The point of GTM is focus
Most startup advice about go-to-market sounds like a buffet. Add content, add outbound, add partnerships, add PLG, add events, add community, add a pricing page refresh. It all sounds reasonable, until you realise the quiet cost: you end up with a company that is busy everywhere and credible nowhere.
A good GTM strategy is not a collection of tactics. It is a set of deliberate constraints.
- Who you serve
- What you promise
- How you reach them
- How you convert trust into revenue
- How you learn fast enough to stay honest
If your GTM does not create focus, it is not a strategy. It is motion.
Start with a narrow customer and a sharp problem
The first job is not “find a big market”. It is “find a specific person with a specific pain who is already trying to fix it”. That person becomes the centre of gravity for everything else.
A useful way to define your initial ICP is to make it uncomfortably concrete:
- Industry: not “B2B”, but “mid-market logistics brokers”
- Role: not “operations”, but “VP Ops who owns SLA risk”
- Trigger: a moment that forces action (new compliance rule, new region launch, new headcount plan)
- Current workaround: the spreadsheet, agency, internal script, or competitor they rely on
- Cost of inaction: what breaks if they do nothing
Two principles matter here.
First, your first ICP is a learning strategy. You are choosing the group that will teach you the fastest.
Second, your first ICP is also a distribution strategy. Some customers naturally talk to each other, hire from each other, and copy each other’s tools. Others are isolated islands. Early on, you want adjacency and gossip.
If you can describe your ICP without using the word “and”, you are probably close.
Positioning: pick the frame you want to win in
Positioning is not your tagline. It is the decision of what you want to be compared to.
Startups often lose because they accept the wrong comparison.
- If buyers compare you to an incumbent, you will be judged on completeness.
- If they compare you to a freelancer, you will be judged on price.
- If they compare you to doing nothing, you will be judged on urgency.
Your job is to choose a frame where your strengths are non-negotiable.
A simple positioning stack that stays grounded:
- Category: what type of solution is this?
- Wedge: what is the first job you do better than anyone?
- Proof: why should I believe you?
- Tradeoff: what are you not doing, on purpose?
That last line is where credibility comes from. Great positioning is always a little offensive. It implies that a common approach is wasteful, slow, risky, or outdated.
When positioning feels too safe, it is usually because you are trying to be adoptable by everyone. Early on, you want to be irreplaceable for someone.
Your first motion: choose how revenue will happen
A GTM strategy becomes real when you choose your primary motion. Not forever. Just for now.
There are three common paths, and each creates a different company.
1) Sales-led (high-touch)
- Works when the problem is expensive, political, or risky.
- You win by diagnosis, trust, and champion building.
- Your product can be imperfect if your clarity is excellent.
2) Product-led (self-serve)
- Works when time-to-value is fast and the buyer can decide alone.
- You win by onboarding, activation, and habit.
- Your marketing is the product experience, at scale.
3) Hybrid (often the real world)
- Self-serve discovery with sales-assisted conversion.
- You win by letting the product create intent, then using humans to remove friction.
- Requires discipline so you do not build two half-products.
Pick one primary conversion path and make everything serve it. You can still run side experiments, but your team needs a default.
A practical question to force the decision:
- When someone says “yes”, what did they say yes to?
A contract? A credit card? A pilot? A budget line? A procurement ticket?
If you cannot answer that cleanly, your funnel metrics will never settle.
Channels: earn attention before you buy it
Early channel strategy is less about volume and more about signal quality.
Paid acquisition is seductive because it gives you numbers. But numbers can be a lullaby. If your positioning is not sharp yet, paid will let you scale confusion.
The more durable early channels have one shared property: they compound learning.
- Founder-led outbound that forces you to hear objections
- Narrow content that attracts a specific role, not “the market”
- Partnerships where your customer already trusts someone else
- Community that is built around the problem, not your brand
A calm way to choose channels is to rank them by two criteria:
- Speed of feedback: how quickly do you learn what is wrong?
- Control: can you create results with craft, or do you need an algorithm’s permission?
Most startups should begin with one “craft channel” (high effort, high learning) and one “scale candidate” (something that could later become repeatable).
Examples:
- Craft: founder outbound + Scale candidate: SEO around a narrow use case
- Craft: design partner program + Scale candidate: integration marketplace
- Craft: webinars for a specific role + Scale candidate: referral loop from templates
Your goal is not to find the biggest channel. It is to find the channel that teaches you the fastest, then earn the right to scale.
Pricing and packaging: your GTM in numeric form
Pricing is not an afterthought. It is your strategy expressed in constraints.
A clean early approach:
- Price the first version to create commitment, not extraction.
- Package around the job-to-be-done, not your internal architecture.
- Remove choices until you have evidence that buyers need them.
In early GTM, you are buying three things with pricing:
- A serious customer who will invest attention.
- A clear qualification line for your sales motion.
- A reference story that does not sound like a bargain-bin deal.
If your price is low because you are uncertain, you will attract buyers who are also uncertain. That is rarely the audience that gives great feedback.
A practical heuristic: you want the price to be high enough that the customer expects outcomes, but low enough that they can say yes without making it a career-defining decision.
The first 90 days: a simple operating system
GTM becomes less stressful when you turn it into an operating system.
Here is a 90-day structure that works for many early-stage teams.
Weeks 1-2: clarify the narrative
- Write the ICP in plain language
- List the top 10 objections you hear
- Build one core deck or page that answers: problem, approach, proof, next step
Weeks 3-6: run a tight discovery loop
- 20 to 40 customer conversations (not “networking”, real pattern finding)
- 10 to 15 demos or working sessions
- Track verbatim language that repeats
Deliverable: a “message map” that ties pains to outcomes to proof.
Weeks 7-10: convert learning into repeatability
- Choose one primary motion and stop apologising for it
- Create a single offer that is easy to buy (pilot, annual, or self-serve)
- Write a basic sales process (stages, exit criteria, required assets)
Weeks 11-13: add one growth lever
- One channel experiment that can scale
- One activation improvement that increases time-to-value
- One case study or reference story that feels specific and earned
The meta-rule: do not start week 11 work in week 4. You have not earned it yet.
Metrics that tell the truth (and the ones that lie)
Early metrics should reduce self-deception.
The most reliable early indicators are qualitative turned quantitative.
- Time-to-first-value: how long until the user sees the “aha”?
- Activation rate: what percent reach that moment?
- Sales cycle shape: are deals dying for the same reason?
- Source of intent: do people arrive with a problem, or do you have to create it?
Be careful with metrics that look sophisticated but hide the truth:
- MQL volume without conversion quality
- Website traffic without a clear ICP signature
- Pipeline created without a consistent close rate
A simple dashboard that is honest for early GTM:
- New qualified conversations per week
- Qualified-to-next-step rate
- Next-step-to-close rate
- Median time-to-value
- Top 3 loss reasons (with counts)
If those numbers are stable and improving, you are allowed to get ambitious.
When to scale: rules for adding spend and headcount
Scaling is not a vibe. It is an arithmetic decision.
Before you add paid spend, you should be able to answer:
- What message wins?
- What audience responds?
- What is the conversion path?
- What is the payback model, even roughly?
Before you add sales headcount, you should be able to answer:
- What is the sales play?
- What proof do we show at each stage?
- What is the average deal profile that closes?
- What percent of pipeline closes when run correctly?
A disciplined scaling trigger:
- You have a repeatable way to create qualified conversations.
- You have a repeatable way to convert them.
- Your product reliably delivers the promised outcome.
If any one of those is missing, scaling will turn into morale management.
Common failure loops (and how to exit them)
Most GTM failure is not dramatic. It is subtle, and therefore easy to repeat.
Loop 1: “We need more leads” Reality: you need a sharper problem and a clearer promise.
Exit: rewrite your offer so it describes an outcome, not a feature set.
Loop 2: “We should pivot channels” Reality: your message is not landing, so every channel looks bad.
Exit: fix positioning before changing distribution.
Loop 3: “Sales is not closing” Reality: you are selling to people who cannot own the decision.
Exit: tighten the ICP to roles with budget, urgency, and risk.
Loop 4: “We need enterprise” Reality: you need higher ACV, but you are underestimating complexity.
Exit: earn your way upmarket with proof, security posture, and a real implementation story.
Loop 5: “We need a bigger product” Reality: you need a smaller wedge that creates undeniable value.
Exit: compress time-to-value and make the first win feel inevitable.
A closing note: make it feel inevitable
A strong GTM strategy has a particular texture. It feels calm.
Not because the market is easy, but because the company is not arguing with reality. The ICP is clear. The promise is sharp. The motion is chosen. The team is learning in a loop that produces truth, not theatre.
If you want one final test, use this:
- Could a smart stranger explain why you will win in two sentences?
If yes, you have the seed of a real go-to-market. Now your job is to protect it from noise, and grow it with patience.