Most startups don’t have a marketing problem. They have a “who exactly are we selling this to?” problem. 🎯

That was one of my strongest takeaways from Ahmedabad Startup Day at i-Hub Gujarat — a room where conversations moved quickly from ideas to the uncomfortable realities of taking them to market.
We spoke a lot about GTM strategy, marketing, AI for business, and the mistakes founders make while trying to grow.
And one pattern kept coming back:
👉 Building first. Validating later.
👉 Targeting “everyone” and converting no one.
👉 Confusing visibility with demand.
👉 Scaling acquisition before understanding retention.
👉 Copying a competitor’s GTM without understanding why it works for them.

Because GTM isn’t simply “How do we market this?”
It starts much earlier:
Who has the problem? → How painful is it? → Who makes the decision? → Who actually pays? → Why should they switch? → Which channel reaches them? → What makes them stay?

Get that chain wrong, and even great marketing can become an expensive way to discover that your assumptions were wrong. 📉
Another conversation I particularly enjoyed was around AI for business. 🤖

The opportunity isn’t simply adding “AI-powered” to another product.
It’s asking where AI can genuinely improve customer intelligence, personalization, decision-making, operational efficiency, sales or the economics of growth.

Coming from a strategy + marketing + analytics lens, these are exactly the conversations I enjoy — where data meets customer psychology and eventually meets the market. 🧠 × 📊 × 🚀

Walked out with one thought:
Don’t ask how to scale your startup too early.

First ask — what exactly have you earned the right to scale?

Kudos to the teams and community behind Ahmedabad Startup Day at i-Hub Gujarat by eChai Ventures for creating a room where founders could discuss not just what worked, but what didn’t. 🙌

For the founders here: what’s one GTM assumption you believed initially that the market proved wrong? 👇

#GTM #GoToMarket #StartupStrategy #MarketingStrategy #AIForBusiness #BusinessStrategy #GrowthStrategy #Startups #AhmedabadStartups #StartupEcosystem