My Take on the Ideal Go-to-Market Strategy

If you're starting a project, you'll probably have a few questions, like how to get your product out there and how to start selling.

We'll save sales for another time and just focus on how to bring your business to market.

1. CustDev/JTBD + Soft Launch

when a small group pays for your solution: you interview clients to understand how you can make their lives easier and why they subscribe to your product.

At this stage you're not trying to actively promote your product, you're turning a hypothesis/solution into a product

You need to determine the fit of the product before you can aggressively go to market. As such, a soft launch is important to achieve this goal. Don't invest a lot of resources before you've determined who the target client will be and how to convince them that your product is worth their money

Pennylane is a startup building a competitor to Xero and Quickbooks. In building their product, they surveyed 150 founders and agency owners - their primary ТА

When they launched their product, almost all of the companies they interviewed became their paying clients.
(often, it's the target situation rather than the TA that carries weight)

2. Maximise the impact of GtM with key messages

Unless you're working on a revolutionary product (or disruptive innovation, according to Christensen) that creates a whole new kind of demand, you probably have competitors + substitutes and they already have clients.

Who'll benefit most from the unique value you create?

Remember, the key is to focus onclient value, not wishful thinking.

You shouldn't try to create a product that you think is great but doesn't meet the needs of the market. Once you understand who will benefit most from the product, the GtM will focus entirely on that audience. They are the ones who will see your value the quickest and will be the easiest to convert into clients

So you've done your research, you've got a few clients after a soft launch, and you're great at articulating what's unique about your product.

Now it's time to start selling!

3. When does GtM end and what happens next?

One thing's for sure: you can set targets, but you need more than one metric to say with certainty that you should move from GtM to growth.

My definition of the end of GtM and the beginning of growth is when a MtM growth rate >10% for several months in a row and ROMI >2x

Most GtM companies follow a J-curve. They succeed first (soft launch), then struggle to get to the next stage (GtM), before finding a stable cost structure and starting the growth stage.

You should try 3-4 channels during your GtM, but the most successful startups focus almost exclusively on 1-2 that they absolutely own. Your goal is to determine which one delivers the best ROMI for the volume you need

This is how you hit the bull's eye in your growth, as G. Weinberg, founder ofDuckDuckGo, explains in his book Traction. The main outcome of the GtM phase will be the confirmation of an effective scaling strategy, with ad revenues and returns growing.
It can then be said that this phase is complete and the company is ready for the growth phase

Once you've gone through all this, it's worth moving on to retention issues.