Solo head of marketing: one person runs all the marketing

Solo mode sounds heroic - in practice it’s just a normal 9-18 schedule, without tragedy and without overtime. I have a cleaning company in St. Petersburg, I’m the head of marketing there. Solo. No agency, no contractors, no five-person department. In 50 working days since the new site release - 290 repo commits, 245 URLs in the sitemap, 50+ blog posts, a 4-channel lead funnel via AmoCRM, +86% clicks in Google Search Console. This article: format, stack, cadence. No heroics.

In brief

• 290 commits in 50 working days = 5-6 commits a day. Not at night, not on weekends.
• 5 roles in one pair of hands: SEO, paid ads, copywriting, dev, analytics
• Stack: PHP no CMS, 17 MCP servers in the editor, Obsidian as knowledge base, BMAD methodology
• Week plan on Sunday evening, 30 minutes. Then one task at a time
• Doesn’t fit for budgets >500k RUB/mo and products with thousands of leads a day

What ‘solo head of marketing’ means

Head of marketing - the lead of the marketing department. In a normal setup the head runs a team: SEO agency, paid-ads specialist, content team, designer, developer, analyst. Coordinates, sets tasks, reviews work. Doesn’t do hands-on work.

‘Solo head of marketing’ is when all those roles are in one pair of hands:

• SEO specialist. Technical audit, schema, llms.txt, programmatic SEO pages, URL recrawl via API, Lighthouse optimization
• Paid-ads specialist. Yandex Direct, Google Ads, Telegram Ads, Avito cabinets, bidding strategies and UTM
• Copywriter. Blog articles 1500-4000 words with FAQ, service-page copy, ad scripts
• Developer. Hand-coded site on PHP 8.4 with no CMS, 245 URLs, MySQL for blog and leads, AmoCRM integration
• Analyst. GA4, Yandex Metrica, Roistat, BI dashboards, reports to the owner

In parallel - communication with the owner, rewriting commercial-offer templates, checking cleaning crew work via CRM, contract approvals. Marketing in small and mid-sized B2B rarely exists separately from operations.

My typical day

Schedule isn’t strict, but stable. Without it solo work quickly turns into reactive ‘put out the fire’ mode.

Before lunch - concentrated work: copy, dev, SEO audits. The hardest, attention-demanding stuff. Email and Telegram open, but notifications off - I answer during breaks.

After lunch - operations: ads cabinet checks, lead replies in CRM, owner communication, task tracker, site updates.

Evening - review and plan: I look at Search Console and Yandex Webmaster for the day, log changes in Obsidian, write tomorrow’s plan. 30 minutes max.

On average 7-8 hours of focused time, 5 days a week. I don’t work Sundays as a matter of principle - that gives a cushion for the next working week.

Cadence and planning

Solo mode only works with strict planning structure. Without it you slip into chaos: ‘don’t remember what to do today’.

Every Sunday evening - 30 minutes for the week plan in Obsidian. 5-6 large tasks tied to open BMAD-methodology epics. By Friday I usually know which of them roll to next week.

Every morning - open the vault, look at the active BMAD story and yesterday’s log. One task at a time, till done. Hopping between ‘I’ll try SEO’ and ‘no, better ads’ is the fastest path to burnout in solo mode. With me every morning it’s clear what’s in flight.

The 50-day SEO cycle we launched in March ran at exactly this rhythm. 290 commits = 5-6 a day. Not at night, not on weekends. Regular, no rushes. Publishing cadence - 2-3 articles a week. This frame sets a rhythm better than any alarm clock.

The stack that lets one person carry it

Without the right tools solo mode doesn’t work. Here’s what I use daily - no made-up ‘AI helpers of the future’.

1. Hand-coded PHP site, no CMS

The company site - PHP 8.4 + MySQL + .htaccess as router. No WordPress, Bitrix, Tilda. Page template:

<?php
$page_title = "...";
$canonical = "https://example.com/.../";
include __DIR__ . '/includes/header.php';
?>
<!-- Content -->
<?php include __DIR__ . '/includes/form.php'; ?>
<?php include __DIR__ . '/includes/footer.php'; ?>

That’s it. No plugins, no version conflicts, no npm dependencies. Deploy via rsync in 15 seconds.

When you’re the only developer, you don’t need an ecosystem for a five-person team. You need a solution that doesn’t break itself and doesn’t require weekly security updates.

2. Seventeen MCP servers in the code editor

MCP - Model Context Protocol, a way to give the AI assistant in the editor access to external tools. In my settings.json:

• playwright - browser automation for SEO audits, competitor screenshots, render checks
• firecrawl - crawling competitor sites at 200-500 URLs per pass
• gsc - Google Search Console: impressions, clicks, indexing
• yandex-metrika + yandex-webmaster - Yandex Metrica and Webmaster programmatically
• github - repo work, PRs, issues
• filesystem - read and write files on the Mac
• obsidian - search across the vault
• snyk - vulnerability scanning of the code
• gemini + nanobanana - image generation for the blog
• context7 - up-to-date library docs
• firecrawl + ddg - web search
• superpowers - custom skills

In sum - the tools that in a normal team would be a separate analyst, frontend dev, and SEO specialist. For me they work through a single editor interface.

3. Obsidian as the project knowledge base

In the root of the site repo lives the folder obsidian/ - a vault with 60+ notes. Structure:

• SEO/ - title and description rules, reference markup, audit checklists
• Tech/ - link building, freezes, BMAD docs, host migration
• Analytics/ - impressions reports, campaign breakdowns
• ISO certificates/ - text of licenses and standards for YMYL pages
• Blog - content base.md - full project history, 30 ready topics
• Log YYYY-MM-DD.md - what got done that day, what commits, what decisions

When you work alone, you forget your own agreements in two weeks. The vault is the ‘second brain’ where I grep for what I promised by Thursday. No Notion, no Confluence - only local .md files next to the code.

4. BMAD methodology for one person

BMAD - Brownfield Methodology for Agile Development. Six epics, 26 stories, 26+ slash commands for the code editor. In the classic setup it’s a tool for a dev team. For me - a frame that structures one person’s work:

• PRD (Product Requirements Document) - written once at project start, fixes 34 functional and 22 non-functional requirements. After that - the anchor for all decisions
• Epics and stories - 6 epics (Semantic coverage, Lead gen, Geo-local pages, MySQL blog, E-E-A-T, Operations). Each epic - 2-6 stories, each story - a 4-8 hour task
• Implementation Readiness Report - ‘can we start’ checklist: do we have all accesses, is there a plan, is the outcome clear

When tasks are structured this way, I stop jumping between topics. Every morning it’s clear which story is in flight.

5. Lead funnel into 4 channels in parallel

The site form duplicates the lead into four channels:

form → /send.php
  1. mail() → company email
  2. Telegram Bot API → leads chat
  3. AmoCRM API → contact + deal in pipeline
  4. INSERT into MySQL leads

If one channel fails, the lead is saved in the other three. In 50 days of work, lost leads - zero.

In a normal team the AmoCRM integration would be done by a separate middleware dev over 2-3 weeks of meetings. I wrote it in a day, JWT token valid till 2031.

What I do NOT do by hand

Solo mode is possible only because half the routine is automated. List of what I delegated to tools and APIs:

• Keyword research - Python script via Yandex Wordstat API checks 388 phrases in 8-10 minutes
• Sitemap - generate-sitemap.php rebuilds with real lastmod via filemtime() on each deploy
• URL recrawl - Yandex Webmaster API /recrawl/queue sends up to 620 URLs a day
• IndexNow - every approved blog comment auto-pings Bing and Yandex
• Schema validation - Rich Results Test via Playwright on a URL list after deploy
• Vulnerabilities - Snyk MCP scans the code in one click
• Graphics - Pexels (free stock photos) for most banners, Gemini API for unique case-study covers
• Article drafts - Claude as assistant for the first draft, then always final proofreading by hand with Glavred and Baden-Baden rules

Final fact-check, owner sign-off, publishing - always by hand. I wouldn’t trust AI to publish texts with company numbers.

What’s important to keep in the system

Solo mode is stable only if there are ready answers for typical problems. I worked these out over three years - sharing.

Cadence discipline. Without external deadlines it’s easy to push a task to next Monday. Solution: weekly three-paragraph report to the owner + publishing cadence of 2-3 articles a week. They set rhythm better than any alarm.

Bug log. In a team an analyst tells you about a bug. Solo, you find out about a bug only when you step on it - sometimes a week later. Solution: an ‘Issues log’ in the Obsidian vault, weekly walkthrough.

External code review. I run PHP syntax check of all files in deploy.sh, Snyk MCP scan, Lighthouse after every major release. Doesn’t replace second-pair-of-eyes, but catches 80% of gross mistakes before prod.

The business runs without me. Over 18 months of solo mode I had 3 short sick leaves and a couple of vacations. The site on those days runs on autopilot: ads on auto-bidding strategies, leads come via forms and AmoCRM, analytics collect themselves. The company manager replies to leads. New articles and audits don’t ship on those days - acceptable in B2B with a long sales cycle and 5-7 leads a day.

What would be different with a team

Honestly: with a 4-5 person team I’d ship 2-2.5 times more, not 4 times. Coordination eats a meaningful share of the effect. And there are still tasks solo mode closes faster than a team:

• A/B test decisions - no need to call a meeting and wait for the analyst. Check Metrica, draw the conclusion, write the edit, deploy in 5 minutes
• Repackaging offers for a new channel - I write it myself, check with Glavred and Baden-Baden myself, publish myself. From idea to launch - a day instead of a week
• Technical fixes - no designer sign-off, no Jira tasks, no dev sync call

For marketing in B2B with a long sales cycle and a small number of large clients - this is often more important than ‘getting 4 times more done’.

Who ‘remote head of marketing’ fits

I offer the remote head of marketing service on a freelance basis for businesses with a similar profile:

• No in-house marketing team, or one exists but needs a lead
• Services or products sold via site + paid ads + organic
• Local niches: cleaning, renovation, construction, delivery, IT services, professional services

Doesn’t fit:

• E-com with thousands of SKUs and complex merchandising
• Brands with a large ATL budget and media campaigns
• Businesses where marketing must approve decisions daily with top management in meetings

If your profile matches the first list - write to me in Telegram @dimik90, let’s talk. You can also reach me via the site or the email in the footer.

Related: how I work with projects - on the format without calls and 40-page proposals. Cleaning case over 3 years and 9 months - the path from starting in the niche to the current role. 50 days of SEO in B2B cleaning - what specifically got done over the last 50 working days.

Freelance services:

• Remote head of marketing from 70,000 RUB/month
• Independent contractor audit from 30,000 RUB
• SEO for services - full cycle
• Marketing for cleaning - main niche, specifics on budgets and channels