Leading a GTM team

We are a marketplace, not a software product. What actually changes about GTM?

The short answer

You are running two go to markets at once, and they are not equally hard. Work out which side is scarcer (usually supply) and go get it manually before you spend a rupee on the other side, because demand arriving at an empty marketplace is worse than no demand at all. Marketplace GTM is local and dense before it is broad: win one city, one category, one campus completely, then repeat, because liquidity is a neighbourhood property and national averages hide it. Expect to do embarrassingly unscalable things early, hand matching pairs, fulfilling orders yourself, seeding listings, and be honest that this is buying liquidity with your own labour until the flywheel spins. The decision that shapes everything afterwards is how much of the transaction you control: a listings board and a full stack operated service look similar on a slide and are completely different companies to sell.

Go deeper, your way

4 hand-picked resources, 2 India-specific, 4 link-checked. Pick how you want to dig in.

📄 Article
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Why we picked it Nineteen concrete launch moves, drawn from NFX advising sixty plus marketplace startups, rather than another abstract essay about network effects. The tactics about constraining geography and time and about manually fulfilling early orders are exactly the unscalable work most marketplace founders try to skip.

19 Tactics to Solve the Chicken-or-Egg Problem and Grow Your Marketplace

From NFX by James Currier 20 min read

Open nfx.com →
📄 Article
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Why we picked it Chen ran growth at Uber and now invests at a16z, and this is his curated shelf of the twenty essays worth reading on marketplace GTM, organised by chicken and egg, trends, product strategy and network effects. Rather than send you one opinion, it gives you the reading list a marketplace leader should have already worked through.

Required reading for marketplace startups: The 20 best essays at andrewchen

From andrewchen.com by Andrew Chen 5 min read, then hours of reading

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📄 Article
✓ Link checked India Free Advanced

Why we picked it The clearest account of the choice at the heart of Indian marketplace GTM: matchmaking versus full stack. It shows what Urban Company had to build to control supply (200 plus training centres, roughly 300 rupees per hour to professionals, a 20 to 25 percent acceptance rate) and is honest that serving the top ten percent of Indian households caps your growth.

A Spotlight on Urban Company

From Tigerfeathers by Paavan Gami 30 min read

Open tigerfeathers.in →
📄 Article
✓ Link checked India Free Advanced

Why we picked it A marketplace GTM decision taken to its conclusion: dropping commission entirely in 2021 and monetising through ads and logistics instead, which looked reckless and produced the largest e-commerce platform in India by order volume. The detail that 73 percent of orders come from the discovery feed rather than search is a lesson in where marketplace demand actually gets created.

The Meesho Must Go On

From Tigerfeathers by Rahul Sanghi and Paavan Gami 40 min read

Open tigerfeathers.in →

The same ground, at another level

How what gtm actually is reads from a different seat.

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 → How do I tell whether our GTM is genuinely working or we just got lucky with a few deals? Luck looks like revenue. Working looks like repeatability. Ask whether you can name the trigger that made each of the last ten buyers start looking... Doing the work 4 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 →

Terms in this answer

Go-to-Market Marketplace Flywheel

People also ask

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 → 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 → How do I tell whether our GTM is genuinely working or we just got lucky with a few deals? Luck looks like revenue. Working looks like repeatability. Ask whether you can name the trigger that made each of the last ten buyers start looking... Doing the work 4 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 → 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 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 →
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