The Startup Ideas Podcast - Making $$$ as a Marketing Engineer

Episode Date: August 31, 2026

In this solo episode I explain a role that I call the marketing engineer. I believe this person becomes one of the most valuable hires in tech in the next 18 to 24 months. I define the job, I show the four eras of marketing that lead to it, and I give the tool stack that makes it work. I use a commercial HVAC software company as a worked example, and I list six systems that a marketing engineer builds. I close with four ways to earn money from this skill and a 30-day plan to learn it. Timestamps: 00:00 – Intro 01:46 – The Evolution of Marketing 04:29 – What is a marketing engineer 07:19 – Build the Growth OS 10:18 – Marketing Engineer Tool stack 13:23 – Live Data Workflow 14:32 – Agent Job Description 16:56 – Example: vertical SaaS for HVAC contractors 18:27 – System 1: Customer Truth 20:20 – System 2 - 4: Founder content, Outbound signal and Creative Testing 23:31 – System 5: AI search visibility and the growth cockpit 24:19 – System 6: Eval Loop 25:06 – Ways to Monetize 29:41 – The 30-day plan 32:24 – Closing Thoughts Key Points I expect the marketing engineer to command salaries from 250K to more than 1 million dollars. I build the growth repo first, because it holds the marketing memory of the whole company. I write a job spec for each agent, in the same way that I write a job description for a person. I measure qualified replies and pipeline, because business results show the true signal. I treat taste and judgment as the moat, because agents become a commodity. I recommend one working system over five half-built ones. The #1 tool to find startup ideas/trends - https://www.ideabrowser.com LCA helps Fortune 500s and fast-growing startups build their future - from Warner Music to Fortnite to Dropbox. We turn 'what if' into reality with AI, apps, and next-gen products https://latecheckout.agency/ FIND ME ON SOCIAL X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenberg Instagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/

I think one of the most valuable people in tech over the next 18 to 24 months is going to be something called a marketing engineer. Now, some people call it a forward deployed marketer and some other people are calling it an AI growth operator. I'm saying, call it whatever you want. The name is probably going to change, but the job won't. It's the person who can do a whole marketing teamwork with AI agents. And I think there's going to be a ton of money to be made in it. I actually think this becomes a $250k, $500k, a million dollar job because every company wants more leads, they want faster experiments, they want sharper positioning, and they want to read on their customers,

and they want their just marketing to get smarter every week with a smaller team than a bigger team. Whoever can walk in and just build that with AI agents are going to get to name their price. So if you're a marketer, this is how you become way more valuable. If you're a founder, you know this. You don't just want to vibe code something. You want people using your product. So you're going to have a huge edge if you can use AI agents to do your marketing for you. By the end of this episode, you're going to know what a marketing engineer actually does.

What do they build? What the tool stack looks like? How do you use things like Grockbot and Claude and Kodx and Hermes and Creative Models, how they all play together within the context of a marketing engineer? And the exact 30-day plan I'd follow to learn from scratch if marketing engineering is interesting to you. Let's get into the episode. I can't wait to see what you build. So something I can't stop thinking about is marketing keeps changing.

And having been a part of multiple cycles, I've started and sold three venture-backed companies. You know, one was in the web era, one was in the social era, one was in the mobile era. every time the technology changes, the most valuable kind of marketer changes with it. So think about the traditional era of marketing. I actually think about it as like the Don Draper era, where marketing was about making people care through the story, through the psychology, getting your product in front of people on whatever channels existed at the time,

things like traditional print media and radio. The best marketers at that time understood what people wanted, what they were insecure about, who they were trying to become, and how to package a product so the market paid attention. Obviously, that skill matters a lot. But then the internet showed up, and it created the digital marketer. So it evolved from traditional to digital. Suddenly you had websites, email, SEO, Google, in 2005, I think, 6,

you had Facebook ads, landing pages, pixels. The best marketer became the person who could acquire customers through channels you could actually measure. And a lot of people didn't know. These were new channels. So the best marketers understood funnels targeting these new channels, analytics, things like Google Analytics,

and the very practical question about what happens after someone clicks. Then software created loops and then growth hacking became a thing around, if I remember correctly, which is an 8, 9, 10, 11. The best growth hacker people were all about activation.

referrals, onboarding, retention, pricing. There was a guy by the name of Dave McClure had this, I think it was called the R framework activation and referral. That was the symbol of the time of the growth hacker era. Basically, marketing moved closer to product because the product itself could become the growth engine. Now we're walking into the marketing engineering era. And I feel like not a lot of people have spoken about this.

That's why I want this to be the de facto episode about this whole era. The marketing engineer still needs all that old stuff. It still needs, you know, customer understanding, judgment, positioning, understanding, understanding distribution, taste. If anything, taste, you know, people talk about this all the time, but taste matters more now than ever because AI is about to make average marketing just unbelievably cheap. The new part is that the marketing engineer also builds the system behind the marketing.

So the marketing engineer is connecting customer data, reading the results, shipping little landing pages and, you know, calculators, and then turning raw customer signal into content, outbound, positioning, and product ideas. So the way I think about it is traditional marketing was about, you know, making people care, digital. marketing was acquiring customers through measurable new channels. Growth hacking was about using product and data to build these loops. And marketing engineering is about using AI, agents, data, code, and taste to build a marketing system that keeps learning. And the last phrase is an important one because a marketing system that keeps learning is now actually possible in the agenic era. Now, most companies already have pieces of this lying around to their credit. So, they've got tools and dashboards, calls, content calendars, CRM, some SaaS tools.

The problem is the learning is pretty scattered. Sales might hear one version of the market, support here's another, product sees the usage and marketing sees what got clicks. And the founder remembers, you know, the one customer call that just hit him emotionally that week and just can't get that one customer call out of his or her head. I know that happens to me. Then everyone walks into the growth meeting with a slightly different version of reality.

So the marketing engineer's whole job is actually to pull in these signals into one system and turn them into growth. So the way I define the role is this. A marketing engineer is the person who turns market signal into pipeline using AI agents, data code, taste. And that's really the job.

And I'm going to get super tactical on how you can actually do this soon. If I were a founder right now, the question I'd be asking myself is who on my team would be building the growth system for this company. Now, I am a founder myself. So a lot of the time, I'm doing this myself. And I just hope that if you're a founder listening here, either you hire someone or you do it yourself. And because the companies that are going to win in this agentic era are going to learn the market faster than anyone else. So it's kind of, it's crucial to know.

So if you see the customer pain earlier, you spot the winning language earlier, you're testing more angles using Facebook ads, shipping more surfaces, lead magnets, and understand what's working before the competitor even notices things, you have this unfair advantage. So the question I get asked a lot is, okay, but what is the first thing I would build?

Okay, I want to become a marketing engineer. I want to do more marketing engineering. What do I build first? And the first thing I would build is a growth repo. Yeah, I know it sounds a little bit nerdy, but even if you're non-technical, I believe you can do it. So you're going to want to go and create a GitHub repo, or honestly just a structured folder.

You can call it something like Growth OS. And it becomes a place where the company's marketing memory is going to live. The problem it's going to be solving is that most people use AI in these random chats. So they'll open up a chat GPT or Claude, Gemini. They'll ask for 10 posts. And maybe they'll copy one into a dock that they like. And then the work just disappears. Next week, the AI is starting from scratch again. When what it really needed was the performance data and the founder's voice and the objection from the sales calls and the language it actually created replies.

So the growth repo is going to fix that. And inside it, what we're going to have is a customer truth folder. And that's going to have our sales calls notes or support tickets, maybe some churn notes, interviews, even live product feedback can go in there. So you've got a content engine folder with the founder voice guide, with the winning hooks and the scripts and notes on what performed before. You've got an outbound engine folder with the ICP, your ideal customer profile, the account research, the trigger events, maybe some approved angles could be good to have there. Even actually ban language is good to have as well.

Because, you know, AI outbound gets weird fast. If you let it talk like an over-excited SDR who just discovered personalization, you know, sometimes bad things could happen. So you've got a creative testing folder for ad angles and things like landing page tests and hooks and offers and results. And you've got an agent's folder where you define the jobs your AI workers do. And that repo is the difference between, hey, AI help me make a thing. And AI is helping the whole company get smarter. That's how a growth or a marketing engineer, you know, is thinking about it. And then the prompt gets way better. So instead of, hey, you know,

write me 10 LinkedIn posts, you say, you know, read the customer truth file, read the founder voice file, read the last five posts that drove qualified replies, and draft five new posts around Payne's buyers that were actually mentioned this week. So it's a totally different level of output because the agent is now having real context. What tools, do I need if I want to become a marketing engineer? Well, I'll tell you some of the most important ones and how to think about where all the tools fit and your tool stack. So, you know, Grockbot is new, but it's just an incredible product. So I think of Grockbot as the growth operating system that lives close to the internet. So marketing is a living system. The marketing is moving. Competitors

are moving culture is changing. Customers are changing their language. Creators are picking up new formats. Grockbot is especially useful in that world because it is connected to the X ecosystem. If I were setting this up as a founder, I'd give it a few clear lanes. So I'd say one bot watches competitors and tells me what change. One is going to watch customer language across X and Reddit. One watches the creators in the niche and finds formats worth testing. And one watches ads and landing pages. You know, basically, wherever there's a connection to the internet, you know, Grockbot is going to be extra good there. That doesn't mean you can't use Grockbot to do everything. You totally can. And I think,

you know, I'm one of those people that, you know, say like, you know, basically, you know, pick an ecosystem that you like, that you feel comfortable with. If Grockbot feels good for you, you know, just do everything in there as well. The way I think about it, this is just the way I'm thinking about it. So I hope it gets the creative juices flowing. You know, for me, I use Claude and Codex and products like that in a different part of the system. So they're going to help me build the repo and generate the landing pages, writing scripts, building the little internal tools that I was talking about. And then, you know, turn that repeatable work into something durable. You know, I've talked on this channel about Hermes before. Hermes style

workflows are still extremely valuable. especially when you want scheduled operations with memory and approval. So something like every Monday morning, build me a market brief or every Friday afternoon, review the experiments, every time a fresh batch of sales calls land, maybe put it in a folder and then pull the objections and update the positioning file. Then you have creative models, and they're going to help you move faster on ads, thumbnails, mockups and video concepts. There's a bunch of those that exist.

There's foul AI. There's Higgsfield. There's a bunch of them. And local AI matters when the data is particularly sensitive or there's private customer transcripts or regulated notes, pricing plans. Basically, anything, a company would feel weird sending into a cloud tool. Also things that are too expensive to do into a cloud tool. I'm going to do a whole separate episode on local AI. So stay tuned for that over the next one or two weeks and subscribe so that comes into your feed.

The tools are going to keep changing, but the workflow is the thing to actually learn. So where it gets really interesting is when the agent connects to live business data and the tools obviously to actually do the work. So take SEO content. The beginner version is asking an AI to write a blog post about a keyword. So a marketing engineer isn't going to do that. A marketing engineer is going to check Google Search Console, pulling keyword data from HRAFs or SEMRUS, look inside the CMS to see if it already exists.

It's going to rank opportunities by volume and by buyer intent. And it's going to research what's already ranking in hopefully adding the founder's point of view and draft the post, write the meta-title, suggest internal links, and just send the whole thing for approval. That's a pretty big jump, but the agent has a job, the job has inputs, and the inputs come from the business, and the output goes somewhere useful. So every agent is going to need a real job spec. And I'd write it out almost like I was hiring a person. Here's the data source. Here's when you run it, Here's what you filter out.

Here's the output I expect. Here's what good looks like. Here's what's going to need human approval. Here's the metric that matters. And here's what you write the result. So the system gets smarter next time. So for maybe a competitor-engager agent, that might be every weekday morning, check these 20 LinkedIn accounts and pull the people who commented on new posts,

enrich them, drop the, drop. the bad fit leads and draft 10 messages tied to specific posts they engage with. Oh, and then obviously write the results to a file for approval. The metric is going to be positive replies from qualified accounts because a marketing engineer cares about business results, right? Not activity counts. Messages sent is activity. Qualified replies is going to be your signal.

and the whole point the marketing engineer is trying to do is to generate pipeline demand. And you train these agents the same way you train and you hire. You start with small tasks, you watch at work, you correct the mistakes, you add the correction to memory, because now we have memory, and then you expand the scope as you increase your comfort level.

If the outbound agent writes a first line that sounds like fake, for example, you've got to add the rule to the repo, and if the content agent keeps writing these generic intros that sound like generic AI, you give it three good examples and three bad ones. If the customer truth agent makes a claim with no evidence, you know, we got a problem here. You got to add the rule that every insight needs a quote or a link or a source.

Every correction becomes part of this operating system, this growth, you know, marketing engineering system. And that's how this whole thing compounds. And going back to like how does a marketing engineer make a million dollars here, $500,000 a year or $500,000 a year or $1.5 million a year for their own startup, it's because they're building this and it's so darn valuable. But let's actually get into a concrete example so that this gets solidified into your head. So imagine a vertical SaaS startup selling software to commercial.

HVAC contractors. These are companies managing technicians and service calls and maintenance, contracts, and dispatch. So it's a real B-to-B market. The buyer has a lot of money. The workflows are messy and the language is specific, which is why I wanted to use this example. The marketing problem for that company is usually a little bit more sharper than, hey, we need some more content. hit. The real problem that they're facing is usually something like which pain gets the owner to take a demo. Maybe it's dispatch chaos or maybe it's late invoices. Maybe it's that the owner has no idea which jobs were profitable until the month is over. Or maybe it's actually that the technician finishes a service call, spots a replacement opportunity, and the follow-up

quote just never gets sent. That's interesting. just because it's really specific. So when you have something specific, you know, it's just interesting. You know, my bunny ears go up. Stop losing, replacing revenue after every service call is obviously a much sharper angle than run your HVAC business better. So this is where your marketing engineer is going to earn their keep, right? It's going to start with the customer truth system. That first system is going to be the customer true system. And every startup says they understand the customer and you talk to five people and they get five different results. We talked about that. But the marketing engineer is going to pull those signals into one place.

The output is a file called what the market is telling us.md. I tweeted about this idea. It went viral. I'm glad people liked it. It's basically a markdown file which updates every morning or every week, depending on how much signal the company is going to have. And it's reading the sales calls and support tickets. and churn notes, even striped movement. Oh, CRM notes is a good one. And also social data, especially if it's more consumery. And its whole job is to show what's changed. So maybe the buyers are using a different phrase than they were using a month ago.

Or maybe the trial users keep getting stuck before they invite a teammate. You're just going to get some insight. And you're going to ask the agent to show, quote, snippet. tickets, ticket links, event counts. What you don't want is obviously a vague summary, which I've seen a lot of people do this. They just get these summaries, and it's pretty vague. Like, in this case, you'd get something like,

customers want better collaboration. You want something way more sharp than that. I want the thing that's going to make the business, you know, harder to lie to. So for the HVAC company, you know, good memo might be something like five sales calls this week. mentioned emergency dispatch, but the calls that actually converted all talked about missed follow-up quotes after the tech left. Just a lot sharper. The second system is the founder content engine.

So a lot of companies have great raw material, like the founder has opinions, and you've got customer stories. But you know, you're not really capturing all the stuff. So the marketing engineer could build the loop. So you can record founder talking to customers. You can pull from podcasts, extract the strongest ideas, and then have the system watch what performs, you know, which hooks, you know, people keep watching because you have this data, right? And then you create content out of that. For the HVAC company, imagine. something like the loss replacement revenue insight becoming, you know, five things. A founder post about the hidden revenue leak in service businesses, a short video on why contractors lose money after the first visit,

a landing page line that says every completed job should create the next quote, a cold email angle could be good, and a simple calculator that estimates the loss revenue. So the system here is learning. The third system is the outbound signal engine. So bad outbound usually starts with a spreadsheet full of names, but good outbound starts with timing. So who just raised money, who's hiring for the exact problem you solve, who posted publicly about a pain point. And then who fits your ICP and has a real reason to care this week. These people are, you know, they've got the pain.

You're selling painkillers, not vitamins, when timing hurts. So having an agent watching those signals, researching accounts, drafting specific angles, and sending to human for approvals, that's the type of thing that for the HVAC company would be awesome. So like watching for contractors, hiring dispatchers, or opening new locations, getting bad reviews, and then having the agent actually go and reach out outbound is going to be. huge. The fourth is the creative testing engine. So, you know, taking one offer and spinning up 20 hooks, 10 ad angles, recording the result and testing them. So a lot of people say, like, Facebook ads don't work for me. Yeah, maybe. Or maybe the creative, you're just not testing enough

creative with the right angle. So a good marketing engineer could create thousands of pieces of creative based on, you know, your positioning. It's basically like having, uh, creative, becoming this like learning system, not really a treadmill that you actually have to do, you know, have to do. You're going to have it on repeat, having these agents go and create creative based on just how the world is changing and how that data is, is changing too. And again, like another like huge insight around like, wow, this is like a new way of doing marketing. Marketing. Marketing. engineer. The fifth system is AI search visibility. So, you know, you now have billion, I mean, there's a billion plus people using chat GPT asking just chat GPT. I'm not talking about

Google AI, AI overviews or Gemini or perplexity or Claude. I just saw Sam Altman said they have a billion users. It's insane. So you've got to think about whether your company is even understandable to those systems. And then having agents, actually go pull in that data and actually create content and optimize your website such that you're ranking high there. Getting cited by AI is like such a huge opportunity and something that a marketing engineer is thinking about, of course. The sixth system is the growth cockpit. So, you know, this is like a weekly view that tells the team what has changed and what to do about it. What content has work? What campaign created real conversations? Which objection came up again? What test won? How many tests won? What percentage of test won? What competitors move? What customer pain is getting louder and what to test next? You know, for the HVAC company, the cockpit might say something like, hey, you know, this week, the lost replacing revenue angle drove fewer clicks than the dispatch angle. But twice as many demo requests from owners with more than 20.

tech. So that's the kind of memo that if you're an executive, you want to wake up to that. And that's super, super valuable. So if you've gotten this far, what are some ideas and how you've actually can make money with marketing, engineering? And I think there's a few ways that you can do it. The first is becoming the person inside the company. So if you're already a marketer or a rev-ops person, a growth person, a creator, or just honestly, like a cure. marketing-minded person. This is one of the clearest ways to become way more valuable because this work sits directly next to revenue. All the ideas that we talked about, all the systems that we talked about, is things around creating pipeline, lifting conversion,

cutting wasted spend is huge with things like these marketing agents. And you've got this direct line to business value, and that's how someone becomes a $500,000 higher. Because they look at it, and they're like, well, if I'm going to save $2 million and I'm going to increase revenue this much, and I'm going to double the conversion rate, that's a huge, huge, it's a win-win situation. So, you know, why in the original I said, I think that there's going to be people make a million dollars doing this. And I actually think that's conservative. I think there will be versions of the best marketing engineers making millions of dollars a year is because they're going to be just driving insane amounts of value in the same way that Ford deploy

engineers are driving insane amounts of value for companies right now. The second way is just do consulting. So you embed, you know, you create an offer, you embed with a founder-led company, maybe it's 30, 60, 90 days. You build a business. You build a one growth system and then you sell the outcome. So hey, we'll build your customer true system and turn it into weekly campaigns. Or we'll build your founder content engine or we'll build your outbound signal engine. Some of these ideas that we talked about, you just embed yourself, you build it and you charge, you know, $5,000, $30,000 a month depending on what you're actually building. The third somewhat less talked about is productized services. So you can pick

one wedge and then repeat it. So, for example, outbound signal engines for vertical SaaS. That's what you focus on. Or founder content engine for B2B CEOs. Customer truth repos for seed stage startups before they hire a full marketing team. So the tighter the wedge, the easier it is to sell, deliver, and repeat. And that's like the only thing that you focus on. That's why it's called productized services because it's not like you're doing services custom things for everyone. There's this one thing you do for this one niche and you charge X amount of dollars for it. The fourth

is software. I think the biggest outcomes are going to come from this, but I do think that I would start with services first. So you do the work by hand. You build the same system for five companies, 10 companies, and you notice the pain that repeats. And then that's when you turn it into software. And that's also how you avoid building something that nobody wants. The fun part is all these ideas actually stacked together. You can start by consulting to learn what actually works. You can notice the same system every client needs. You productize it.

You eventually turn it into software like a set of agents. If I were doing this tomorrow morning, I would keep the first version almost painfully simple. I would build that growth OS folder. I'd have five of those files, customer truth, founder voice, experiments, agent jobs. And then I would paste 20 real customer notes or call summaries. And then I would ask the agent to do one job. I'd say, tell me what's changed, show me the receipts, suggest one marketing test that could create pipeline this week, not next week, not a month.

months from now. And then built one thing from that output, you know, for that HVAC company I was talking about, maybe it's the loss replacement revenue calculator or something like that. The first goal is just to prove the system can turn this messy market data into one useful action. So if you listen to this and you're like, wow, being a marketing engineer sounds really cool. I want to go hone my skills in the next 30 days to become a marketing engineer, be it as an employee, as a founder, whatever it is, here's the plan that I would run. Week one, I would do an audit. So I'd pick one real company. It could be yours, a friend, whatever you can get access to you. I would study the website, the offer, the ICP, the founder's content, if there is any.

Oh, sales calls and support tickets, if you can get them, obviously. And then you output a market map, who's the customer, what pain do they describe, what words do they use, and what would you test first? What are they buying instead of your product or this product? Where is the funnel leak? And what would you test first? So what week one is just studying all that stuff? Week two is the growth repo. So create it, add the folders and build your first, what is the market telling us? markdown file. You can use whatever tools you like. It can be Claude, ChatGBTGBT, GROCB, Gemini, local models, whatever it is. The tools actually matter less than the workflow here. The goal is basically just to turn that scattered signal into the memo with real receipts and actually just start feeling like a true marketing engineer. Week three is your first machine. So you can pick one system and actually build it. You know, It could be the content engine, the outbound signal engine, a landing page tester.

Obviously, this is going to vary depending on what the company needs and wants. But just pick one because you're going to get better outcome with one. And one working system is going to beat five half-built ones. And then week four is just all about results. Like what changed? Okay, you did this thing. Did replies improved? Did meetings get books?

Did any conversion left? Did the founder sound sharper? the founder like the post. At the end of your month, you should have a case study that sounds something like, I audited this company's growth. We built this customer truth repo. I found it was like one high intent pain

that they didn't know about. And I turn it into an outbound signal engine which shipped, you know, 75, targeted messages, got nine warm replies, book three calls, and I documented everything what I learned. And then you're showing like a real business result, tangible value.

And that's how you get hired. That's how you get clients. And that's how you become credible. I think the best marketing engineers are going to feel like part marketer, part product person, part revops, part data analyst, part creator, and part engineer. So they can talk to a customer. They can build the workflow that uses that insight. They can write the positioning.

They can wire the automation. and they can make the landing page and they can read the conversion and they can set the outbound agent and they know when personalization sounds fake and they can use AI to make more and they've got the judgment and taste to know what should exist in the first place.

The agents are going to be a commodity at some point. Your judgment about what to point them to is the moat and that's the job of the marketing engineer really and I think it's going to be one of the most valuable jobs out there. If you're a marketer, this is how you become the person your company literally cannot run without. And if you're a founder, this is how you get agents running your marketing for you. I think there's a real edge that you can have when you're actually using marketing agents to actually grow your startup ideas because people are still stuck in the old growth hacker or even worse, digital marketing era.

of marketing. I think this window is open right now. I think a lot of people haven't built the machine. And I wanted to give you the sauce so that you can internalize it so you can process it to get your hands dirty around building some of these agents, some of these marketing agents, because it's all about increasing your probability of success when it comes to building your own startup. And I thought that, you know, hey, if you can get a promotion, you can if you can have more fun being an employee working with in an organization, why not, why not do this?

So hope this has been helpful. Obviously, I could have gone deeper in so many parts of this episode. There just wasn't enough time. But do let me know what you want me to go deeper in. Is it the Grockbot part? Is it, you know, the markdown files, skills. You let me know, I live to serve.

I'm here to just give that information to you. Hopefully, you enjoy it. Hopefully, it gets your creative juices flowing. And if you haven't liked, comment and subscribe at this point, I don't know what you're doing. Hook it up. You're hooking yourself up. You're getting more quality content in your feed, less slop.

So thank you for. giving me your time. Hope it's been helpful and I'll see you next time.