B2B Marketing · 5 min read
Building a B2B Growth Engine From Ground Zero
How I think about the first 90 days of growth at an early-stage B2B company — before there's a playbook, a team, or a budget.
Kim Kornachuk·June 26, 2026
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When you join a company at ground zero, there is no funnel to optimize and no attribution dashboard to stare at. There is only a product, a hypothesis about who needs it, and a runway.
The first job of a growth marketer is not to run campaigns — it is to find the shortest path to a repeatable motion. I start by mapping the entire buyer journey on a single whiteboard: who feels the pain, what triggers the search, where they go to learn, and who signs the contract.
In B2B, the buyer and the user are often different people. The user feels the pain daily; the buyer controls the budget. Your messaging has to speak to both, and your channels have to reach both.
The 0-to-1 playbook I keep coming back to: (1) Talk to 25 customers before touching a single ad. (2) Win one channel before adding a second. (3) Instrument everything, but only report on the two metrics that move the business. Growth at this stage is about subtraction, not addition.
#growth#early-stage#strategy
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