F2F #74: The hidden tax of inbound marketing when you are the CEO

Inbound marketing is one of the most seductive tools a founder can use. It is also the right one if you dread the prospect of having to cold-call or cold-email people to drive traffic and sales to your company.

It takes a while to take off. First, you feel like you're blogging for no one, speaking to the void. Then, it picks up and it lifts your brand organically, one piece of content at a time, helped by SEO.

It feels clean (if you think, like me, that paying - ads - is cheating) and scalable. It feels aligned with long-term thinking. You write, you publish, you show up on podcasts, you build an audience, and eventually the leads start pouring in.

For a CEO, especially one who enjoys writing or speaking, inbound feels almost free. It's too good to be true... so where's the catch?

The real cost of inbound marketing is not money: it is attention, time, and decision-making capacity. And when the CEO is the one driving it, like in our case at MarsBased, that cost is usually hard to perceive... until it's too late.

Inbound is tempting because it gives you leverage and validation at the same time. You feel productive and visible. Every podcast episode you publish, every article you write, screams "task complete". Also, every piece of content out there will compound over time thanks to SEO and how algorithms work. It's extra rewards for free! A long tail of free gratification.

Even at the beginning, you feel like you are building something that will pay off later. The metrics move slowly, but they do move, and that is enough to justify the effort. Later on, when you have good metrics, it's even more enticing: hit publish and receive immediate love by your community. Right now, we're having the first youtube videos raking in over 2000 organic visits in the first 12-24h and it feels amazing to hit "refresh".

It's what they want.

But I will not be talking about how we, content creators, marketers, influencers, etc slave away by serving algorithmic platforms. That's for another day.

The problem is that inbound has a delayed feedback loop. You can spend weeks producing content without knowing whether it is helping revenue at all. Metrics can come right away (views, downloads, shares, etc.) but conversion from content to lead can take weeks, months and years, in some cases.

Sales, on the other hand, is brutally honest. You either close deals or you do not.

When the CEO chooses inbound over sales, strategy, or team alignment, they are often choosing the work that feels safest, not the work that matters most right now. I admit that I have taken shelter in inbound marketing for weeks at a time because I didn't want to do sales or less-rewarding tasks. That could've put the company in danger.

Inbound is a great way to avoid uncomfortable conversations: pricing changes, firing employees, changing company policies, tough sales calls... Content gives you the feeling of progress without forcing you to confront friction.

There is also a fragmentation cost. Writing a post here, recording a podcast there, answering comments, thinking about distribution, checking analytics, speaking at a conference every now and then... None of these tasks are hard on their own. Together, they can make a powerful marketing plan or... destroy focus. Your day becomes a sequence of fast-paced context switches instead of deep, high-impact decisions. How can you think things through when your brain is wired to switch context every 10 seconds?

Another hidden tax is becoming the bottleneck. Founder-led inbound often works because it is authentic, opinionated and personal. But that also means it is hard to delegate. Over time, the company starts depending on the CEO's voice to generate demand. If you stop publishing, the pipeline slows. If you take a break, visibility drops. Or, worse of all: you might hire someone to help you out, only to start micromanaging everything they do and wanting to review every single blog post or tweet they write.

With regards to the last point, I am not that kind of manager. I don't micromanage or try to intervene and fiscalise everything our marketing guy does in the company, but I am often blocking decisions because I have to make a call that's been sitting on my Linear inbox for too long. That happens often and I am trying to fix it.

Inbound marketing offers a subtle but dangerous dynamic: inbound only works if you keep doing it, and you keep doing it because it works. It works... until it does not scale anymore.

Now, it looks like inbound is evil. Don't get me wrong: it is not. It's my favourite strategy. I wrote this to remind myself that it's easy to fall prey to complacency when inbound alone works. That's why I started doing outbound this year to force myself out of the comfort zone and to reevaluate my opinions to see if they still hold true after the years.

Inbound makes sense for a CEO when the sales motion is already clear, when someone else owns execution and distribution, and when the CEO's role is limited to high-leverage input OR when you're a very small team and you're the only person doing marketing (up to 20 people max).

The sustainable model is to treat inbound like an asset, not a habit. Build systems around it. Separate creation from promotion. Put explicit limits on how much CEO time it is allowed to consume and / or make a rule like "for every hour spent in marketing I will spend two in sales".

Your time as a CEO is not infinite nor cheap. If inbound marketing feels free, it is usually because you are not measuring what it is displacing nor feeling the consequences of this lack of strategy.

The tax is invisible at first. Then it hits you like a truck and can rock and even capsize the company if you don't have a stable business.