Go To Market
Go to market with a plan and metrics.
Purpose
- A Go-To-Market (GTM) strategy identifies the best channels your company can use to reach and convert customers. GTM directly impacts margins because channels deliver differently in terms of acquisition cost and quality of customers.
- Using Responsible Innovation techniques to craft a GTM strategy will emphasize treating customers with respect and empathy and can increase margins by reducing churn and lowering customer acquisition costs.
Method
- Identify your cheerleaders.
From your customer discovery work, you’ve segmented users and have a good idea of who is going to pay for your product. Now you need to decide which segment to begin with, and how to convert those potential customers into purchasers.
Calculate an initial customer segment by analyzing the size of the segment, the likely time to convert, willingness to pay, and potential for organic growth once you have a beachhead. - Find the right channels for reaching the best customers.
Identify where you can reach each customer segment with messaging about your product, whether online or offline. In addition to email campaigns and cold reach-outs, GTM might include social media ads for consumer products, old-fashioned physical mailers for industrials, or trade shows and sponsorships for SaaS.
Find the right channels for reaching the best customers through iteration. Run small tests, and then try something else.
Often overlooked, industry events and trade shows can be incredibly useful places to find contacts for potential customer contacts. If you’re aiming for a top-down sales process, make sure you’re at the kind of event that attracts decision-makers. If you’re going bottom-up, find the individual contributors or PMs whose lives your product will change. - Learn from the no’s.
As you work on converting potential users to paying customers, track who learns about your product but doesn’t choose to purchase. GTM isn’t just about making sure people know about your product; it’s also making sure you are reaching the right people. - Fine-tune your ROI + pitch.
Understand the ROI of your GTM efforts. Track metrics related to conversion so you know what GTM channels are most effective. Consider both absolute rate of conversion and time-to-convert to better align channel strategy.
Don’t worry about scale at the start. Use your initial experiences to refine your pitch when GTM efforts expand. Learn from every sales conversation to identify the selling points that resonate with customers.
Generally speaking, if you’re doing paid ads, your earliest customers are the cheapest to acquire. Paid customer acquisition costs (CAC) will only increase from there. - Create order from chaos.
Next, track and calculate customer churn metrics. Once you’ve got a paying customer, how long do they stick around?
Select a time frame to use when tracking churn; this should relate to what your product delivers as well as how many customers you have. In the early days, the numbers will likely be too small to be statistically significant, but you can still understand trends. Consider starting with a weekly tracking of churn.
Once you know churn, you can (and should) track and calculate the revenue per customer (customer lifetime value – CLTV) per GTM channel.
In addition to churn, track how often the remaining customers are using your product. Not every product is designed to be used daily, so decide what’s right for your company: tracking Daily Active Users (DAU), Weekly Active Users (WAU), or Monthly Active Users (MAU). - Don’t be a roach motel.
Be transparent with customers about conversions and opt outs.
Some companies try to force conversion with up-front credit card information required for a free trial and then obfuscating the conversion timeline or process. Respect your customers and let them know when a free trial is about to convert. Having them purchase and then immediately drop out doesn’t look good in the long run. Optimizing for short term numbers will not make your company an enduring success. - Pilot efforts to lower CAC + iterate.
Investors care – a lot – about CAC, especially in relation to LTV. Know those numbers and understand why trend lines look the way they do. If you don’t have a good explanation, form a hypothesis and test it.
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Trap Doors
- Contacts are not for purchase
Most email lists for purchase are not worth the cost. Do your own digging, or use AI tools to help identify leads. The early GTM game is all about hustle. - “Lumpy” is not always bad
You may find you have “lumpy” sales that don’t correlate to any obvious external factors. Don’t try to hide that. - Numbers are always a story
When numbers are small, it’s tempting to think there’s not enough data to really tell a story. Don’t wait for the customer N to get huge before you look at the numbers. - A quick “no”...
A quick “no” isn’t necessarily a failure. Acquiring a customer who quickly drops just gives you a different headache.
Founders are the best salespeople in early days.
Many founders don’t consider themselves salespeople and are eager to make their first sales hire so they can go back to building. Don’t do it! As a founder, keep selling long after you think you can’t do it anymore. Like, for years.
Your first customers often bet on your product because of your reputation as founders.
Cases
Slack achieved phenomenal business app growth, going from $0 to $7 billion in less than five years through a primarily product-led GTM strategy. Their approach included a freemium model with core features that allowed users to experience product value immediately, word-of-mouth marketing where they encouraged friends to test the beta version, and an integration-first approach that made Slack sticky by embedding it into existing workflows. They targeted individual teams rather than entire organizations, allowing for organic bottom-up adoption within companies. The results were remarkable: 8,000 people signed up within 24 hours of their public launch, nearly doubling within two weeks, and reaching 265,000 active users after one year.
Sources:
Butterfield, Stewart. "From 0 to $1B - Slack's Founder Shares Their Epic Launch Strategy." First Round Review, 2024. Available here; Slack Technologies. "Not all Daily Active Users are created equal: Work is fueled by true engagement." Slack Blog, 2019. Available at.
Zoom’s GTM strategy focused on product quality and ease of use, leveraging a freemium model with generous features in their free tier. Their key insight was creating virality through their product itself - people experience Zoom’s value before signing up simply by joining meetings through shared links. When Zoom launched in 2013, they signed up 400,000 users in the first month, reached 1 million users by May 2013, and had 40 million users just two years after launch. The pandemic accelerated this growth dramatically.
Source: Gray, Catherine. “Ten years of Zoom: from start-up to global leaders.” Technology Magazine, 2021. Available here.
Canva started by identifying a specific pain point - existing graphic design tools were complicated, expensive, and intimidating for beginners. Their GTM strategy combined a freemium model with extensive content marketing, creating helpful articles around design topics that brought organic traffic. Canva has tailored its design platform for specific industries, such as Canva for Nonprofits and Canva for Education demonstrating effective vertical market penetration.
Source: Hermann, Jaryd.“How Canva Grows.” UX Planet, 2023 Available here.
Tools
Who to Enlist
Founders in similar or adjacent industries will have great GTM lessons to share.
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Early customers can help you identify the channels they use for product discovery.