You’ve built the product. You pushed it live.
And now… radio silence.
No signups. No feedback. No growth.
You don’t have a bad product.
You have a broken go-to-market strategy.
If no one knows you exist, your product doesn’t either.
What Go-To-Market (GTM) really means
GTM is not marketing.
It’s not a launch checklist.
It’s not a few posts and cold emails.
A go-to-market strategy is your second product.
It’s the engine that puts your real product in motion.
Your GTM should answer three things with absolute clarity:
1. Who is this for?
Not in theory. In practice. A specific user with a pressing problem.
2. Where do they live online?
Communities, channels, workflows — not vague “personas.”
3. Why should they care now?
Not because it’s well-designed. Because it fixes something painful.
Until you can answer all three, you haven’t shipped your company — just your code.
Design Your GTM Like a Product
Think of GTM as a system you build, test, and iterate — not a one-time campaign.
Product-led growth (PLG) gives you the edge
If you’re an early-stage founder, PLG isn’t just a buzzword. It’s a strategy that gives you scale without a sales team.
Here’s how PLG makes your GTM sharper:
1. The product is the demo. Users onboard themselves.
2. The experience drives referrals. You build distribution inside the product.
3. The value speaks before your sales email does.
If your product doesn’t nudge users to take the next step — share, invite, upgrade — you’re missing out on the most scalable GTM channel you have.
Go-To-Market in Action: Real-World Examples
Slack: GTM built into the workflow
Slack didn’t run a big ad campaign. They focused on one thing:
Build a tool people invite others into.
- Users could onboard in minutes.
- Team invites were part of the core flow.
- The product created its own distribution.
Slack’s early growth was engineered by the product, not marketing.
Takeaway for founders
Make your product collaborative by default.
Growth should be triggered by usage, not external promotion.
Heap: Value before the pitch
Heap made analytics radically simple. No tracking setup. No manual events.
1. Prospects could start in seconds.
2. Product delivered insights during the trial.
3. Sales calls were about solving problems, not convincing people to try.
Takeaway for founders
Make sure your product delivers value in the first session.
PMF is easier when users already believe in the product before they speak to you.
Expensify: Build for a hated problem
Expensify didn’t try to delight users. They removed a universal pain: expense reports.
Their GTM wasn’t clever — it was obvious:
“Expense reports that don’t suck.”
That line did more than any landing page rewrite ever could.
Takeaway for founders
Don’t solve interesting problems. Solve painful ones.
And say it in the words your user would actually use.
A Lean GTM Playbook for Founders
You don’t need a sales team.
You need a repeatable process that turns strangers into users.
Here’s how to build it:
What to Do
- Identify the top 3 problems your user faces daily
- Join 5 communities where they talk about those problems
- Launch a dead-simple solution — even if it’s duct-taped
- Get feedback from the first 10 users — live calls > forms
- Build in referral or collaboration mechanics
- Track what converts and what churns
- Double down on what works and remove the rest
A working GTM strategy is a loop — not a launch moment.
Practical GTM Experiments That Work at 0→1
You don’t need a budget. You need focus.
Try these founder-tested tactics:
1. One-pager for a single user type — no homepage, just a focused landing page.
2. Direct outreach — 10 DMs/day with real pain-based language.
3. Live onboarding calls — build relationships while reducing churn.
4. Mini-use cases — show the product solving one real job in a workflow.
5. Referral rewards — give more of the product, not just discounts.
These aren’t hacks. They’re your first sales motions. Manual at first. Scalable later.
TL;DR — The launch is not the end
It’s not enough to build a product.
You need to build the system that gets it used.
A great product with no distribution dies quietly.
An average product with great GTM still gets users — and a second chance.
You don’t need noise. You need traction.
You don’t need reach. You need relevance.
You don’t need hype. You need habits.
Your GTM strategy creates all three.
Let’s keep building.
– Aasheesh