how to break into startups as a non-technical [full playbook]

I’m starting this series because I wish I had something like this when I was trying to understand startup roles myself.

Before we get into it, you might reasonably be asking: who is writing this?

TLDR: After graduating, I was as an early-stage VC investor who then left to join NationGraph, a Series A startup backed by Menlo Ventrures to do growth/marketing.

Seven months later, I got promoted, helped bring in hundreds of thousands of dollars in closed-won deals, generated millions in pipeline, and was recently featured by Clay as a GTM engineer to watch.

This isn’t to boast but to show you that anything is possible and you can also break into a startup too as someone non-technical.

I’m still figuring it out but I ought to share some lessons on the way.

In this series: I’m going to try to show you exactly what I would do if I had to start from zero again:

• Which roles I’d target and which exist.
• Which kinds of companies I’d go after.
• How I’d get their attention, and how I’d turn that attention into a job.

Let’s start with the basics and what roles exist.

At most startups you should probably be either building or selling

This is an oversimplification, but I think it’s a useful way to think about most early-stage startups generally.

At the beginning, a startup really needs to do two things: build something people want and figure out how to get people to buy it.

If you’re an engineer, the first path is fairly obvious. You can help build the product.

If you’re non-technical and early in your career, I think you should try to get as close as possible to the second.

Help the company get customers.

This doesn’t mean every non-technical person needs to become part of the GTM team within the startup. As startups get into later stages, there are obviously many other important roles: account management, product managers, finance, operations, recruiting, chiefs of staff, and so on.

But many of those roles become easier to break into once you have a few years of experience and a clearer skill set.

This guide is specifically for someone coming out of school or with less than two years of experience who doesn’t have much of a track record yet.

At that stage, I think one of the easiest ways to make yourself valuable is to work on something the company cares about every single day: revenue.

• That could mean directly selling the product. It could mean generating pipeline for the sales team. It could mean creating content that brings people to the website. It could mean improving SEO, running events, making videos, building outbound campaigns, or automating parts of the entire process.

The titles for these jobs can get confusing very quickly: sales, growth, community, marketing, demand gen, SDR, BDR, GTM engineering.

When I was first looking at startup jobs, half of these sounded like completely different careers. But it’s actually quite simple if you break it down.

So what actually falls under GTM?

The easiest way to simplify it is to think about it is outbound and inbound GTM.

Outbound means you go find the customer.

You figure out which companies should buy your product, find the right people inside those companies, and try to start a conversation with them:

• Cold calling and cold email are the obvious examples, but it also includes prospecting, account research, list building, LinkedIn outreach, writing sequences, and all the work that goes into turning a company you’ve never spoken to into a sales opportunity.

If you see an SDR or BDR role, this is generally the world you’re entering.

Inbound works in the opposite direction. Instead of going out and finding each customer, you’re creating things that make potential customers find you.

This is where a lot of what we traditionally call marketing sits:

• Writing content, making videos, working with UGC creators, publishing blog posts, improving the website, building landing pages, working on SEO/AEO, running events, creating case studies, and generally finding ways to get more of the right people interested in what you’re building.

If you see a founding Marketer, community, social media manager this is generally the direction you will be entering.

Now the title “Growth” is no different, it just means you’re living somewhere between the lines above or all of it at once depending on the company.

This is a general overview of the roles + functions you’ll find in the revenue generating part of a startup.

More recently, there is another layer that sits across both of these: GTM engineering. Whatever you want to call it!

You don’t have to be an engineer to be a GTM engineer

The name makes this role sound more intimidating than it is. At a basic level, this type of “engineering” work is using software, data, AI, and automation to make sales and marketing more effective.

Contrary to popular belief you do not need to come from an engineering background or degree to do this role.

• Maybe your sales team is manually researching 100 accounts. You build a workflow that can research 10,000 (this is what NationGraph does if you sell to the government).
• Maybe you’re manually finding the right person at every company before sending them an email. You create a system that automatically sends cold emails to website visitors.
• Maybe your marketing team is doing the same repetitive research every week. You automate their work.

A few years ago, doing a lot of this would have required significantly more engineering help. That’s changing quickly.

Tools like Clay and AI coding agents like Claude have made it possible for people who aren’t software engineers to build surprisingly sophisticated things.

But there’s an important distinction here: Not being an engineer doesn’t mean you should be afraid of technical things.

You don’t need to learn how to build production level ready code.

• But you should know what GitHub is. You should understand the basics of pushing and pulling changes.
• You should be comfortable opening the terminal and using simple bash commands like cd and ls.
• You should understand your local file system and have a rough idea of how API/MCPs work.

AI can increasingly handle the implementation. Your job is to understand the problem well enough to tell it what you want, give it the right context, recognize when it gives you something bad, and steer it toward something better.

That’s where taste becomes important. For a non-technical person entering startups today, I think that combination,** first principles critical thinking,** basic technical literacy, and taste, is incredibly powerful.

Now that we’ve gone through the basics of the types of roles you should look for. Next, I’ll talk about how to pick that startup and how to stand out to get the role.

Till next time.

With gratitude,

Chris