Read time: 5 minutes

Welcome back to our mini-series on raising from a point of strength! In the previous lesson, we explored the contrasting journeys of two startups—one that raised funds but struggled to gain revenue traction in their startup due to a lack of go-to-market fundamentals and another that bootstrapped, laid strong GTM foundations, and thrived.

Today, we'll dive deeper into one of the foundational aspects of building a successful startup: breaking down the Go-To-Market (GTM) strategy.

You have probably heard this term too many times before…”Go-To-Market/GTM”, or when you hear about it you go “Sure, it’s marketing, sales, and customer/user retention and expansion”, which is right…on a high-level, but have you ever really understood the real meaning and importance of this, and how having strong GTM foundations can make or break your startup?

Understanding what it consists of and getting familiarized with its components is something that many founders miss or don’t fully understand, leading to critical mistakes in their startups that have an everlasting negative impact on the founder’s ability to ever be able to raise capital from a point of strength.

If you are a founder starting off on your journey, you can use what you learn here as your compass to follow the right path to success. If you are a founder in the middle of your journey and have hit a “roadblock” in your path, this can help you identify the real problem to then apply the right solution and continue on your path to success.

Let’s get to it!

What does Go-To-Market mean and why does it matter?

There’s nothing “new under the hood” when it comes to the meaning of Go-To-Market, it means exactly that, how will I get my product/service into the market? However, once we peel off the first layer we can begin to understand the intricacies of what GTM really is…

Many founders think that if they build a great product, customers will come…if you know of a founder who succeeded with that please capture him/her for research since we would like to learn how to replicate that. For those founders that don’t have those superpowers, a sound GTM strategy should help you avoid that mistake and give you a clear picture of:

1. Who is my ICP?

2. How can I reach and find my ICP?

3. After reaching them, how can I convince them to use my product/service?

4. How can I convert them into paying customers/users?

5. Once they pay for my product/services, how can I retain and increase the revenue that I’m getting from them?

6. How can I replicate 1-5 in different channels?

If you have clear and concise answers to this you’ve already won half the battle since you have a plan that you can follow and execute that should help you conquer your SOM (Serviceable Obtainable Market) and SAM (Serviceable Addressable Market) in the early stages of your startup and will set the foundations to then go on and conquer your TAM (Total Addressable Market).

Not only that, but a concise GTM strategy can also ease things when looking for investment, better when you use real data from the market, and best when you have initial traction and revenues since you can raise from a point of strength since the investment will not be used to “discover what could work” but to fuel a growth machine ready exponentially grow!

Well, what’s the other half of the battle you wonder? The other half consists of knowing how to break down your GTM strategy and understanding how to tie it to the right KPI metrics to enable you to identify the bottlenecks in your business to then implement the right strategies to unlock revenue growth.

So simplest way to break down your GTM is by splitting it into a funnel.