Surviving the Chasm
A B2B Founder's Guide to GTM from idea to PMF
When most founders think about go-to-market (GTM), they imagine perfectly orchestrated outbound campaigns, or sales teams crushing quotas. But buried beneath the AI market maps and the unending lists of growth hacking tips lies the unglamorous yet crucial 0 to 1 journey.
How you build, position, and sell your product is forged in this span of time between idea and product market fit. Most companies won’t survive this chasm. The ones that do will find themselves set off on a course that is increasingly difficult to deviate from, as their initial foundation only becomes more and more solidified.
No company journey is identical, and a founder will always have to make decisions for themselves and their company on a case by case basis. But given the disproportionate impact of this stage for early startups, we felt it worthwhile to dive into the strategies we’ve seen work.
We break this journey into 5 stages:
the pre-sell
design partners
your first customers
building a growth engine
scaling beyond founder-led sales
1. The Pre-Sell
A common founder mistake is spending months building a product you think your customer wants, only to go live and find you’ve missed the mark. The best way to avoid this is to find buyers before you build your product and then deliver a product you know those buyers want.
This starts at the ideation phase. Before you write a single line of code, you should have conducted dozens (and for best in class companies that number is often closer to hundreds) of customer discovery calls. Your job in these earliest conversations is to understand pain points in an open ended fashion. Too often founders waste this precious early time with customers trying to pitch their product, instead of listening to what their customers actually need. Start with open ended questions instead of leading ones - e.g. replace “would you use this product” with “what would make your life easier?”.
A consultative approach works well to identify a clear problem; then you can begin to scope out a hypothetical solution. As you do, maintain a relationship with your more involved customers to help you answer increasingly granular questions about your early use-case:
What value does your product create for the customer?
What processes would it be replacing, and how do those processes work today?
Who is the economic buyer and who is the user?
What would their budget be for this type of a product? Where does the budget come from? What do they spend on similar tools? How much do they spend trying to solve this problem today?
What would the purchasing journey look like for this product?
How would your product directly contribute to achieving the economic buyers’ and users’ OKRs?
What minimum requirements (integrations, security) would they need to actually go live with this product?
Eventually, try and bring your most engaged potential customers on as design partners. This means they will commit (usually through an LOI) to provide a certain amount of feedback as you build and to trial the product once it reaches a minimum viability. This is an important step for making sure you’re building a product people actually want. As a general rule when it comes to B2B products - if you can’t get a customer to agree to trial what is essentially a bespoke product, then you likely aren’t solving a big enough pain point for them.
To accomplish this, figure out how to showcase your product's potential value to early design partners while minimizing actual development work. Many successful founders secure commitments using nothing more than Figma mockups and a compelling deck, allowing them to demonstrate their conceptual framework without committing to a final product design.
Ideally your LOI will include commitments to milestones and pricing. Milestones are important because they give you clear, upfront expectations about what a minimum viable product would look like. Pricing is important not because you care about revenue but because it proves willingness to pay. It is very easy to be enthusiastic about a product when it’s free - putting a dollar value in your LOI forces your customer to honestly assess the value of the product and requires them to go through the process of requesting budget, which validates buy-in from the economic buyer in addition to just the user. While discussing pricing upfront is uncomfortable, just remember it will save you the much bigger discomfort of spending months building a product only to find that no one is actually willing to pay for it.
Often this looks like a pilot period that then converts to a large discount on an agreed upon price. This arrangement is an effective option because the customer knows they’re getting a large discount (appropriate given that they’re sharing their time and knowledge, and taking on the risk of dealing with a young company) but you still have some evidence of what they believe a fair full price would be. This will allow you to better understand the size of the opportunity and begin to evaluate unit economics for your product. ACVs (average contract value) will determine a great deal about your product and GTM strategy, so effectively assessing your product’s likely near-term and long-term ACV is an extremely valuable exercise at this stage.
Going into this arrangement it's crucial to properly set expectations. For a more mature product (and especially when selling to enterprise customers) pilots typically serve as the initial implementation phase, with a very high bar for execution. For design partners, the expectation must be clearly set that you are building alongside them, so customers aren't disappointed by a subpar product experience.
Your main focus in the pre-selling stage is to clearly identify a large enough problem affecting a large enough number of customers for the solution to be a commercially viable product. While rapid iteration is crucial once you begin building, in this phase you can save yourself tons of time and money by investing upfront in customer research and market validation before rushing to development. Don’t spend 5 months building a product only to learn something that could’ve been unearthed in a single well-structured conversation. Instead, use this time to carefully validate and fine tune all of your assumptions about the product and your customer’s needs before setting off on a particular course.
2. Design Partners
You have a carefully vetted thesis and a handful of engaged design partners - now it’s time to build.
Your goal in this phase is to build a product that solves a real, valuable pain point that you know a majority of your potential customers will want to adopt. The best way to do this is to work with a handful of design partners who are representative of your broader set of customers, ensuring you're building features that serve your broader market rather than creating one-off solutions.
Keep your initial customer batch small until you've validated your product to keep from spreading yourself too thin and prevent burning early customer relationships with a subpar experience. The right number depends on how much support your customers need and where the incremental learning from new customers stops (most B2B companies land in the 3-5 zone for this first batch).
Come up with a pre-determined structure for how you’ll work with your design partners to make sure everyone’s on the same page and to get the most out of your customers’ time. Often teams will set up meetings on a regular cadence (e.g. a standing weekly or bimonthly meeting) to ensure consistent feedback. Share a clear agenda ahead of time and be intentional around what kind of feedback you’re hoping to get in each meeting (internal interviews, onboarding, watching product usage etc).
This period is all about understanding a broad set of customers’ needs and ensuring you’re building a product that actually meets them. It also has the added benefit of creating customers that feel invested in your product and your success, something that can be very useful down the line when you need customer references or advocates.
During this phase you should aim for rapid product iteration based on real usage and feedback. A common failure point is founders building for weeks to perfect a feature a customer insists they want, only to ship it and find it falls flat. Actual customer feedback and usage is the only real source of truth. So ship and iterate quickly even if your product is a little clunky. Otherwise you’ll waste too much time stuck in the world of the theoretical.
3. Your First Customers
As you start to become confident in your product and feel that your initial design partners are becoming more self-sustaining, it’s time to quickly start broadening out to your first batch of true customers.
The phased roll out is intended to help you pace yourself and ensure you’re still able to understand and respond to customers’ needs, while beginning to learn more about how to reach and acquire customers at scale. Your second batch of customers should feel similar to your design partners in terms of how you communicate with them, but with a slightly more market ready product and less hand holding.
At this stage most of these customers will likely be coming from your industry contacts (rich from your extensive customer discovery), investors, personal network, and - if you’re really hitting it out of the park - design partner referrals. As you grow it’s preferred if at least some portion of these customers are net new relationships, as customers sourced exclusively from your personal network can create an artificially positive impression of customer pull.
If possible, structure these early customers similar to your design partners - with pilots that automatically convert after a certain amount of time. This way you won’t have to renegotiate once the pilot’s ended and you won't waste your time on a customer that wants to see the product but isn’t ready to pay.
Initially you can take everything you learned from your design partners about value proposition and buying journey and refine it into a more targeted pitch. As you onboard new customers pay close attention to what resonates with different customer personas and what the buying journey looks like for each. Ask yourself questions like:
What messaging seems to land with different types of customers? What are common concerns?
Who makes effective champions versus decision-makers?
What does a typical sales cycle look like for different kinds of customers? What causes a deal to close faster vs drag out?
How do they think about budget allocation for this type of product?
When and where do they make buying decisions for your product?
How do they measure success for your product?
Document the answers meticulously and constantly be iterating on both messaging and product in response. By the end of this stage, you should have a clear picture of your ideal customer persona (or personas), which segment or persona you want to focus on first, and solid theories on how to sell to those segments/personas effectively.
A key pitfall at this point in time will be around your ability to stay disciplined with customer selection. Many startups say yes to any potential customer no matter the circumstance, but the truth is a bad customer can be more damaging than no customer. Common types of customers that can derail your progress include:
The flashy enterprise deal - while large ACVs and brand names can be appealing, these customers can be too distracting and resource intensive to service effectively as an early startup. Prioritizing one big customer over numerous smaller ones puts all your eggs in the basket of a contract that could evaporate overnight (what feels like a large commitment to you could be a drop in the bucket to them), and prevents you from spending time learning how to acquire and service a broader array of customers.
Custom requests - be wary of customers that require a high degree of custom build or hand holding that is not going to scale to your other customers. Archaic data structure and they need custom integrations to make it work? Pass. Special features for their one off product segment? Pass. Behind the times management team that expects you to act as an inhouse engineering team? Pass pass pass.
Non scalable ICP - if someone is using your product but is not representative of a broader ICP, be cautious. E.g. don’t spend resources supporting a mom and pop shop when you already know your core customer is mid-market.
Of course, experimentation is necessary to figure out your ICP and as an early stage startup you’re going to be building a lot of products/features as customers request them. The goal is to maximize learning and to limit collateral damage. For each potential customer or customer request, ask yourself:
Can we support their technical requirements while building our core product?
Can we handle their ongoing support needs?
Is this a customer profile we may be able to sell to repeatedly?
Is this customer’s requirements or feature request something that is common across our customer set?
Do we know we can provide value to this customer with our current product?
If you take on a customer and eventually decide one of these qualifiers is no longer true, don’t be afraid to fire them. The lost revenue is not as important as the time you’ll lose working with a customer that’s not going to scale or will distract you from your core ICP.
4. Building the Growth Engine
Once you’ve gotten your first few batches of customers humming and you feel comfortable your product is scaling, it’s time to start turning your initial insights and learnings into a growth engine.
Often founders jump ahead to hiring an SDR at this point in time, but in our experience it’s almost always better for the founder to lead sales until they’ve figured out at least one or two scalable GTM motions (often around ~$1mn in ARR). This is because you need to be able to see firsthand what is resonating with customers and be able to iterate in real time to have any hope of building a scalable GTM machine (not to mention your actual product, which is still very much under construction).
This stage is all about experimentation - figuring out what GTM strategy works for your company. Once you start to hire a sales team they are going to 1) perpetuate the GTM strategy you initially set up and 2) distance you from your customer. Once set in motion both of these things can be hard to unwind. So now is your time to go wild trying things and learning as much as you can with limited repercussions, so that you have all the information you need to build the foundation of a solid strategy going forward.
We break down the “growth engine” into 4 potential topics, all of which will need experimentation to refine: GTM motion (how you sell), buyer’s journey (who you sell to), channels (where you sell), and pitch/positioning (what you sell). The goal is to effectively align your strategy and GTM motion with the value your product provides.
GTM motion
Most companies utilize some combination of different GTM motions (e.g. inbound, outbound, PLG, ABM) to acquire their customers. You can find a great breakdown of the different motions here. To decide which motion may work for your company you need to broadly answer the question: How does my customer make this purchasing decision and what action can I take to influence it?
The answer to this question depends on what kind of product you’re selling to what kind of a user. For example, if you’re inventing a category or selling a product that’s never been built before, you may need to do a fair amount of audience education before anyone even knows to consider your product. Conversely, if you’re selling a product in a well known category it may be more about how to get in front of the economic buyer at the moment they make their decision.
As a general rule, the higher the ACV the higher-touch your sales approach needs to be, and the simpler your product the more efficient you can be in your GTM. A product that an individual can choose to purchase and use on their own requires a single touch point. A complex 6 or 7 figure contract will likely require multiple touch points in the company to get over the line. Again, most products require (or benefit from) some combination of GTM motions.Buyer’s journey
The buyer’s journey has to do with how you demonstrate your value proposition (as quickly as possible) to your ICP. This usually starts with understanding who at the org has to see your product to understand its value (whose OKRs are getting impacted) and how that value gets communicated to the economic buyer (assuming it’s not the user). Then deciding how and when you get in front of both those stakeholders and how much education they need to understand your value.
For example, for a simple product, making a demo publicly available may be enough for a customer to understand the value and sign up for it themselves. For a more complex product, you may find you need a discovery conversation to make sure you give a demo that’s tailored to their specific needs. Or you may find that 1x1 onboarding is a requirement for a customer to be able to get value out of their product and continue to use it, vs other products may be intuitive and entirely self-serve.
Playing around with how you structure the buyer’s journey for different types of users and customer personas (and there will likely be more than one) at a small scale can be a very effective way to nail your funnel when you start to scale your GTM down the line.Channels
You’re likely going to have some thesis around where your customers live but it’s important to experiment. Different companies, buyers, and industries can have vastly different success rates on LinkedIn, Twitter, or TikTok, while for some you’ll find deals happen almost exclusively in person at trade shows or conferences, or that your best angle is via working with a trusted channel partner. For more complicated sales-processes you’ll likely be leveraging a combination of channels to hit different stakeholders.
It is especially important to figure out if there are opportunities for you to increase the surface areas of your sales motions, e.g. so that you are selling 1 to many. This can mean selling into industry-specific ecosystems (associations, trade groups, etc), investing in community led growth, exploring platform integrations or channel partnerships, or figuring out how to turbo-charge customer referral dynamics. Often cracking these types of channels is what allows a company to break out and enter hyper-scaler mode.
Pitch and positioning
Perhaps the simplest but most impactful of these categories - pitch and positioning refers to how you position your product - what are you selling? Some of this is product driven but much of it is narrative. Who are you competing with and how do you want your customer to view you in relation to them? What story and even what jargon resonates for which buyer? Play around with messaging and begin to codify your pitch.
As you start experimenting in these areas, set up a basic sales funnel and track conversion rates throughout your pipeline. As people drop out, understand why to better understand what part of your funnel needs tuning. Are people dropping out after your first call? Maybe you’re not getting in front of the right people, or maybe you’re pitching the right people but your messaging is not conveying your value. You can also use this time to further crystallize your ICP/add to your customer signals, and then use that definition to prioritize and qualify leads so you’re spending your time effectively. E.g. maybe your ICP is “robotics companies” but as you iterate you further refine your highest intent customer to be “robotics companies that have raised a Series B but have not yet hired a head of data science.”
The goal of this stage is to create a structured sales process that you can eventually hand over to a sales team. This will ensure consistency and predictability in your sales going forward and will provide you with data so you can continue to improve your methods over time.
Often you will have different playbooks or even GTM motions for different customer personas and segments. While it may make sense to eventually target multiple customer segments (e.g. mid/enterprise, top-down/bottom-ups etc), it’s usually a good idea to begin with one so as not to spread yourself too thin and so you can perfect a single gtm motion before you move onto another.
By the time this period of experimentation is over you’ll want to be driving repeatable sales yourself, and know the approximate answer (or have educated theories) to questions like:
Who is your ICP?
What is the best way to get in front of them?
Who are your core buyers within those customers and what does their purchasing decision look like?
What is the quickest way to move someone through your funnel/the quickest path for you to demonstrate value?
What is likely to cause someone to drop out of a sales process or churn off your product?
How long should it take for a customer to move through your sales cycle?
What is your pitch/messaging?
How do you demonstrate ROI to your ICP (maybe you even have a case study or two)?
Finally, it’s important to couch all this knowledge in the fundamental economics of your product - comparing what people are willing to pay for it (ACV or ARPU and LTV) with how much it costs you to acquire and service those customers (CAC), and ensuring that you can sustainably sell and service this product. Remember that your first cohort of customers will always be your best customers (by definition they are the ones that most feel the pain and are self-selecting into using your product) so if your unit economics are not sustainable now, they likely never will be.
5. Scaling Beyond Founder Led Sales
Now that you have a solid understanding of what your GTM is going to look like, it’s time to scale it beyond yourself. The right time to do this is different for different companies, but a good rule of thumb is when you have an actionable GTM playbook/structured sales process, and you yourself have become the biggest bottleneck to growth.
What type of hire you start with (S/BDRs, AEs, full-stack sales professionals, CSM, solutions engineer, growth marketing, etc) depends on where you’re seeing the biggest bottlenecks in your funnel, what kind of customer you’re selling into with what kind of motion, and what your core skill sets are that you may need to supplement.
While many founders’ instincts are to hire a Head of Sales at this point, bringing on someone more junior is usually the more successful approach. Most startups at this stage need a hustler who can take the founder’s playbook and go grind through outbound to increase top off tunnel, whereas a senior person may come in with a preconceived notion for what will work and may be reluctant to go pound the pavement. Exceptions to this rule could be in relationships-based industries where a more seasoned/established leader could be more effective but even here, you’ll often get as much or more value out of bringing someone on as a consultant or an advisor as you would a full-time employee.
Finally, for junior sales hires it often works well to hire in pairs when possible. Having more than one person in a role creates a healthy level of competition, makes it easier to evaluate each individual’s performance, and introduces redundancy into your sales team (the machine won’t grind to a halt if one leaves). Set quotas based on your own conversion rates, remembering that founders usually close at 2x higher rates than first sales hires.
As your initial sales team gets up and running you can hire in around them to complement, leaning on fractional hires when necessary (e.g. a contract writer to churn out white papers, or a social media intern to manage company accounts). Once first hires ramp and are reliably hitting quotas you can expand the team, eventually bringing on (or promoting from within) a sales leader who can help you navigate establishing and scaling a sales team around the new GTM playbook.
At which point it’s safe to say you’ve officially reached the “1.” :)