Building Product Marketing From Scratch at Trezor

Why I wrote this

I joined Trezor in September 2023 as the first product marketing manager the company had ever hired. The first thing I did was nothing. I didn’t write a positioning doc, run a workshop, or open a Notion page called ‘Q4 Marketing Strategy’. I made a list of every person I needed to talk to, and I started talking. This is the story of building the function from zero: the frameworks helped, but earning trust mattered more.

Summary

A founding PMM’s first job isn’t strategy, it’s listening. My first sixty days at Trezor were spent meeting product, design, support, leadership, and the people who packed the boxes, asking ‘how does this actually work here’ until I understood why the company had gotten this far on instinct alone. Then came the harder work: selling the function before I could use it (the house metaphor — positioning is the foundation, messaging is the house, copy is the decoration), running the first positioning workshop ahead of Safe 5, and introducing a launch tier matrix so the company could stop doing too much for too little. The Safe 5 launch at BTC Prague in June 2024 was the proof: the packaging team pulled lines from the messaging doc themselves, and on Reddit and X the community fed back the exact narrative we’d built months earlier. Product marketing exists when the story works without you having to be in every room.

Key takeaways

• Sell the function before you use it: nobody will adopt your frameworks if they don’t understand what product marketing does. The house metaphor (positioning, messaging, copy) gave people a mental model they could explain to each other when I wasn’t in the room.

• Frameworks are everywhere; earning the right to introduce one is the real work. April Dunford’s positioning method and launch tiers exist in every PMM playbook on the internet. Getting a company to actually use them is a completely different problem.

• Trust is the founding PMM’s most important deliverable, not documents. You have to become the product expert on the marketing team and the marketing expert on the product team, in both directions at once. That’s earned in small interactions, almost none of which feel like ‘marketing work’ at the time.

Perspective from 2026

The same process that started with Safe 5 has now been applied to Safe 7, the Trezor Expert onboarding service, and dozens of feature launches in between. Same bones every time: positioning first, messaging on top, copy last, with the right people in the room early enough to catch the things only they can catch. Looking back, the frameworks were never the point. Building from zero lets you define what product marketing means at your company, and the first PMM sets the ceiling for the second one. The job is to make yourself useful enough that the function outlives the founder.