers respond by overthinking. They build complex attribution models. They debate where good ideas should come from. They claim to be data-driven. Sterling's response is blunt: "People who say they're data-driven in the haystack phase, like there's no data, so what are you talking about?"
The haystack phase needs a different approach. Forget perfect strategy. Focus on action. More action creates more insights. More insights lead to faster iteration. Speed beats precision every time.
Sterling's formula strips away the complexity: find the cheapest CPM out there, pair it with a bold offer, then take it to as many channels as you can. No overthinking. No analysis paralysis. Just rapid testing with clear rules for success.
This approach makes traditional marketers squirm. They want to be strategic, thoughtful, measured. But in the early stages, those instincts kill momentum. The goal isn't to find the perfect channel through careful analysis. It's to run enough tests fast enough that you stumble into something that works.
"Finding a needle in a haystack is basically about your ability to create insights off of your activity," Sterling explains. Not insights that lead to action. Action that creates insights. The order matters.
Define clear tests. Set time limits. Know what success looks like. Then run as many as you can handle at once. When something shows promise, double down now. When something fails, move on. The winners will show themselves through results, not theory.
Performance marketing, SEO, content marketing, these are table stakes. Every rival has access to the same Google Ads platform, the same LinkedIn targeting, the same email tools. Playing only in known channels means competing on execution alone. For an early-stage startup, that's a losing game.
"Good marketers create new channels instead of just allocate money and energy into the ones that exist," Sterling says. The difference matters. Channel creation isn't just another tactic. It's life or death for early-stage companies.
Sterling learned this the hard way at Divvy. Channels that worked at Jive were failing. He was spiraling, convinced he'd be fired. The breakthrough came from a simple question: where are the buyers when they're not on LinkedIn or Google?
Finance pros, it turned out, read niche business newsletters. Not big publications, but small, focused ones like Owler that sent fancy Google alerts in email format. These newsletters had audiences but no ad model.
Sterling called Owler directly. The pitch was simple: "Can I pay you a thousand bucks and see what this does?" They'd never sold ads before. They were curious if it could work for them. That thousand-dollar test generated hundreds of demo requests.
The channel exploded. Sterling quickly expanded to Morning Brew and The Hustle, often becoming their first advertiser before they had formal ad programs. Not everything worked. A deal with the New York Times flopped completely. But newsletter advertising became Divvy's number one channel for years.
Here's the key: this channel worked because Sterling created it. Once rivals noticed and followed, the edge vanished. The cycle repeated. Find a new channel, exploit it, watch others copy it, find the next one.
Creating proprietary lead flow means looking where others aren't. It means calling companies that don't sell ads and getting them to try. It means building partnerships before partnership programs exist. It means being comfortable without a roadmap.
Traditional marketing teams organize around specialties. Companies hire an email marketer, a paid ads specialist, a content writer, an SEO expert. Each person owns a channel, optimizes their metrics, stays in their lane. This makes sense for companies with proven channels. For early-stage startups, it's death.
The anti-playbook needs different people. Not specialists who execute set strategies, but thinkers who figure out which strategies to pursue. Not copywriters, but people who decide what copy needs to exist in the first place.
When hiring, Sterling looks for a specific pattern: people whose brains just work differently. He described a candidate who had a lawn mowing business as a teenager. Nothing unusual there. What was unusual is what he did next. He had ten clients. He went to each one and said, if you go post about me in your community forums, I'll mow your lawn free for a month. Overnight, his demand grew five times over.
"If you can find people who their brains just sort of think like that, they're a little more hacker, a little bit more artist, a little bit more mad scientist," Sterling says. Those are the people who create channels. Performance specialists who are very good at spending money in known channels have their place. They just shouldn't be your first hire.
This hiring philosophy connects to how Sterling builds culture. He doesn't think in terms of a marketing team and a sales team. He thinks in terms of a revenue team, where each person owns a different leg of the relay race. To reinforce that, he compensates people one level deeper in the funnel than their direct role. Marketers get measured closer to revenue, not just on MQLs or ROAS. It forces tighter alignment and clears out credit seeking fast.
Sterling pairs this with a goal-setting framework he calls budget, quota, and stretch. Budget is the board number, the floor you have near-certain confidence in. Quota is the team number, a real win that reflects a healthy business. Stretch is the ceiling, where extra rewards kick in, whether that's trips, faster promotions, or additional comp. The system pushes the team to empty the tank while still protecting the business.
The result of building this way? "Really great marketers love it because they sort of shine through," Sterling says, "and really bad ones absolutely hate it because there's just like nowhere to hide."
The traditional B2B sales motion is dying. The SDR role, that cornerstone of predictable revenue, is going away. Not because sales development doesn't matter, but because a dedicated human SDR no longer makes economic sense.
Sterling's companies tell the story. Jive and Divvy ran heavy SDR motions, the classic Utah sales playbook. Redo has zero SDRs. The shift isn't philosophical. It's practical. Every handoff adds cost. Every transition point loses customers. In an era demanding efficiency, those inefficiencies are fatal.
The future Sterling sees: full-cycle reps handling everything from first touch to close, backed by heavy automation. Tools like OneMind, which Sterling calls "quite wild," act as AI SDRs and SCs. They flip through decks, answer questions, qualify leads, book meetings. The technology isn't just helping human SDRs. It's replacing the role.
"Anything that comes that's inbound, I think is highly likely to be mostly automated in the very near future," Sterling predicts. The human touch stays critical for complex, outbound, strategic deals. Everything else becomes a technology play.
On the marketing side, Sterling also points to Clay and Unify as tools providing real value right now. Not silver bullets, but the next iteration of how B2B teams work. And as AI continues to make cold outreach easier for everyone, he expects the real alpha to shift back toward human, high-touch approaches: micro events, in-person interactions, and targeted ABM-style plays that cut through an inbox everybody's learned to ignore.
Freemium debates miss the point. The question isn't whether to give something away free. It's how to make money while giving something away free.
"I love freemium, but I don't like not making money," Sterling says. Traditional freemium hopes free users eventually upgrade. Sterling's model makes money on free users from day one.
Divvy proved it. The software was free. Revenue came from interchange fees on transactions. Users paid nothing directly but generated revenue through usage. Redo follows the same logic: free software, monetization on usage. The customer gets value without paying. The company makes money without charging.
"If you put your head down, you can figure out how to make money on something that's free," Sterling says. The constraint forces new thinking. Partnership agreements, usage-based back ends, revenue flows that don't depend on a subscription. If the product must be free but the company must make money, the answer is rarely obvious at first. But it's there.
The search for marketing playbooks makes sense. Playbooks offer comfort. They promise that someone, somewhere, has figured it out, and all you need to do is follow their steps.
But early-stage marketing doesn't work that way. Success comes from creating unique channels, not optimizing ones that exist. It comes from hiring creative thinkers, not task doers. It comes from rapid testing, not careful planning.
Stop looking for what worked elsewhere. Start building the muscle to discover what works for you. The anti-playbook isn't about rejecting all frameworks. It's about developing the ability to create your own.
The future belongs to marketers who find needles in haystacks through sheer action. Who spot proprietary channels before they become common. Who build business models that make free profitable. The playbook for that doesn't exist. And that's exactly the point.
See what Sterling is building at https://redo.com/en
Connect with Sterling on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sterling-snow-051baab5/
Connect with Paxton on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paxtongray/
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00:41 - The haystack phase: activity beats strategy
04:07 - Creating proprietary channels vs. following playbooks
05:25 - The $1,000 newsletter ad that changed everything
26:23 - Why SDRs are becoming extinct
28:42 - Making freemium actually profitable
Sterling Snow is the CEO and Co-founder of Redo, a customer experience platform for online brands.
He's a member of Utah's oldest and largest early-stage venture firm.
He was a former Senior VP or Revenue at BILL, a former Chief Revenue Officer at Divvy, and a former Marketing and Sales Director at LogMeln.
Sterling is also an angel investor mainly in the seed and Series A rounds His investment portfolio includes Kaedim (AI for 2D and 3D image modeling) and Trinsic (full-stack identity platform).
