Hyrax

Hyrax Marketing Budget

What we want to spend from September 2026 to August 2027

Date
September 4, 2026
Prepared by
Tristan Benozer
Go-to-Market

Hyrax Is Already Funded Like a $10M Seed Company

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Engineering and product run rate$2M+
Plus Tristan full time and four people part timeincluded
Salary and benefits we have committed each year$3M to $4M
Plus everything that is not salary+25%
Cash needed each year$3.75M to $5.0M
Runway an investor expects24 to 30 months
So the round that funds us is$7.5M to $12.5M

We did not raise this money. We committed it. But the company we have built costs the same either way. For comparison, First Round Capital writes an average first cheque of $3.5M and goes up to $20M.

Salary run rate from the Hyrax Budget Review, 4 September 2026. Non-salary operating cost at 25% of payroll and 24 to 30 months of runway are standard round-sizing assumptions. First Round Capital cheque sizes from firstround.com.

What Investors Tell a Company This Size to Do in Year One

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How much they spend

Marketing as a share of the round15% to 25%
On a $7.5M round over 24 months$0.56M a year
On a $12.5M round over 30 months$1.25M a year

Where it goes

Paid media, high intent30–40%
Content, docs and SEO20–25%
Team and agency15–20%
Events, out of home, influencers10–15%
Measurement and attribution10–15%

Who they hire

First hireOne broad marketer who can still do the work themselves. Not a specialist
Not yetNo sales rep. Content and community are the pipeline until team upgrades appear
ContractedPaid media, video, design, motion. The marketer directs them

What they measure before they scale

Activation event defined and trackedrequired
Free to paid, unaidedabove 2%
Free to paid, worked by a personabove 8%
Team upgrades tracked separatelyrequired

Hiring guidance from First Round Review, The Playbook for Hiring the Right Marketer at the Right Time, Maya Spivak, former marketing lead at Segment and Wealthfront: hire a broad marketer who will do the work themselves for the first few quarters, and note that a growth marketer disseminates material rather than building it. PLG hiring sequence and readiness thresholds from Index Ventures and SignalFire operator guidance. Free-to-paid benchmarks from ProductLed's survey of 600+ B2B SaaS companies: 9% average, roughly 3x that where a person works the qualified accounts, and activation tracked by only 34% of companies. Allocation bands cross-checked against Scalix and Directive.

Our Plan Follows That Blueprint

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CapabilityBlueprintYear oneShareWhat it is
Paid media, high intent30–40%$500K32%Google, Reddit, X, LinkedIn and seven more. Run by an agency
Content, docs and SEO20–25%$340K22%Technical articles, integration guides, comparison pages. Written in house
Team and agency15–20%$280K18%One marketer, plus video, design and motion contractors
Events, out of home, influencers10–15%$250K16%Conferences, developer creators, out of home. One point above the band
Measurement and attribution10–15%$190K12%Source tagging, PostHog, Synter, experiments
Year one100%$1.56M100%$129.9K a month, ramping $105.3K to $154.7K

Year one

Find out what a customer costs. Hire one marketer. Contract everything else. Build the content and the tracking that nothing works without.

Year two

Scale only what year one proved. Size and mix come back for approval once we have the evidence. We are not asking for a year two number now.

$1.56M sits above the $1.25M top of the seed band because our committed run rate sits at the top of the range that band is drawn from. Events and out of home run one point above the blueprint at 16% rather than 10 to 15%, which is a deliberate choice: conference booths for GitHub Universe, LDX3 and KubeCon are the fastest way to reach engineering leaders while we have no word of mouth. Every other line sits inside the band.

What Companies Running This Blueprint Typically Produce

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The normal range

CaseFree to paidPaying companiesARR
Bear3%806$4.6M
Base4%1,388$7.9M
Bull6%2,082$11.8M

Published average free to paid is 9%. We model 3% to 6%. Traffic is the same in all three cases. Conversion is what moves.

Where we are today

Signups a day, measured27
Cost per signup, measured$34
Free to paid, measurednot yet tracked

What marketing controls

Signups and what they costMarketing
Which engineers arriveMarketing
Whether they activateProduct
Whether they invite the teamProduct
Whether they stayProduct

The outliers, well outside the range

Cursor$4.0B ARR
Cognition$492M ARR
CodeRabbit$100M ARR

Outlier growth happened where the product and the distribution reinforced each other. It is not what more media spend produces on its own.

All three cases run the same 95% monthly retention, the same seat ramp from 8 to 20 per company, and $30 a seat. None of those is measured yet. Free-to-paid average of 9% from ProductLed's 600+ company survey. Signups a day is the average of 31 August to 2 September from PostHog project 436309. Cost per signup is measured on the rebuilt ad account. Cursor $4B ARR against a $60B acquisition price, Cognition $492M, CodeRabbit $100M, all third-party estimates, unaudited, collected 4 September 2026.

We Recommend $1.56M Starting September

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Released each quarter

Q1, Sep to Nov$316K
Q2, Dec to Feb$364K
Q3, Mar to May$415K
Q4, Jun to Aug$464K
Year one$1.56M

What each quarter has to show

  • Every signup tagged with where it came from
  • Cost per signup, by channel
  • How many connect a repository
  • How many get a first fix
  • Free to paid above 2% unaided
  • Team upgrades counted separately

Revenue is not a first-quarter gate. Nothing converts before the tracking exists.

Two things to decide

  • Start now. Signing an agency takes six to twelve weeks. Conference booths sell first come and LDX3 is two weeks away.
  • If the range on the last slide is not good enough, the answer is a bigger number. Treated as a Series A that raised $30M, the marketing budget starts at $2.25M.

Quarterly gates use the PLG readiness thresholds from Index Ventures and SignalFire operator guidance and the activation-tracking finding in ProductLed's survey, where only 34% of PLG companies track activation at all. Series A band is 15% to 25% of a $30M round across 24 months.