The marketing team you'd hire, before you can hire one.

Digital Star is a senior fractional marketing team for venture-backed startups, most often right after a seed round or Series A. Alex Moura sits with your leadership team and sets the strategy, and then we do the work across every channel. You get C-level judgment and the hands that carry it out, in one place.

At a glance

Who's running marketing while you run the company?

You closed the round, everybody wants a piece of it, and nobody's job is bringing in customers yet.

A full-time CMO wants equity before they've proven anything. A cheaper hire can't do the brand or the design, so they bring in an agency, the agency sells you big, fast results, and its junior staff does the work. Before long you're managing a tangled web of vendors, and bringing in customers still isn't anyone's job.

Founders needed a different kind of marketing team, one that sits at the table with the C-level team and then does the work itself. That's why we started Digital Star. We start the month after you sign, work inside your accounts, and hand your first marketing leader work that's already running.

What do you get?

Every channel, run from one plan. Emily Kramer of MKT1 splits marketing into the fuel (what you say) and the engine (the channels that carry it). Most first hires are good at one. We build both in the same month. One founder, weighing our proposal, put it this way: "It's helpful to me that you are not just focused on delivering expertise for one part of the marketing stack, but instead approaching it more holistically."

• A board report with real numbers. Strategy, budget and targets, and the marketing slides ready before every board meeting.
• Copy that sounds like your buyers wrote it. We study your market in their own words, then write and design from what we hear.
• Every ad dollar tied to a deal. Search, social and streaming TV, each campaign judged on the revenue it brings in. We've run million-dollar monthly campaigns.
• Your dream accounts, by name. Our account-based tools find the people inside the companies you want to win and reach them with content made for them.
• Founders your buyers already trust. Your leaders go live, each conversation becomes a podcast, and the best moments become clips, posts and emails.
• Conferences that fill your calendar with meetings. We pick the events worth your time and run campaigns before, during and after each one, including campaigns under $500 that skip the booth entirely (how we run them).
• Leads that show up warm. Every lead is scored and sent to sales fast, and prospects get the content that explains your product before the first call.
• One owner for every vendor. We brief and manage your PR firm, video crew, designers and freelancers. On one launch, we ran ten channels at once and managed five outside specialists: video, PR, design, LinkedIn and outreach.
• A team that walks into something working. When you're ready to hire, we help you find the people and hand them a plan that's already running. We've hired marketers, managed PR and production teams, and led PR ourselves.

What's it like to have us on the team?

Think of it as a CMO on your leadership team who has launched and grown businesses in your industry, and who also does the work.

It starts with a launch meeting. In the first 30 days, we set up your brand, your website and your CRM. By day 45, the whole growth system is live: ads, analytics and automation, all connected, so every campaign is judged on the deals it brings in. From there, every month brings new content, a board-ready report, a campaign around the next conference, and more of your CEO on LinkedIn and in video.

Every two weeks we sit down with your leadership team for 30 minutes. Once a month we meet with your CEO, and in the weeks between you get a written update. It's the feeling of getting things done fast, and getting them right. One founder we launched with called us "hands-on, creative and thoughtful at every step."

Over the last four years we've turned from marketers into AI-native growth operators. Most agencies spend about 90 days on a plan and start the work the next quarter. We go after quick wins first, then deliver the full plan, the brand, the website and the automated customer system in half the time. That speed goes into everything it takes to tell your story and drive the point home: a brand book of 70 pages or more, custom icons, photography, video, motion graphics and animation, ads, and brand and email templates. All of it is set up and automated in HubSpot or whichever CRM you use.

We build on HubSpot, Figma and the full Adobe suite, and when a tool doesn't exist or costs too much, we build it ourselves. We've done this work in cyber insurance, fintech, regtech and govtech, where security matters, so we work inside your accounts and your customer data stays there.

We also help the whole team tell its story. Everything starts with a conversation. You were there: you know what nearly went wrong, who stayed late, and why the result mattered. That's the raw material, so I sit with your leaders every month and ask the questions that pull it out. What did a customer ask this week? What does sales keep explaining? What changed your mind? We move quickly and run a tight ship, and you get content in your own voice without having to sit down and write it.

Then we decide what deserves a story, and we make it properly. We write when the detail matters, film when the voice matters, and use photography when the work itself tells the story. For a young company, a customer explaining what changed makes an unfamiliar product easier to understand. One customer film we made came from a simple Zoom call. When your team wins, we tell that story too: the hard part, the people who helped, and what changed for the customer.

A good story deserves more than one outing. We introduce it on LinkedIn, and as people respond, we give it more room: paid promotion, short clips, the website, and a case your sales team can send. One customer interview can feed a case study, an ad and a sales deck. Our AI systems keep the source with every claim, draft from your own words and examples, and carry what you've approved into the next piece, so we never start from scratch. You check every fact, name and claim before anything goes out. The final piece sounds like someone who has done the work, because it came from someone who has. That's what separates it from the mass-produced stuff your competitors post.

Then we find the keyword gaps in your category, the questions buyers ask that nobody answers well. We've helped several clients define their categories, and that work puts them in Google's AI Overview when buyers search: as the answer for a new category in insurance finance, as the platform Google names for military license portability, and among the venture studios it lists for fintech growth. That's how a new category starts to build demand. We do the same for ourselves: see our guides to ChatGPT ads for insurance and HubSpot for insurance.

How should you vet a fractional marketing team?

Ask any firm, us included:

1. Who exactly does the work? Names, and whether those people are on the first call.
2. Do you lead, do the work, or both? If it's one, who covers the other, and at what cost?
3. Which number will you own? Pipeline, signups, booked demos. Get it in writing.
4. What will my board see, and when? At Series A, board meetings come every six to eight weeks.
5. Have you done it at my stage, in my market? Ask what they launched this year, and how fast.
6. Whose name are the accounts in? Yours, from day one.
7. What happens when we hire? Ask what your first hire will inherit: the plan, the accounts and the dashboards.

Questions founders ask

Are you an agency?

We're a senior team that runs your marketing like an in-house department, and we bring in specialists such as video crews and PR firms when the work needs them.

Do you only work with insurance companies?

No. Our deepest Series A work is in insurtech, and we work with founders in regulated industries, software and technology, entertainment and consumer brands.

Do venture funds work with you?

Yes. Surge Ventures, a fintech and insurtech venture studio, brought us in for its own brand and website, then to take two of its companies to market. Here's how funds work with us.

How do we start?

A first call with Alex, then a written proposal, then a launch meeting. The work starts the month after you sign.