Every marketing plan starts the same way: a list of channels on slide four. Nobody has said out loud what is actually stopping the company from growing. The DATE framework makes that conversation happen first.

DATE comes from Krithika Shankarraman — eight years building Stripe's marketing function, OpenAI's first marketing hire, later head of marketing at Retool, now EIR at Thrive Capital. It is four steps, run in order:

D — Diagnose. Name the single biggest constraint on growth: awareness, understanding, conviction, conversion or retention. Not "we need more leads" — a stage with a number attached. A real diagnosis makes at least one currently funded activity look obviously wrong.

A — Analyze. Not "what are competitors doing?" but "what has this category stopped questioning?" Map the four or five companies your buyers compare y ...