Founder doing GTM

What does 'go to market' actually mean? People say GTM constantly and I still cannot define it. GTM is the whole answer to one question: how does a stranger who has your problem end up paying you and staying. That covers who you sell to, what ... Breaking into GTM 4 resources → What is an ICP and how is it different from a persona? People use both words for the same thing. An ICP describes the company you want as a customer: size, industry, what they already use, what has to be true for your product to matter. A perso... Breaking into GTM 4 resources → What is positioning in plain English, and why does everyone insist we have got it wrong? Positioning is the context you give a buyer so that your strengths look obvious. It is the answer to 'what kind of thing is this and who is it for'... Breaking into GTM 3 resources → I have never sent a cold email in my life. Where do I even start? Start with twenty companies, not two thousand. Pick people you can describe precisely (job title, company size, the specific problem you think they... Breaking into GTM 4 resources → Everyone says do content. What does inbound actually mean for a startup with no audience? Inbound means someone with the problem finds you while they are looking for an answer, and leaves you a way to follow up. For a startup with no aud... Breaking into GTM 3 resources → I have a call booked with a real prospect tomorrow. What do I do on it? Ask questions and shut up. Gong's analysis of more than half a million calls found the sweet spot is somewhere around eleven to fourteen questions,... Breaking into GTM 3 resources → I have no idea what to charge. How do I pick a first price? Find the right order of magnitude first and stop arguing about the exact number. Are you a ten dollar product, a hundred dollar product, a thousand... Breaking into GTM 3 resources → I am a founder and I have never sold anything in my life. Where do I actually start? Start by talking to twenty people who have the problem, with no intent to sell, and write down the words they use. Then go back to the ten who lean... Breaking into GTM 5 resources → We have about fifteen customers and they are all different. How do I find an ICP out of that? Do not look at who bought, look at who is happy. Rank the fifteen by usage and by whether they would be annoyed if you disappeared, then take the t... Breaking into GTM 4 resources → How do I write a one-line description of what we do that a normal person actually understands? Stop trying to be clever and name the category first. A stranger needs to file you somewhere in their head before they can care, so 'a CRM for fiel... Breaking into GTM 4 resources → I am a founder in India and my buyers are in the US. How do I get a stranger twelve time zones away to reply? Distance is not your problem, credibility is. A US buyer who has never heard of you needs a reason to believe you understand their world, so lead w... Breaking into GTM 4 resources → I write blog posts and nothing happens. What am I doing wrong? Usually one of three things. You are writing for a persona you invented instead of a real person you have spoken to, so the piece is generically co... Breaking into GTM 3 resources → Founder-led sales sounds terrifying. Why can I not just hire a salesperson? Because you have nothing to hand them yet. A salesperson needs a buyer profile, a set of common objections, a working pitch, a rough price and a de... Breaking into GTM 4 resources → What is a value metric and why does everyone say it matters more than the number? A value metric is the thing you charge for: a seat, a thousand API calls, a gigabyte, a transaction, a resolved ticket. Patrick Campbell's line is ... Breaking into GTM 3 resources →

What is the real difference between product-led, sales-led and everything in between, and which one are we? The question is not which model you prefer, it is who signs and how much they are risking. If one person can start using the product on a card with... Doing the work 4 resources → How do I build a sales deck that is not just a tour of our features? Open with a change in the buyer's world, not with your company. Name the shift, show that it creates winners and losers, describe the better state ... Doing the work 4 resources → Our product is self-serve. How do we get users without a sales team? Product-led companies get most of their new users from two places: organic search (about forty percent) and product virality (about sixteen percent... Doing the work 3 resources → My demos go well and then the deal stalls. How do I stop that? A demo that goes well and dies usually means you pitched your product instead of positioning it against what the buyer would otherwise do. April Du... Doing the work 4 resources → How do I find out what customers will actually pay without just asking them? Asking "what would you pay" gets you a polite fiction, so use structured methods instead. Van Westendorp gives you a sensible range, Gabor-Granger ... Doing the work 3 resources → How did Chargebee get its first paying customers after 14 months with none? Chargebee was founded in 2011 in Chennai by four friends, two of them from Zoho, and spent over 14 months building before a single customer paid. T... Doing the work 2 resources →

What does April Dunford say most teams get wrong about positioning? Dunford's core claim, after working with over 300 technology companies, is that positioning is not a tagline, not branding, and not messaging. It i... Leading a GTM team 3 resources → When should you add a sales team on top of a self serve product, and how do you avoid breaking it? Elena Verna's rule is that most companies do this too soon and for the wrong reasons. The signals that sales will actually help are an average orde... Leading a GTM team 3 resources → When do I stop selling myself and hire the first person, and what kind of person should that be? Hire when you have closed roughly ten to twenty deals yourself, can describe who buys and why in one paragraph, and are spending more than a fifth ... Leading a GTM team 5 resources → How do I decide which GTM roles to hire, and in what order? Hire against the bottleneck you can prove, not the org chart you eventually want. If you have more conversations than you can run, hire a closer; i... Leading a GTM team 5 resources → We are changing our positioning. How do I roll it out without breaking the pipeline mid-quarter? Sequence it: sales first, marketing second, brand last. Reps carry the new story to live deals before the website changes, because they can adapt i... Leading a GTM team 4 resources → When do I hire SDRs, and how many AEs can one SDR feed? Hire SDRs after you can point at a message and a segment that reliably produce meetings, not before. If a founder or AE cannot book meetings from c... Leading a GTM team 4 resources → How much of my pipeline should come from inbound versus outbound, and when do I add the second channel? Early on almost every B2B company grows through one dominant channel, so the wrong move is to run four at half strength. Name your primary channel,... Leading a GTM team 4 resources → How do I turn random wins into a sales process someone else can run? Write it down, then make it boring. Take your last ten closed deals and map what actually happened at each stage, then turn that into templates: a ... Leading a GTM team 3 resources → Should I price in rupees for India and dollars for everyone else? If you sell to Indian SMEs, price in rupees, include GST in the displayed number, and support UPI and domestic cards, because dollar pricing on a c... Leading a GTM team 3 resources → When does a founder stop selling personally, and why do the best ones hire two reps instead of one? Jason Lemkin's marker is that the founder closes the first batch themselves, roughly the first ten customers, because if you have not done it you w... Leading a GTM team 4 resources → How do I turn the thing that worked when I did it into an engine someone else can run? Write down what you actually do, not what you think you do. Record your own calls, listen back, and pull out the four or five moves that keep showi... Leading a GTM team 4 resources → How do I set quota, comp and ramp for my first sales team in India without copying a US template that does not fit? Anchor on your own deal data, not on a benchmark deck. A workable starting point is a quota of roughly four to five times on-target earnings, a bas... Leading a GTM team 4 resources → Should we sell to Indian SMBs, Indian enterprises, or skip India and go straight at US buyers? Pick on payback and on where your product is genuinely better, not on prestige. Indian SMB gives volume, fast feedback and brutal price sensitivity... Leading a GTM team 5 resources → Do we need to create a new category, or should we position inside one that already exists? Default to an existing category. Categories are expensive: you are paying to teach a market a new word, and you only earn that back if buyers genui... Leading a GTM team 4 resources → Should my outbound team sit in India while my buyers are in the US? Yes for most of the funnel, and this is a genuine structural advantage rather than a compromise. Indian SaaS companies have built pipeline into the... Leading a GTM team 5 resources → When do I hire a VP of Sales, and what happens to me after I do? Most founders are ready around one to two million dollars of ARR, once a couple of reps are already selling successfully and you have a process wor... Leading a GTM team 3 resources → Buyers always ask for a discount. How much do I give, and how do I stop it eating my ARR? Assume discounting will happen and price for it rather than trying to hold an imaginary line. Jason Lemkin's practical version: mark list up so a s... Leading a GTM team 4 resources → How does Datadog run bottom up and top down selling at the same time without the two fighting? Datadog does both deliberately. Individual developers install the agent and get value in about 15 minutes with no salesperson, while the sales team... Leading a GTM team 2 resources →

How did Freshworks sell to the US from Chennai without a US sales team? Freshworks started as Freshdesk in Chennai in 2010 and decided early that inbound would be the engine, not field sales. Girish Mathrubootham has sa... How the best do it 2 resources → What did Slack's "We don't sell saddles here" memo actually change about how they sold? Stewart Butterfield sent the memo to the Tiny Speck team on 31 July 2013, two weeks before Slack's preview release, and published it later. Its arg... How the best do it 2 resources → How did Zoho build a global GTM engine without ever raising money? Zoho never took outside capital, so it could never buy growth, and that constraint shaped everything. Sridhar Vembu funded the early years from the... How the best do it 4 resources → What did Postman do differently to get developers to adopt before it ever sold anything? Postman began in 2012 as Abhinav Asthana's side project, a small HTTP client he put on the Chrome Web Store to fix his own API testing pain. Adopti... How the best do it 2 resources → How did BrowserStack get to millions in revenue on word of mouth alone? Ritesh Arora and Nakul Aggarwal built BrowserStack for a pain they had felt themselves, testing sites across browser versions, and their first dist... How the best do it 2 resources → How did Zerodha become India's largest broker with no ads and no sales team? Nithin Kamath has written it plainly: Zerodha does not advertise, does not have a sales team with targets, and does not do much marketing. What it ... How the best do it 2 resources → How did HubSpot turn a marketing idea into a distribution advantage nobody could copy? Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah started from an observation, not a product: buyers were finding answers on blogs, forums and search engines long b... How the best do it 2 resources → Why do the best operators settle pricing before the product is finished? Madhavan Ramanujam's position, from Simon-Kucher and Monetizing Innovation, is that willingness to pay is a product design input, not a launch deci... How the best do it 3 resources → What do the very best GTM teams do that everyone else does not? They treat GTM as a system they design rather than a set of tactics they copy. The best teams pick one narrow group of buyers and go absurdly deep,... How the best do it 4 resources → What separates a great VP of Sales from a merely good one? A great one recruits. If they have not personally hired and carried two or three quota-carrying reps before, they are a manager of a system somebod... How the best do it 4 resources → How do the best B2B companies get positioning agreed when product, sales and the founders all disagree? They stop arguing about opinions and go find the buyer's view, because the only competitive alternative that matters is the one the prospect would ... How the best do it 4 resources → What do the companies with genuinely great inbound do differently? They pick one content strategy and commit to it for years instead of sampling five. Lenny's breakdown of content-driven growth is a useful map: edi... How the best do it 4 resources → How do the best companies raise prices without losing customers? They change price alongside a visible change in value, they tell people early, and they stage it. Grandfather existing customers for a defined peri... How the best do it 4 resources → What did Claire Hughes Johnson learn about scaling a go to market org, taking Stripe from under 200 people to over 7,000? Claire Hughes Johnson was COO of Stripe from 2014 to 2021 and had spent a decade at Google before that running business and sales teams. Her argume... How the best do it 2 resources → How do the best companies decide to change their GTM motion instead of just grinding the current one harder? They watch for the signal that effort and outcome have decoupled: same activity, worse conversion, longer cycles, more discounting. That is a motio... How the best do it 4 resources → When is it right to move upmarket, and how do the companies that pull it off actually do it? Move when the demand is systematic, not when two large logos email you. The signal is a pattern of bigger accounts arriving on their own and hittin... How the best do it 5 resources → We are an Indian company selling to global buyers. How do we position so that being from India reads as an asset rather than a question mark? Do not hide it and do not lead with it. Buyers care about outcome, support and trust, so answer those directly: publish your response times, staff ... How the best do it 5 resources → Enterprise CIOs say they find most vendors through outbound. What does great outbound into a big company look like? Zuora's CIO puts it plainly: roughly eighty percent of the startups he ends up evaluating were discovered through outbound channels, whether that i... How the best do it 4 resources → Is there a way to build demand before the product even exists? Yes, and Rocketlane is the cleanest Indian example. Srikrishnan Ganesan started a community and a podcast for his buyers nine months before the pro... How the best do it 3 resources → How do the best teams sell into large Indian and global enterprises where procurement runs the show? They treat procurement as a stage with its own owner, timeline and artefacts, not as an annoyance at the end. A CIO's process typically runs experi... How the best do it 4 resources → AI is breaking per-seat pricing. What are the best companies charging for now? The direction of travel is away from seats and towards usage and outcomes, because when software does the work, charging per human is charging for ... How the best do it 4 resources → What do Indian SaaS operators say it actually takes to win US customers while building from India? The recurring advice is that global is a starting position, not a later phase. Manav Garg built Eka out of India when SaaS was not yet a word and h... How the best do it 4 resources →