You Just Pulled the Wrong Lever: A Conversation with Rashel Hariri

Rashel Hariri has seen growth from every angle: scrappy startups, hypergrowth scale-ups, and billion-dollar brands. She's a fractional CMO and go-to-market advisor who parachutes in when growth stalls or a company's go-to-market starts feeling messy. Before that she led marketing at McDonald's and Shopify. Now she embeds like a co-founder with B2B SaaS and AI startups, fixing real problems fast.

What I like about her is that she isn't selling frameworks off a slide. She's in the trenches. And her core message is one most founders don't want to hear: when you think marketing isn't working, it usually is. You just pulled the wrong lever.

Big brands are startups in disguise

Rashel's move from McDonald's and Shopify to companies with maybe $50k for all of marketing sounds like a hard reset. Her reframe is that it wasn't, because every job in her 17-year career started with nothing. She was hired number one on McDonald's Canada's digital team, and by the time she left it was twelve people disrupting the company from inside. At Shopify she built social from the ground up. Even at McDonald's, in the early days there was no big budget. She was running around asking other departments if she could borrow some of theirs to test digital ads, and when she walked in looking for the web team she was told there wasn't one, they used an agency.

That's exactly what prepares you for startups, she says. You walk in, look around, and ask: what do we have, what don't we have, what's essential for the next six months, and then focus only on those. The external perception is that the big companies have it all figured out. Internally they're always figuring it out too. A big company is often just a startup in disguise.

When growth stalls, look at the stool

When a founder comes to Rashel because growth has stalled, sales aren't converting, and everything feels messy, the causes usually cluster. She pictures a three-legged stool, and so much of it comes back to ICP and product. Often there's simply no product market fit. Is it the messaging? The value props? Something not landing with the ideal customer? Or does the ICP itself need to shift, along with who the real decision-maker is?

The trap she sees constantly: founders are so in love with their product, so proud of it, that they can't see it might look just like something else in the market. That's where marketing has to do the hard work of differentiation, and the edge can be something as simple as a different pricing structure or a more complex problem solved. It's made worse by team shape. Startups tend to have a CTO, a COO, and a CEO, and no go-to-market person, so the COO gets stuck with "I just need people to know about it" and no real strategy behind it.

Marketing isn't ads

The most common expensive mistake Rashel sees is advertising too early. Founders decide step one is a Google, Meta, or LinkedIn ad campaign, hire an agency, and spend $100k to generate three or four leads a month. She walks in, has them take a step back, and builds a holistic strategy. Often, for a B2B SaaS company, the answer isn't ads at all. It's events, a community layer, partnerships, referral engines with adjacent products.

The problem is that when people think marketing, they think ads. And an agency, she notes without knocking them, is only ever looking at ad metrics: traffic sent to the site, traffic sent to the lead page. They're not thinking about what happens once that traffic hits your CRM, how many actually signed up, or the quality of those people. Worse, if your value props and messaging aren't right, you're paying to send the wrong people to the wrong features. Which is why her line lands so hard: marketing does work. You just pulled the wrong lever.

Foundations before the mansion

So when a founder has just raised and wants to spend, Rashel's first instinct is to slow them down. If you're building a mansion, you figure out the foundation first. Do you even have nurture sequences, email outbound, proper lead pages, correct messaging? Maybe the brand your cousin built needs elevating now that you're a funded company. Maybe the move is a community and the right ambassadors.

Founders are go-go-go, so the hardest thing she does is make them pause. "Give me two weeks. I have to do an audit, see what's working, what's broken." Part of that is walking them off ledges, like an expensive HubSpot account they don't need at their stage. She'll save them the money now and take them to Salesforce later, when they're actually ready. The instinct to buy the best-practice tool before you need it is its own kind of waste.

Sales and marketing are one motion

Rashel is blunt that the old marketing-funnel-versus-sales split doesn't exist anymore. The same human sees your LinkedIn post, clicks to your blog for detail, lands on your lead page, and signs up for a call. People also skip all of it and just ask ChatGPT for the top five tools in your category. So you have to be defensible across the whole path: marketing, SEO and its newer cousins, and the sales call itself.

Which is why she's expanded into sales auditing. She goes into a client's HubSpot, picks contacts, reads the emails, checks how long reps take to respond and what they actually say, asks for the call recordings, and delivers training on them. Her phrase for it is that no one can hide, and sales can't point the finger at marketing. Half the time nobody even knows what's happening on those calls. Some of her clients have hit their highest sales months ever after she got embedded on both sides, not just marketing.

Fractional beats a junior hire

Given a founder with $100k and six months of runway, choosing between hiring her fractionally or a junior marketer full-time, Rashel's answer is unsentimental: hire the fractional. A junior is someone you'll always have to manage, and a founder moving fast doesn't have the time. A fractional has done this before, brings a network of writers, devs, and designers, and often doubles as a coach, having the deep conversations about the business, the founder's leadership style, and what's keeping them up at night that you'd never have with someone three years into their career.

Her model is fractional-first: come in, make the early strategic calls, and phase out or drop to an advisor role once it's obvious a full-time hire is needed. On a $2 million seed, a full-time CMO is enormously expensive once you add their salary, a marketing budget, and the tool stack on top. The whole point of the fractional is to move things forward now and hand off cleanly later, with the systems, documentation, and governance in place so the founder never becomes dependent on her.

Product market fit is repeatability, not raises

Ask Rashel to define product market fit from a marketing lens, and she says repeatability. Not "some people are paying us," and pointedly not an endless run of VC rounds. A company that keeps going back to raise Series B, C, and D, diluting the founder's equity each time, may look successful, but to her it can signal something rocky underneath. Real fit is the repeatable motion: inbounds, signup rate holding month over month, customers not leaking out the bottom of the bucket. High churn is a signal something is fundamentally wrong, and no amount of shiny marketing fixes the absence of substance.

Her cautionary tale is a one-click-checkout company that had raised around $150 million and hired top Salesforce leaders. When she poked at the product roadmap, there wasn't a clear one, and signups had stalled. To her that was the tell: you can't have product market fit if you're not continuously evolving the product. The company didn't last much longer.

The AI slop tell

Rashel is refreshingly direct that a lot of the tech flooding the market is useless, and that the AI tools promising seven figures in three months simply can't deliver. There's no hack to hard work other than discipline. She expects a lot of the AI slop in marketing to fade this year, because people can tell the difference, and the creators who are genuinely building in public will win the attention.

Her honest confession is that she caught her own writing starting to sound like ChatGPT, all those "it's not this, it's that" constructions, because that's what she's been marinating in online. Her rule is about sequence. You, the human with years of real experience, supply the ideas and the input, and then use AI to refine and brainstorm. What you don't do is tell ChatGPT to write your blog post and stuff in three keywords to rank. That's where the slop starts. And in a saturated market, founders are the first salespeople in their company, so being present with a genuine reputation is what carries you from zero to 0.5 before the GTM engine even exists.

Why She's Interesting

Rashel also runs She's Interesting, a platform for women entrepreneurs over 30 that she started in 2023 because she couldn't find the content she wanted. She was tired of watching young guys in front of rented Ferraris explain how they made a million dollars, and she wasn't seeing enough real stories from women in business. So she gathered smart, successful women, VCs and founders, and always began by asking where they came from and how they got here, because the full journey is where the learning actually is.

The backdrop she names matters: less than 2% of women get venture funding, and so much of it comes down to who you know in what is still largely a boys' club. Her challenge to listeners stuck with me. Name three women you respect who aren't your mom, sister, or wife, and notice how many people freeze, when naming three businessmen they idolize is effortless. It's inherited bias, not malice, and the fix is to actually go meet and support ambitious women in your network.

Key takeaways

A few things worth keeping.

"Marketing isn't working" usually means the wrong lever. The failure is almost always upstream: wrong ICP, unclear messaging, or the wrong channel. Diagnose before you spend more.

Ads are rarely the first move. For most B2B SaaS, events, community, and partnerships beat paid before your foundations and messaging are even right.

Fund the foundation, not the ad account. Nurture sequences, real lead pages, and correct messaging come before the shiny campaign.

Product market fit is repeatability. Not a run of raises, not a shiny signup spike. A motion that repeats, month over month, without the bucket leaking.

A fractional beats a junior. Early on you want someone who's done it before and brings a network and coaching, not a hire you have to manage.

Frameworks worth stealing

The wrong-lever diagnosis

When a founder says marketing isn't working, start from the assumption that it does, and something upstream is off. Check the ICP, the messaging, and the channel before spending another dollar. Traffic to the wrong people, or the wrong features pushed to the right people, looks exactly like "marketing failed" and isn't.

Foundations before ads

After a raise, resist the ad account. Build the infrastructure first: nurture sequences, proper lead pages, correct value props and messaging, a brand that matches your stage. Pause for a two-week audit of what's working and what's broken before you spend, and don't buy the enterprise tool before you need it.

The holistic GTM audit

Stop treating marketing and sales as separate funnels. The same buyer moves from your post to your blog to your lead page to a sales call, so audit the entire path, including the CRM and the actual call recordings. When you can see all of it, no one can hide and the message stays consistent from first touch to close.

Fractional-first

Early on, hire a fractional to make the strategic calls and bring a ready network, rather than a junior you'll manage or a full-time CMO your seed round can't carry. Phase to full-time only when the need is obvious, and make sure the fractional leaves behind documented systems so nothing depends on them staying.

Quotes worth keeping

The lines I wrote down.

Marketing does work. You just pulled the wrong lever.

There's no hack to hard work other than discipline.

Founders are the first salespeople in their company.

For me, product market fit is repeatability.

And the one that explains half of every failed campaign.

If people can't tell what you do, they're not going to buy your product.

Rapid fire round

Same questions every guest. No prep, no warning. Here's how Rashel handled it.

Best advice you've ever received? Outsource. Outsource whatever you don't want to do, especially as a woman. Her old boss at McDonald's, who had five kids and now runs McDonald's in Switzerland, outsourced everything, laundry and cleaning included, to protect the time she had with her family.

Advice you wish you'd listened to? She says she doesn't really carry regrets, but she wishes she'd started investing younger instead of staying in savings mode through her twenties, and that she'd entered tech earlier.

What would you tell your younger self? Nothing, honestly. You're on the right track. Whatever hurdles come, none of it will matter, because you'll end up exactly where you need to be and it's going to be great.

Ongoing challenge that keeps you up at night? The solopreneur question: doing everything herself and deciding whether to bring on a partner or a second arm, because the work grows and then retracts, and she's still working out what the right structure looks like.

Favorite spot? La Plata in Barcelona. A tiny tapas bar with about four tables where you order at the bar, eat simple, perfect food, tomato and onion salad, fried sardines, and carry on with your night.

Tool you can't live without? Whisper Flow, the dictation tool. She's a heavy dictation user and calls its messaging and onboarding chef's kiss.

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Rashel Hariri is a fractional CMO and go-to-market advisor who has led marketing at McDonald's and Shopify and now embeds with B2B SaaS and AI startups. She hosts the She's Interesting podcast and is building Juggle, an AI chief of staff for solopreneurs. Find her at rashelhariri.com or on LinkedIn.