Marketing Cube founder Maya Moufarek's lessons for customer-focused startups

Maya Moufarek, founder of Marketing Cube, spent more than 15 years working for companies like Google and American Express before launching her own agency.

Today, her London-based firm works with startups around the world — and her startup clients have raved about the results, based on what we’ve heard in our TechCrunch Experts growth marketing survey.

We interviewed Moufarek to get her take on lessons she’s learned from working with larger companies, how she applies them to smaller companies, her approach to optimizing her clients’ success, trends she’s seeing in growth marketing and more.

How do you think those qualities contribute to your success in working with startups and forming strategies.

The truth is, a lot of the time ambitious founders and executive teams don’t have a marketing background, so they need to outsource to find the right support to deliver on huge growth ambitions — usually within very limited time frames.

In that situation, experience is everything — there’s no one-size-fits-all marketing approach for startups.

Having gained 15+ years of experience in a range of businesses — from startups to conglomerates, and experience of Series A to private equity — I’ve had the opportunity to actually apply the tried-and-tested practices of hypergrowth, as well as offer the full stack of C-level support.

You need to get straight to the beating heart of the business, understand the culture, involve the right people — and be comfortable telling founders and exec teams things they don’t always want to hear?

What lessons did you learn from working with larger companies such as Google and American Express that you use when working with startups.

I find Clayton Christensen’s jobs to be done (JTBD) framework very powerful because it’s relevant to the product, marketing and strategy teams.

This is why I really love the JTBD framework — it stops you from seeing the customer like a strict “persona” and lets you start seeing the solutions they need to find instead.

What major trends are you seeing right now with hiring growth marketers.

I often hear founders say that “growth is the new engineering.” Tech companies have been fighting over engineering talent for as long as I can remember, and now it’s the same for growth talent.

A lot of small businesses applied the “cut deep and early” recommendations to manage their cash flow, so they now need to rebuild entire marketing and growth functions.

Thankfully, there is a lot of funding going into startups at the moment, so there has been a huge spike in demand for growth talent.

Lastly, as we’ve all seen, the crisis catapulted the digitization of businesses and purchase funnels for more established businesses that now need digital growth marketing talent to help maintain their sustainability.

Some even applied account-based marketing best practices by building target lists of talent and creating automated sequences to reach out to them.

For these businesses, the flexibility and customer development were the essential elements of the T in their growth teams, as they had to build an entirely new proposition on the fly.

The wealth of knowledge and adaptability of the growth teams in both of these types of businesses shows how valuable T-shaped marketers are to whether businesses big and small fail or succeed