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Shreyas M V · Published · 13 min read
Your First 90 Days of Marketing as a Technical Founder: A Week-by-Week Plan
A technical founder can run the first 90 days of marketing in about 71 hours over 13 weeks: positioning and conversations first, then outbound, then one article, one community and one video, then a review. This page gives the hours, the output and a stop rule for every week. The hours and stop rules are Kanso's proposal, not measured results, and the only outcomes in the sources are one startup's own account of its first six months.
- The plan runs 13 weeks and 71 hours, an average of 5.5 hours a week, which is under two 40-hour work weeks in total.
- Weeks 1 to 3 settle one customer, one value statement and your own network. Weeks 4 to 7 add outbound email. Weeks 8 to 11 add one article, one community and one video.
- Every week has a stop rule, and week 7 has a gate: 150 emails with no calls booked means change the list or the message.
- The only measured outcomes come from WunderGraph's account of its own first six months, so the hours are a proposal to adjust.
What does a 90-day marketing plan for a technical founder look like?
A 90-day marketing plan for a technical founder is a sequence of capped weekly tasks that moves from one chosen customer to direct conversations, then to outbound, then to one piece of content and one community, and ends with a count of what worked.
The order follows the one detailed founder account in the research. WunderGraph's post says early growth for a technical startup comes from work that does not scale, starting with manual outreach to your own network, then defining who the customer is, then cold email, then content.
The caps come from a different problem. A founder who is also the engineer has no marketing department to stop a task, so the plan stops each task for you with a number of hours and a rule.
one customer → one value statement → your network → 150 emails → one article → one community → count → keep one channel
What is documented and what is our analysis?
The documented part is small and comes from two articles and one question thread, while the schedule, the hours and the stop rules are Kanso's own reasoning. The lists below keep the two apart so you can see how much of the plan rests on evidence.
Documented, as of October 2026:
- WunderGraph's post, last updated 22 July 2026, says its team sent over 2,500 emails in 6 months, about 10 a day, and grew to 1,000+ email contacts, 200+ active Discord members and 1 to 5 sales calls a week in that time.
- The same post describes the order its team followed: personal network, an ideal customer profile, cold email, content on its own site with cross-posts, community participation and simple videos.
- Edify Content, a content strategy consultancy, argues that technical teams should write about value instead of features and write from the audience's point of view.
- A thread in r/startups asks for sales tips for solo technical founders, which shows the question is live.
Our analysis:
- The 13-week split, the weekly hours, the 71-hour total and every stop rule.
- The assumption of about 5 minutes per researched email and 2 minutes per prospect on the list.
- The 150-email gate, the choice of one community, and the decision to keep a single channel after week 12.
- The omission of SEO, paid ads and launch platforms, which the sources supplied for this page do not cover.
Neither source reports a reply rate, a conversion rate or a cost per customer. Anyone who quotes you one for this plan is guessing.
What are the 13 weeks, hour by hour?
The 13 weeks run in four phases: foundations in weeks 1 to 3, outbound in weeks 4 to 7, content and community in weeks 8 to 11, and review in weeks 12 and 13. Thirteen weeks is 91 days, the 90-day window plus one day, and the table gives each week a focus, an hour cap, one output you can check and a stop rule.
| Week | Focus | Hours | Output | Stop rule |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Pick one customer | 5 | A one-paragraph profile: job title, company type, the problem, what they pay today | Stop at 5 hours with a draft, even if unsure |
| 2 | Write the value statement | 5 | One sentence of value for that customer and a rewritten first screen on your site | Stop after two rewrites; a third waits for real feedback |
| 3 | Ask your own network | 6 | Individual messages to every relevant contact, replies logged, calls held | Stop when replies slow down and move to week 4 |
| 4 | Build the prospect list | 5 | 150 named prospects that match the profile, with a contact route, in a sheet | Stop at 150; more list work is avoiding the sending |
| 5 | Outbound, first 50 | 6 | About 10 researched emails a day for 5 days, subject lines tried in batches, opens tracked | Stop sending at 10 a day, whatever the mood |
| 6 | Outbound, second 50 | 6 | 50 more emails; the message changed only where the log shows a reason | Stop editing the template after one change a week |
| 7 | Outbound, third 50 | 6 | The last 50 emails and a count of calls booked from all 150 | Gate: 150 sent and no calls booked means change the list or the message before sending more |
| 8 | Write one article | 8 | One article on your own site that takes a clear position on a question your customer asks | Stop at 8 hours and publish what exists |
| 9 | Distribute the article | 6 | Cross-posts with the canonical link to your site, and a personal message to everyone who engages | No new article until this week is done |
| 10 | Pick one community | 5 | One community where your customer asks questions; useful answers, no link drops | One community only; leave it if it has no buyers in it |
| 11 | Make one simple video | 6 | A plain video that shows what the product does or builds something with it | Publish at 6 hours; do not re-edit |
| 12 | Review the evidence | 4 | A one-sheet count of conversations, calls and sign-ups by source | Keep the one best source and cut the rest |
| 13 | Write the next plan | 3 | The next 90 days on one page, using the survivor from week 12 | Stop at 3 hours |
Read the output column as the definition of done. When the output exists, stop, even if hours remain, and go back to the product.
How many hours does the plan take?
The plan takes 71 hours over 13 weeks, which is about 5.5 hours a week. The sum is 5 + 5 + 6 + 5 + 6 + 6 + 6 + 8 + 6 + 5 + 6 + 4 + 3 = 71, and 71 ÷ 13 is 5.46.
| Phase | Weeks | Hours | Share of 71 | What it buys |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Foundations | 1 to 3 | 5 + 5 + 6 = 16 | 16 ÷ 71 = 22.5% | Customer, value statement, network |
| 2. Outbound | 4 to 7 | 5 + 6 + 6 + 6 = 23 | 23 ÷ 71 = 32.4% | Prospect list and 150 emails |
| 3. Content and community | 8 to 11 | 8 + 6 + 5 + 6 = 25 | 25 ÷ 71 = 35.2% | One article, one community, one video |
| 4. Review | 12 to 13 | 4 + 3 = 7 | 7 ÷ 71 = 9.9% | Evidence and the next plan |
Two time assumptions sit under the outbound weeks. Building the list takes about 2 minutes per prospect, so 150 prospects is 300 minutes, or 5 hours. Sending takes about 5 minutes per researched email, so 50 emails is 250 minutes, or just over 4 hours, and the rest of the 6-hour week goes to replies and calls.
Those minutes are estimates for a founder who writes each message by hand. No source measures them, so time yourself in week 4 and change the caps if your numbers differ.
What do you do in weeks 1 to 3?
In weeks 1 to 3 you choose one customer, write one value statement and talk to the people you already know, for 16 hours in total. WunderGraph's post says to draft the ideal customer profile quickly and not spend long on it, and to refine it as the product changes.
Week 1: pick one customer (5 hours)
Answer the questions WunderGraph lists: where the customer works, their job title, the traits they share, why they would use the product, the problem you solve for them and what they would pay. Write the answer as one paragraph and stop at 5 hours.
A draft you can test beats a profile you keep polishing. The calls in weeks 3 to 7 will correct it.
Week 2: write the value statement (5 hours)
Write one sentence of value for that customer and rewrite the first screen of your site to match it. The next section covers how, using Edify Content's advice.
Week 3: ask your own network (6 hours)
Message each relevant person you know, one at a time, and ask for honest feedback on the product. WunderGraph's author says he began with friends who were software engineers, widened to every tech contact on his LinkedIn, and did not paste one message to everyone.
His team got feedback on its landing page, documentation, SEO and social pages, and, in his words, the most useful signal was that the product was interesting enough to pursue. The stop rule comes from the same post: its team moved to cold email once reach through its personal network slowed down.
How should a technical founder write the value statement?
Start from what the buyer gains, not from what the product does. Edify Content argues that technical founders default to a problem-and-solution pitch built on features, and that this stops working quickly because it does not speak to what buyers care about.
Edify suggests working through the story questions: who, what, where, when, why and how. Who has the problem and who else already solves it, what the problem does to their day, where they have already looked, when they would see results, and why your solution is better. Its worked example uses a made-up meat slicer, and the percentages in that example are invented by the author, so they are not evidence for anything.
Use the questions as a drafting check on your week 2 sentence. If the sentence contains a feature name and no outcome, it is not finished.
One caution about the source. Edify is a content strategy consultancy and its article ends by recommending that founders hire someone for marketing, so read its framing as a practitioner's view, not as a neutral finding.
What do you do in weeks 4 to 7?
In weeks 4 to 7 you build a list of 150 prospects and send them researched emails at about 10 a day, for 23 hours in total. This is the manual outreach WunderGraph credits for its early sales calls.
Week 4: build the list (5 hours)
Build a sheet of 150 named people who match the week 1 profile, with the way to reach each. WunderGraph's team combined LinkedIn with two paid tools, Lusha and Hunter.io, to find email addresses.
The 150 is 10 emails a day for 5 days a week over 3 weeks, so the list covers exactly the sending in weeks 5 to 7.
Weeks 5 to 7: send 50 a week (6 hours each)
WunderGraph's post gives four rules for the email itself. Use a subject line you would open yourself and try subject lines in batches, research the recipient so the message is personal, end with a specific time or a calendar link instead of asking whether they are free, and track opens.
Keep a log with one row per email: date, recipient, subject line, opened, replied, call booked. The log is what makes the week 7 gate and the week 12 review possible.
Change one thing a week at most. If you rewrite the subject line, the opening and the ask at once, the log cannot tell you which change mattered.
What does the one documented outbound example show?
It shows that one team of technical founders did a high volume of personal outbound and ended up on a steady number of calls, but it does not show a rate that you can plan on. The post says the team sent over 2,500 emails in 6 months, about 10 a day, and reached 1 to 5 sales calls a week.
The two volume figures in the post do not agree with each other, and the arithmetic shows how far apart they are.
| Measure | Figure | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Emails sent, per the post | 2,500 over 6 months | The post's own figure |
| Emails per week | 2,500 ÷ 26 weeks = about 96 | Kanso's arithmetic, 6 months taken as 26 weeks |
| Emails per weekday | 96 ÷ 5 = about 19 | Kanso's arithmetic |
| Emails per calendar day | 2,500 ÷ 180 days = about 13.9 | Kanso's arithmetic, 6 months taken as 180 days |
| Emails per day, per the post | About 10 | The post's own figure; it does not match the lines above |
| This plan's volume | 150 emails = 6% of 2,500 | Kanso's arithmetic: 150 ÷ 2,500 = 0.06 |
The post does not explain the gap. Possible reasons include other channels in the total or uneven weeks, but that is a guess, so this plan takes the stated 10 a day because it is the post's own daily figure and the safer one for a part-time effort.
What this means for the week 7 gate: 150 emails is 6% of the post's total. A result of no calls from 150 emails is a signal to change the list or the message, and it is not proof that outbound fails for you.
Two limits apply to the whole example. The post reports the results of one company, and its product was infrastructure for developers, sold in places where its customers already talked, such as GraphQL communities. A founder selling to a different buyer may not see the same pattern.
What do you do in weeks 8 to 11?
In weeks 8 to 11 you publish one article, send it out, join one community and record one simple video, for 25 hours in total. WunderGraph calls content its next biggest success after outreach and also the most labor-intensive technique, which is why this phase has the most hours.
Week 8: write one article (8 hours)
Write about a question your customer asks and take a position on it. WunderGraph says content has to be valuable and provoking, and credits one blog post with 200+ sign-ups in a single day, against a normal day of 10 to 30 mailing list sign-ups.
That is between about 7 and 20 times a normal day (200 ÷ 30 is 6.7, and 200 ÷ 10 is 20), from a single post. It is a best case, not an expected case, and the post adds that not every article is a hit. Stop at 8 hours and publish.
Week 9: distribute the article (6 hours)
Publish on your own site first, wait a couple of days, then cross-post. WunderGraph cross-posted to Medium, Dev.to, Hackernoon and Hashnode, and says the canonical link must point back to the original on your own site.
Then message everyone who interacts with the piece. Its author wanted to know what drew each person to the article and what worked and did not work for them.
Week 10: pick one community (5 hours)
Pick the single community where your customer already asks questions, and answer what you can answer well. WunderGraph's author watched the questions in the GraphQL Discord and Reddit communities and reached out when the product solved a problem someone raised, without posting repeatedly.
The stop rule is one community only. If you cannot find a buyer in it after the week, leave and pick another next time.
Week 11: make one simple video (6 hours)
Record a plain video that shows what the product does or builds something with it. WunderGraph's post says its videos were simple, not polished, and advises against overthinking them.
The cap of 6 hours is there to enforce that advice. Publish at the cap without a second edit.
What do you do in weeks 12 and 13?
In weeks 12 and 13 you count what happened by source, keep the one source that worked best and write the next plan, for 7 hours in total. A count turns a feeling of progress into a decision.
In week 12, add up from your log the conversations held, calls booked and sign-ups, and label each by where it came from: network, email, article, community or video. Keep the source that produced the most and cut the lowest one.
In week 13, write the next 90 days on one page around that source. For a recurring routine after day 90, the weekly growth checklist sets out a 60-minute review you can run each week.
If you sell to developers, the Razorpay developer growth story shows how another company treated developers as its first customer.
What are the stop rules?
The stop rules are six limits that end a task before it grows, and they are the main reason this plan exists. Each one is Kanso's proposal, built to fit a founder who also ships code.
- Hour cap. When the week's hours run out, stop and ship what exists. The output is judged on whether it can be tested, not whether it is perfect.
- Early finish. When the output exists before the hours run out, stop and go back to the product.
- Network handoff. When replies from people you know slow down, move to the prospect list. WunderGraph's team made the same switch.
- The week 7 gate. If 150 emails produce no booked call, change the list or the message and do not send more of the same.
- One change a week. Change one variable in the email at a time, so the log shows what mattered.
- One channel after week 12. Keep the best source and stop the rest until it produces on its own.
If you hit rule 4 and still believe in the customer, the useful question is which of the two inputs is wrong: the people on the list or the words in the message. Test them separately.
Where does Kanso fit into this plan?
Kanso helps with the community step in week 10 and with none of the other weeks. The Reddit Agent finds relevant threads and drafts replies for you to review and post yourself, and the Hacker News Agent finds relevant conversations and recommends what to do next without ever posting.
Choosing the community stays your decision, and neither agent posts on your behalf. They shorten the search for threads where your customer is already asking.
Marketing for technical founders: frequently asked questions
What are your top tips for solo technical founders trying to get good at sales?
Talk to real prospects early and treat every call as practice. WunderGraph's post says calls with people outside the founders' own network taught them how to pitch and sharpened the product, and that every call counts as sales experience. This plan follows that order: message your network in week 3, send about 10 researched emails a day in weeks 5 to 7, and keep two hours a week for the calls themselves.
When should a technical founder think like a tech founder, and when not to?
Think like an engineer when you build, measure and set limits, and think like a buyer when you write anything a customer reads. Edify Content describes the founder's role as internal and the marketer's as external, and says that acting like a tech founder in front of buyers leaves them uninterested. In this plan the spreadsheet, the hour caps and the stop rules use the engineer's habits, while weeks 1 and 2 move the wording to the customer's point of view.
What is a startup marketing plan?
A startup marketing plan is a short, dated list of what you will do to reach customers, how many hours each task gets and what result would make you continue or stop. The 13-row table in this article is one: a week, a focus, hours, an output and a stop rule per row. A plan without the hours and the stop rule is a wish list, because nothing in it tells you when to quit a task.
What should you do in your first 90 days of marketing?
Spend the first 3 weeks on one customer profile, a value statement and conversations with your own network, weeks 4 to 7 on outbound, weeks 8 to 11 on one article, one community and one video, and the last 2 weeks on review. That adds up to 71 hours, or about 5.5 hours a week. The sources behind this plan describe one startup's first six months, so treat the 90-day cut-off and the hours as a proposal.
Is there a startup marketing plan template or example?
The plan table in this article works as a template: copy its five columns into a spreadsheet and replace the outputs with your own numbers after week 1. It is a plan for the first 90 days after a usable product exists, not a launch plan built around one release date. The only startup account in the research behind it is WunderGraph's.
What is technical marketing, and what is a marketing technologist?
Both terms mostly name jobs rather than what a founder does, and the search suggestions around them are about skills, roles, interviews and hiring. This page covers a different question: a founder who builds the product and also has to find the first customers. The research behind this page includes no authoritative definition of either job title, so check a job description or the hiring company for those.
What is a marketing tech stack?
A marketing tech stack is the set of software a team uses to run marketing, such as tools for finding contacts, sending email and tracking replies. The sources behind this plan name only a few: WunderGraph used Lusha and Hunter.io to find email addresses and MailTrack and Active Campaign to track opens. For the first 90 days, a spreadsheet for the list and the log is enough, and a tool earns its place only when the spreadsheet stops working.
Where do technical founders learn about sales and marketing?
Mostly by doing it in small, tracked steps, with a few essays as a starting point. WunderGraph's post tells technical founders to read Paul Graham's essay Do Things that Don't Scale first, and takes from it that the first users have to be recruited by hand. This plan turns that advice into 13 dated weeks, so the reading and the doing happen together.
Why do technical founders struggle with marketing?
Edify Content says technical teams tend to assume a working solution will be wanted and to describe it by its features, when buyers respond to what it does for them. It adds that most of the technical teams it works with do not see the full value of marketing. Weeks 1 and 2 of this plan address the first problem directly, and the review in week 12 addresses the second by replacing opinion with a count.
Sources
- How to market your product as a Technical Founder, WunderGraph
- Why Tech Founders Need to Think Like Marketers, Edify Content
- What's your top tips for solo technical founders trying to get good at sales?, r/startups on Reddit
Note: Facts are attributed to the two founder-facing articles and the community thread named in the Sources section, read on 16 October 2026. Both articles are practitioner accounts, not studies. The weekly hours, the stop rules and the time per email are Kanso's proposal, and no source measures them. Kanso has no affiliation with WunderGraph or Edify Content.
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