Startups at all stages need a solid go-to-market (GTM) strategy.

You know, a plan to get your product / service in front of customers and convince them to buy.

Investors want to see how savvy you are with distribution. But even companies without investors need to think about how they’re going to bring their product into the market and acquire customers.

But how to create a GTM strategy if you’re still pre-seed and don’t have much traction yet? Or if you're still figuring out your product/market fit?

Good questions. Let's dive in.

Every good GTM strategy has two main parts

1. Qualitative: deeply understand your customers
2. Quantitative: reach your customers at scale

Let’s start with #1.

Know your customers insanely well

In order to sell a product, you have to deeply understand who you're selling to. Who has the problem you’re solving? Who will benefit from your solution?

Here are 4 questions to ask that will help you identify your customer persona:

• Who is your target demographic?
• What is their specific problem?
• Why do they have this problem?
• What does a day-in-the-life look like for this person?
• How does this person currently solve their problem today?

You should be able to answer all these questions (and more) in extensive detail. The goal is to know your customer so well that you could easily play their character in a musical. 🎶

Bad customer persona: Women who are between 20-45 years old.

Good customer persona: Women between 20-45 years old who work in banking and have no time. Makes 6 figures.

Great customer persona: Women between 20-45 years old who work in banking and have no time. She makes 6 figures and has disposable income to invest in X and buy Y things. She power-eats lunch at her desk. Reads Benzinga and the Skimm for fun. She uses A, B, and C apps. And solves this problem by doing D, E, F… etc.

Paint a vivid portrait of your customer. The more specific, the better. You want to know them better than they know themselves.

If you’re interested in a book on customer development, I’ve loved reading The Mom Test: How to talk to customers & learn if your business is a good idea when everyone is lying to you.

How will you reach this customer at scale?

Once you know who your customer is, you should have ideas of how you plan to acquire these customers at scale.

“At scale” means acquiring way more customers without needing tons more time or money.

It’s ok if your earliest ideas about acquiring customers at scale aren’t home runs… but you should have some ideas.

Bad answer: I’ll get customers through word of mouth and SEO.

Why is this bad? This response doesn’t describe a reliable and repeatable process.

Good answer: I’ll send out referral codes to people who live in X zip code. I believe in this idea because I gave out 10 codes at the local train station and that worked well.

Why is this good? You tried an experiment. It worked on a small scale. Now you’re experimenting to see if you can make it work on a large scale.

Great answer: I’m already acquiring customers and here’s how. I’ve only spent $20 so far but I drove 40 people to our waitlist through direct mail. That waitlist receives a sequence of 5 emails about our product, and converts at 20%.

Why is this great? You tried an experiment. That experiment proved successful. You can scale this acquisition channel by going harder on direct mail to acquire more leads for the waitlist. Or you can dedicate resources to increasing the conversion rate of the waitlist.

A note of caution

No matter how brilliant your plan is, you'll most likely have to pivot once you're ready to scale up in a big way.

Next week we’ll share why this is... and what you can do about it.

Let’s wrap it up

A good GTM strategy should convey:

• A strong understanding of your customer persona (qualitative)
• A detailed plan on how to get this customer repeatedly (quantitative)

If you have these things, you will be ahead of 99% of the decks that we see.