Abstract Startup businesses have always played an important role in the global economy, but recently their importance has grown significantly. For this reason, governments around the world have amended regulation and created incentives to encourage their development. However, statistics show that startups have an extremely high mortality rate, often due to a lack of strategic planning, wrong marketing investments or inefficient resource allocation. The purpose of this paper is to propose a decision-driven tool which will enable the creation of a successful promotional strategy. The proposed strategy is a three-stage process allowing startups to gradually eliminate non-optimal advertising formats. The first stage focuses on the analysis of the e-market where the startup operates. The second stage is dedicated to the economic environment that the new company will face relative to its available resources. Its aim is to reject overly expensive advertising formats by linking costs to availability of funds. The third and last stage is a cost effectiveness analysis, allowing the entrepreneur to identify the best advertising formats and using an impact-factor as a proxy of effectiveness. The proposed methodology has been applied to the case of an Italian early-stage startup for validation.