Marketing Briefing: How InTandem, a growth marketing program for minority founders, is aiming to solve for inequality in the startup space

By Kristina Monllos

When it comes to marketing, some start-ups tend to focus on whatever channel that’s working for them at the moment, often to the point of becoming overly reliant on that one channel.

This is certainly the case for minority owned DTC startups too, but compounded by the fact that they are poorly networked in — and there for underfunded by — the traditional VC community. That, in turn, hinders growth marketing and the pursuit of the scale needed for success.

Helping minority founders avoid the possible pitfalls of putting all their eggs in one basket when it comes to advertising and marketing is part of the reason Alex and Matt Tepper have recently founded InTandem, a new mentorship growth marketing program designed for startups with founders from underrepresented communities. The program, founded in partnership with Google, aims to work with Black-founded, female-founded and Latine/x/a/o-founded startups to help scale their businesses after they’ve landed Series A funding. (Both work other jobs; Matt was recently named CMO at Nutrafol and Alex is Managing Director at Emerald Technology Ventures.)

Digiday caught up with Alex Tepper to get a sense of why they founded InTandem as well as how growth marketing impacts startups success.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

What was the impetus for founding InTandem?

The impetus is to help solve for the inequality in the startup space. What we’ve seen historically is that at the stage of startups where it’s about Series A, a lot of companies need help understanding how to scale up. With underrepresented founders in particular, in addition to there being a dearth of VC funding for the early stage of underrepresented founders, what we also see is that they don’t have a strong network necessarily to help scale up their companies. And so what we’ve done is put together a curriculum that will help them structurally and tactically create a growth function and growth marketing tactics that allow them to grow their business.

How so?

We have people from Google, from Meta, from digital agencies, from PR agencies, and we brought together some of the best people in the business to help build out this structured curriculum. It’ll help them understand both how to organizationally create a growth marketing framework, a growth marketing organization. For example, one of our partners is Hunt Club and what they specialize in is talent recruitment. They’ve built a whole bunch of early and later stage startups all the way from one to two people all the way up to unicorn size. They specialize in helping startups understand how to build the right set of capabilities and composition of a growth marketing team.

The second side of it is how do you figure out how to balance brand and awareness marketing and performance marketing? A lot of startups at this stage, the seed to Series A stage, have been successful in a single channel. One channel has worked really well for them — maybe it’s influencer marketing, …read more

Source:: Digiday