The Pre-Seed Marketing Checklist: What to Do Before You Have a Budget

Pre-seed marketing isn't marketing in the conventional sense. There's no budget for paid media, no content team, and usually no time for anything that isn't directly related to finding your first customers. What there is — or what there should be — is a set of activities that will determine whether the first £50k of marketing spend you eventually make is invested in the right direction or wasted on the wrong one.

The pre-seed stage is the most valuable research period in your company's life. You're small enough that your customers will actually talk to you, curious enough that you'll actually listen, and not yet committed to a channel or message that you need to defend. The founders who use this period well emerge at Seed with a validated ICP, a clear positioning hypothesis, and at least one channel that's generated early traction. The ones who skip it emerge with a product, a deck, and a lot of uncertainty about who they're selling to.

This checklist is designed for founders who are pre-product-market fit and pre-Seed raise. It's not a comprehensive marketing plan. It's the minimum viable set of activities that sets you up for the Seed stage.

Before Anything Else: Define Who You're Actually Selling To

Not "SMEs" or "financial services companies." Not a demographic profile. A specific, trigger-based ICP: what job title, what company stage, what event in their business creates urgency for them to act right now. The ICP hypothesis at pre-seed doesn't need to be right — it needs to be specific enough to be testable.

The exercise: write down the most specific description you can of the one person who most needs your product right now. Job title, company size, what happened in their business in the last 30 days that creates urgency, what they're currently doing instead of using your product, and what "good" looks like for them if the problem is solved. That's your pre-seed ICP hypothesis.

Being wrong at this stage is fine. Being vague is not. Vague ICPs generate vague customer conversations that produce no useful signal. Specific ICPs generate conversations that either validate or clearly contradict the hypothesis — both outcomes are useful. The specificity is what makes the learning possible.

The 20 Customer Interview Sprint

The highest ROI activity at pre-seed: 20 structured customer interviews with potential buyers — not advisers, not friends who'll be supportive, not people who have agreed to be on your advisory board. Actual potential customers who match your ICP hypothesis.

What to ask: trigger questions first — what's happening in their business that makes this problem feel urgent right now? Current solution questions — what are they doing today instead of using your product, and what's wrong with it? Switching cost questions — what would need to be true for them to change? And the outcome question — what does "this is solved" look like for them in specific terms?

What to avoid: asking whether they'd use your product. This question gets social answers, not real ones. Ask about behaviour and problems instead. What you're listening for: patterns across the 20 interviews that reveal where the urgency is highest, what the real job-to-be-done is, and which version of the problem is most common. This is the raw material for your positioning hypothesis.

Your Positioning Hypothesis

One sentence, constructed from the interview research: "For [specific ICP], [product name] is the [category] that [value proposition], unlike [alternative], because [proof or differentiator]."

The test of a good positioning hypothesis: it must be falsifiable. If you can't define what evidence would prove it wrong, it's not a hypothesis — it's a marketing claim. "We help businesses grow" is not falsifiable. "For Series A fintechs that just hired a Head of Growth, we're the fractional CMO that builds their primary acquisition channel in 90 days, unlike generic marketing agencies that start with strategy decks, because we've done it three times before for comparable businesses" is falsifiable and specific.

The positioning hypothesis becomes the basis for all outreach, content, and product messaging. When customer conversations push back on specific elements — the ICP definition, the value proposition, the differentiator — you revise the hypothesis. When multiple independent conversations validate the same elements, you gain confidence in them. This is how positioning is developed: iteratively, grounded in customer evidence.

The Minimum Viable Marketing Presence

What you need before you can start selling seriously: a website that clearly states what you do, who for, and what the outcome is. Not a full brand identity, not a blog, not a comprehensive case study section. A page that passes the "7-second test" — can someone who lands on it understand your value proposition in under 7 seconds?

The one-sentence positioning test on the homepage: read your current headline to someone who doesn't know your product. Ask them what you do and who for. If they can't answer, the headline isn't working. This test fails for most early-stage websites because founders write for people who already understand the product category, not for people who are encountering it for the first time.

Basic measurement setup: Google Analytics 4 and Search Console installed and configured before you start any outreach. These take 30 minutes to set up and provide baseline data that's invaluable six months later when you're trying to understand what's working. What you don't need yet: a LinkedIn company page, a company Instagram, an email newsletter, a blog, or a podcast. Build those when you have something consistent to say.

Founder-Led Distribution: The Only Pre-Seed Channel That Matters

At pre-seed, the founder's personal network and credibility is the acquisition channel. Not paid media, not content, not SEO. Those take time to build and require capital you don't have. What you have is your personal network, your domain credibility, and the ability to reach people directly in a way that a brand can't.

LinkedIn outreach from the founder's personal account is the most effective pre-seed acquisition channel for B2B. Direct, specific, personalised messages to people who match the ICP hypothesis — not mass connect requests, not automated sequences. Genuine outreach that demonstrates you understand their problem and have something specific to offer. The conversion rate on this type of outreach is far higher than any channel you'll run later, and it generates real ICP signal simultaneously.

Community participation is the second lever: Slack communities, industry forums, and relevant events where your ICP is active. Being genuinely useful in a community — answering questions, sharing frameworks, offering perspective — builds trust that converts to warm inbound. This is slow but compounding, and it costs nothing. Start it at pre-seed and it'll be a material source of warm leads by the time you reach Seed.

Early SEO: What to Plant Now for Harvest Later

SEO takes 6–12 months to generate meaningful organic traffic. The right time to start is before you need it. At pre-seed, you're not looking for SEO to generate significant pipeline — you're starting the clock on a 12-month compound process.

Minimum viable SEO at pre-seed: choose your 3–5 primary keywords based on the ICP research — what does your target buyer search for when they're looking for a solution to the problem you solve? Write one substantive piece of content for each keyword. Not thin content, not AI-generated summaries — the most useful, expert, and specific piece of content on that topic that you're capable of writing. Publish it, submit it to Search Console, and move on. The compound effect starts when the clock starts.

Technical basics at pre-seed: ensure your website is indexable (no noindex tags on content pages, no crawl errors in Search Console), loads in under 3 seconds on mobile, and has at least basic metadata — title tags and meta descriptions on every page. These are 2-hour fixes that enable the SEO work you'll do later.

The Pre-Seed Marketing Checklist Summary

• Written ICP hypothesis: specific job title, company stage, trigger event, urgency driver

• 20 customer interviews completed with actual potential buyers

• Positioning hypothesis written: For [ICP], [product] is the [category] that [value], unlike [alternative], because [proof]

• Website homepage passes the 7-second test

• Google Analytics 4 installed and configured

• Google Search Console installed and verified

• LinkedIn personal profile updated with clear value proposition in the headline

• 3–5 primary keywords identified from ICP research

• One substantive piece of content published for each primary keyword

• Founder LinkedIn outreach programme started (minimum 10 ICP-targeted messages per week)

• One relevant community identified and founder active in it

• Basic technical SEO verified: site indexable, loads under 3 seconds, metadata present

Pre-seed is when marketing habits form — good ones compound, bad ones are expensive to undo. If you're at this stage and want a structured conversation about what to prioritise before your Seed raise, I'm happy to do a short diagnostic call. No fee, no commitment — just a useful conversation that helps you think through the right priorities. Get in touch.

Related: getting your first 10 B2B customers | finding product-market fit faster | what a fractional CMO does at Seed stage