Ask HN: Do you need go-to-market strategy at early stage?
7 comments
GTM is jargon. The first step is to stop thinking in jargon and start thinking in terms of the value you're bringing to the marketplace. You can begin by asking yourself these four questions, and paying close attention to your answers:
1. What problem am I looking to solve? 2. For whom is this problem causing enough pain that they would be willing to pay me to solve it? 3. Where can I find them? 4. What can I offer them that is far more valuable than what I'm asking in return?
Whether you call that go-to-market or something else is irrelevant. What you're doing is starting a business by reaching out to real people with something they really value, and making them an offer so good they would be crazy not to take advantage of it.
But the key here is not to listen to yourself in a vaccum, listen to your ideal customer prospects, the people you're trying to serve. They will tell you what they need, and what you can charge for it.
1. What problem am I looking to solve? 2. For whom is this problem causing enough pain that they would be willing to pay me to solve it? 3. Where can I find them? 4. What can I offer them that is far more valuable than what I'm asking in return?
Whether you call that go-to-market or something else is irrelevant. What you're doing is starting a business by reaching out to real people with something they really value, and making them an offer so good they would be crazy not to take advantage of it.
But the key here is not to listen to yourself in a vaccum, listen to your ideal customer prospects, the people you're trying to serve. They will tell you what they need, and what you can charge for it.
PM here! I have 9 years of experience across startups & big corps. Ok so here’s the thing about GTM - it’s the approach to how you will get your product in the hands of your customers, NOT how to find customer #1. Funding customer #1 is called “customer discovery” it’s how you figure how who you are building for & what problem you are solving. The data you gather & the relationships you make set you up to find those first few “earlyvangelists” who will buy what you have AS IS. GTM is what you discover/define as you develop a repeatable sales process with the first few early folks. The formal GTM comes after this, bc it’s the documentation of the validated sales hypotheses you discovered during sales validation/customer validation. The best books about this from a startup POV are by a guy named Steve Blank (“The Four Steps to the Epiphany” is great). YC uses Steve’s work heavily, I would start small first before hiring anyone - it’s critical that you know the process before you invite someone else in to tell you what you need. Hope this helps!
You always need a GTM strategy when you start. But it can be as simple as just deciding that you're going to whip up a landing page on SquareSpace and send DMs to people on Twitter. You don't need all the fancy stuff, it won't matter in the beginning anyway.
In the end it’s about knowing what problems you are solving and how people will know you are. That is the only gtm thinking you need. The other part is execution to get there
Was told Go to market strategy is necessary, need professional helps, it will guide how i run growth campaigns(cold emailing), branding(color). and that i am not able to aquire customer maybe because i don't have a go-to-market strategy, and later on followed by a invitation for deeper GTM consultation(paid).
Because i haven't successfully gotten any customer, i cannot rule-out this possibility. But i've watched almost all YC videos on how to get first customer,
1. having a GTM is never mentioned not to mention as a mandate
2. in fact, from one of the Aaron Epstein's video, a sincere, manual, email works best, with a razor sharp ICP, this doesn't sound GTM at all, it's just doing this one, hard-coded step, no strategy is needed.
I would love to hear from you folks on your take before i either go work with these GTM folks, or follow the linear, hardcore step that YC/others have recommended.
Time is money thus asking for advices.