“Your first few marketing hires generally need to be generalists because you can't afford to have a channel expert. And the saying about jack of all trades master of none — we haven't had great success with marketing generalists. What we found to be super successful is just contracting with channel experts. They can do it in half the time an internal person can and your cost is lower.”

Channel-expert contractors outperform in-house marketing generalists — channel depth beats generalist breadth for small apps

Rather than building an in-house marketing team, Reading.com assembled a roster of specialist contractors: one for Meta ads, one for Google, one for Apple Search Ads, one for lifecycle email. Each files a weekly report and requires minimal management. The model gives access to expertise that would be unaffordable full-time, and contractors bring cross-client pattern recognition that any single-app team cannot develop internally.