Daniel Ziv of Glilot Capital Partners on guerrilla marketing that pays

Daniel Ziv 00:52

Thank you for having me.

Daniel Ziv 01:09

Long story short, I started as an engineer, then product manager, later became a founder, and now a VC for the last five years, four with Glilot Capital. Glilot invests in seed and A stages. We typically lead rounds, take board seats and help our companies to grow and prosper. We write checks up until $15 million for seed and A rounds. So that's the story in essence. My entire career was in and out of the startup ecosystem. Pretty much that's what I've been doing my entire career.

Daniel Ziv 01:59

Well, besides founders, if I deep dive into a marketing team, or a founder coming from a marketing background, I think the most important thing for them would be a fit to the market. Knowing the audience and the ability to explore new audiences is key, and that's a true X factor for founders.

Founders coming in from outside of the market, who need to build relationships and start educating themselves about the different forces that operate in that market, usually have a harder time picking up and getting to product market fit fast.

Understanding the competition, the positioning and the motivation in this landscape is super important, because it's not only knowing the competition itself, but also what drives them and what their aspirations are. Could be keynote speaker opportunities, could be social media posts, videos, podcasts like this one. Learn more about how your competition sees or views the world, and learn from that to move forward.

Daniel Ziv 03:48

I would separate this question into two parts. When it comes to a seed stage startup, we usually don't expect anyone to have a marketing position, because you don't have anything to market yet. But you do need to have the soft skills around being able to tell your story, being able to, in a very crisp way, explain what your differentiator is from the competition.

A founder who can obtain those soft skills and the ability to share their thoughts will be able, later down the road, to bring in a professional who can translate that into marketing practices. So that's for the seed stage startup. For more mature companies, they usually already have some marketing function in-house. It could be a fractional function, an agency working with them, or even a VP Marketing or CMO. In that sense it's easier to evaluate, because you already have KPIs and the information to hook into.

Daniel Ziv 05:46

It's the same answer as before. It depends on the company goals and what they want to reach for. All of the above works fine for a seed stage startup, but it depends on whether they are pre-product market fit, then usually it's mainly to create some kind of awareness. Those companies usually come in while they are still in stealth before they raise their round A. But if it's already post-product market fit, the main goal is to attract leads and help the sales team drive more sales with the proper positioning and the proper awareness. It's more of a below-the-line type of marketing effort.

Daniel Ziv 07:10

I can only speak for myself. I'm a very KPI driven type of investor and I'm customer obsessed. All I care about is to see happy customers, high NPS, and it starts with the marketing but it ends up with the other functions like sales, customer success and product. The answer is not divided into two stages, but mainly into different go-to-market strategies. If we're talking about direct sales, I'm looking to learn more about the funnel, to see how it can expand and how we can better optimize it. It's forward-looking work: you look at the historical funnel, and you also think together with the founders about the future funnel. Apart from that, companies that have self-serve, a freemium edition, open source, anything like that, have different KPIs. You want to see that the machine is working, that if you pour more money into the machine, more leads and more customers come out the other end. The short answer is we want to see some early indication of product market fit and an early indication of a go-to-market strategy that's already working, post experimental. That's for the more mature companies. For the earlier stages, seed and pre-seed, I don't typically look for any framework.

Daniel Ziv 09:29

I'm not sure it's a number so much as it's more of a formula. I want to see positive ROI. It derives from CAC, LTV, the length of the sales cycle. If it's self-serve, that's something I care about. Self-serve or freemium go-to-market strategies can take one month, two months, three months, or even six months. It all factors in together to see that we actually gain or profit more than we invest in acquiring new customers. Factoring all of that together, along with churn, is the most important thing for me.

Daniel Ziv 11:06

Companies who already calculate and evaluate ROAS are already past the gap for product market fit and starting to sell. It's an important one, but not the most important one. If I'm speaking to founders here, don't feel obligated to bring in any KPI metrics for marketing, because I usually speak with much earlier stages and with founders that are pre-product market fit and pre-marketing. But if I'm giving an overall notion around marketing spend, I think that generally speaking, Israeli founders usually budget marketing too low rather than too high. They are the more conservative kind in that sense. That's fine, because you don't want to burn out the funds too early. But once you pick up on something that truly works, it's time to pour more fuel into this machine, as we mentioned, and for even later stages, I wouldn't be afraid of taking loans to do it, so venture lending and so on. Like any other financial play, loans could be a good tool in your toolbox if you use it wisely, don't overspend, and use it to generate more revenue.

Daniel Ziv 12:46

The role is twofold. The first part is hiring the best talent for the job. The best advice I can give founders is to try and hire specifically for marketing positions from companies you aspire to build a company along the same guidelines as. Think which companies are your own model in building your company, then see if there are marketing experts coming from that space, or former ones more relevant to your stage, and try to pull them in and advocate for your company. The second part is mainly around positioning, marketing, the competitive landscape and learning more about the competition. VCs typically have more data points and more attention to this type of information.

We can bring into the boardroom a lot of data coming in externally and lead an educated discussion around it. That's the most important thing we bring to the table. Apart from that, there's the science: the benchmarks, helping to optimize the funnel, maybe even building the funnel from the get-go. Think about a VC as a very involved consultant. We truly care about the success of the company, we're incentivized to, and we're in the same boat with the founders. We also see hundreds of companies a year and maybe tens within our portfolio, so we can pull best practices from one company to another, help connect with experts, and build benchmarks the marketing team can calibrate against. That's what truly separates a grade from the greatest. If you have a VC backing you who knows how the greatest look, they can push you and help you get into that position as well.

Daniel Ziv 15:41

I truly fall in love, and I'm speaking from an emotional perspective here, I truly fall in love with guerrilla marketing. I think that tech companies always go above and beyond in doing stuff that are truly remarkable. If I need to pick just one example from the last year, from 2025, they gave away at a convention beaten-down iPhones with 30% cut into it, advocating for you don't need to give the app stores 30% of your revenues, you can use Appcharge instead. This is truly an amazing company.

Daniel Ziv 16:19

Some people are too humble and too modest to actually share their success stories and actually go out and tell the world how well they have done. And this is coming from a type of culture. And this is definitely a good thing. If I have to put it into practice, I think bringing in a marketing position or a marketing function too late in your journey can be a large mistake with a lot of ripple effects. I don't know the sweet spot of how early you should bring in a marketing function, but definitely in the early stages of the company.

Daniel Ziv 17:26

There's a built-in tension, and this is a very good tension between different functions in the organization. Marketing is always going to blame sales for not converting, sales is always going to blame marketing for not providing enough or high quality leads. The same goes for product blaming R&D and IT blaming security and so on. It's a good type of tension. If I need to give one advice to founders, not just with the executive role but throughout building your company, it's hire slow and fire fast. And firing fast not with the purpose of lowering the average tenure, but to lengthen it, in a way that the best-fit candidates will stay for the long run.

Daniel Ziv 18:33

I'm speaking on behalf of Daniel the founder and Daniel the VC. There's nothing glorious about it at all. It's very shitty work, very intense, very stressful, and you need to come prepared for it.

Daniel Ziv 18:58

Market validation first, definitely this one. Anything you can build a product around, you can also build with a spreadsheet first.

Daniel Ziv 19:12

That's a tough one. But the best would be how to reach out to me. And the answer is right here, from LinkedIn, Instagram, WhatsApp, email, anything goes. I'm looking for exceptional founders all the time. Please do.