Hyrax Marketing Budget
What we want to spend from September 2026 to August 2027
Hyrax Marketing Budget
What we want to spend from September 2026 to August 2027
| Engineering and product run rate | $2M+ |
| Plus Tristan full time and four people part time | included |
| 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 expects | 24 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.
| Marketing as a share of the round | 15% 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 |
| Paid media, high intent | 30–40% |
| Content, docs and SEO | 20–25% |
| Team and agency | 15–20% |
| Events, out of home, influencers | 10–15% |
| Measurement and attribution | 10–15% |
| First hire | One broad marketer who can still do the work themselves. Not a specialist |
| Not yet | No sales rep. Content and community are the pipeline until team upgrades appear |
| Contracted | Paid media, video, design, motion. The marketer directs them |
| Activation event defined and tracked | required |
| Free to paid, unaided | above 2% |
| Free to paid, worked by a person | above 8% |
| Team upgrades tracked separately | required |
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.
| Capability | Blueprint | Year one | Share | What it is |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Paid media, high intent | 30–40% | $500K | 32% | Google, Reddit, X, LinkedIn and seven more. Run by an agency |
| Content, docs and SEO | 20–25% | $340K | 22% | Technical articles, integration guides, comparison pages. Written in house |
| Team and agency | 15–20% | $280K | 18% | One marketer, plus video, design and motion contractors |
| Events, out of home, influencers | 10–15% | $250K | 16% | Conferences, developer creators, out of home. One point above the band |
| Measurement and attribution | 10–15% | $190K | 12% | Source tagging, PostHog, Synter, experiments |
| Year one | 100% | $1.56M | 100% | $129.9K a month, ramping $105.3K to $154.7K |
Find out what a customer costs. Hire one marketer. Contract everything else. Build the content and the tracking that nothing works without.
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.
| Case | Free to paid | Paying companies | ARR |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bear | 3% | 806 | $4.6M |
| Base | 4% | 1,388 | $7.9M |
| Bull | 6% | 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.
| Signups a day, measured | 27 |
| Cost per signup, measured | $34 |
| Free to paid, measured | not yet tracked |
| Signups and what they cost | Marketing |
| Which engineers arrive | Marketing |
| Whether they activate | Product |
| Whether they invite the team | Product |
| Whether they stay | Product |
| 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.
| Q1, Sep to Nov | $316K |
| Q2, Dec to Feb | $364K |
| Q3, Mar to May | $415K |
| Q4, Jun to Aug | $464K |
| Year one | $1.56M |
Revenue is not a first-quarter gate. Nothing converts before the tracking exists.
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.