👋 Hi, it’s Kyle Poyar and welcome to Growth Unhinged, my weekly newsletter exploring the hidden playbooks behind the fastest-growing startups.
— better known as the — is one of those people I knew I’d collaborate with eventually. She’s worked with 350+ startups to build out early-stage GTM strategies and generously shares those insights in her newsletter and on LinkedIn. Maja joins Growth Unhinged to unpack how to build your GTM strategy from scratch (pro tip: you need an early customer profile before you can get to an ICP). Keep reading, then check out related zero to $1M startup case studies and my emerging startup playbook.
Many people mistake go-to-market (GTM) for “launch” or marketing in general.
However, GTM strategy is a set of activities that will propel your product to the scaling stage. The holy grail is to find at least one repeatable and scalable GTM motion that will drive your growth.
In this article, I will present three frameworks that will help you make your GTM journey faster and with less risk of failure. They are based on more than 12 years of my experience, having worked with more than 650 teams of different sizes and from various industries — including Fortune 500 companies.
Three stages of GTM fit
The go-to-market (GTM) journey can be divided into three core milestones before you can start efficiently scaling:
Stage 1: Problem-Solution Fit. OK, you have done the discovery stage and found evidence that your product actually solves the problem. You have up to five paid customers — nascent product-market fit (customers from your rolodex and social networks). You are ready to continue your journey.
Stage 2: Product-Market Fit. You start building a sustainable business model. The prerequisite is retention — that your customers return to the product and regularly use it. Not only can your product deliver value to the customer, but you can also capture some of the value to build a sustainable business. Call me strange for thinking that making money is important, especially if you are bootstrapping or operating within very limited resources 🤷
Stage 3: Go-to-Market Fit. Find at least one go-to-market motion — a predictable and scalable way to attract customers to your product so that later on you can find more product-market fits (open new markets). These are the most common GTM Motions in the tech industry and for SaaS products . If there is something else working predictably well for you (retail marketing, events…), consider adding your choices to this list.
After you understand the core milestones, let’s step up the game with three mission-critical concepts that will more likely than not emerge on your go-to-market journey. I will help you explain these concepts by offering examples from the real company’s go-to-market journey and equip you with frameworks that will help you solve this dilemma with confidence (and for confidence, we need evidence - proof that something is working).
Framework #1: Before there is an ICP, there is an Early Customer Profile
Often, teams start their “persona seeking” journey with a brainstorming exercise. As the outcome, they would define how Hans from Germany who drives Volkswagen and loves to ski is their Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). This is irrelevant if you are not selling Volkswagen accessories or skis. To avoid BS personas, you need to do a much better job in customer discovery, centering on jobs to be done. If you are selling to B2B, there is usually not one persona, but you need to understand the buying committee —a decision-making unit.
Many of you already know this and have done a fine job in defining ICP - but here is the trick: In the early stages of Go-to-Market journey, your ICP will require evidence (case studies, references, testimonials, compliance certifications and other “confidence boosters”) before happily taking your product for a spin.
Here is when Early Customer Profile (ECP) kicks in. Instead of going around chasing references from all fields of life and trapping yourself in 6-18 months sales cycles, you should rather sit down, crunch some data, talk to users, and find a segment that will have:
Burning pain point, aka the urgency to solve this problem now.
Proven willingness to pay. last time I checked, product love alone does not keep the office lights on. You need to capture some of the value you created to pay your bills.
Serve as a good reference and is willing to recommend your solution to peers.
Proximity to you where you can actually reach them and strike a deal in a reasonable time.
This is why in the problem-solution fit stage, your first customers usually come from your contact lists, VCs or advisors. More likely than not, you will have to work your way up to the ICP by securing relevant pilot projects, case studies and references that will get you foot in the door of your ICP’s fortress.
Example: DevStats is a data visualization and goal-setting tool that helps engineering leaders improve the efficiency of their teams and plan better. It connects with tools such as Jira, Github and others, which are super heavy in terms of IP.
Since many bigger teams (ICP) and teams from more data sensitive areas (pharma, medical, finance, etc.) require SOC security certifications and lots of evidence and proof that the tool will “pass their compliance”, the early customer profiles (ECP) in the next 3-6 months are teams up to 30 engineers that can make more autonomous decisions about the tooling.