I was recently asked
I can’t seem to understand why GTM (go-to-market) isn’t something that founders prioritise – is it cognitive friction? Is it a blind spot?
From my experience operating and advising early stage startups, here’s what I think is the answer:
I think it’s that in the early days of any company, in the pre-product-market-fit phase, the product and go-to-market are intimately connected. Unless you have a product with a captive market or captive IP (both rare), you need to develop and market the product in tandem. The marketing (or sales) head and the product head need to collaborate as peers. In fact, as one.
This doesn’t sit well with most founders. They usually have a clear idea of the product they want to bring to market. It’s why they set up the company in the first place. For many, it’s a chip on their shoulder, for instance they are now creating something they were not allowed to in a previous job. Consequently there’s a clear build phase where, as someone said about Steve Jobs, the only market research is looking into the mirror every day.
In turn, this means that by the time the product is ready to be taken to market, the founder is invested not just in the idea, but in its initial manifestation. The person in charge of go to market is given a fait accompli and told to sell it. The founder is confident it’ll sell because in their minds they’ve built the perfect version one.
If the startup is lucky, this approach’ll find traction. Usually, it doesn’t.
Finally, making things worse, because how invested the founder is in the product by now, they expect it to sell, quickly. And so they expect the try-learn-improve iteration phase to be dramatically shorter than it should be. That leads to a phase of short term, tactical fixes that usually doesn’t result in cracking go-to-market channels and positioning – or any learning at all.