THIS WEEK: What founders get wrong about GTM: lessons from 50+ launches

ENTREPRENEURSHIP

We've helped launch products across dozens of startups and scale-ups. We've seen launches that went viral in the first week and ones that went completely quiet despite genuine market demand. The difference almost never comes down to the product itself. Here's what founders consistently get wrong, and what the successful ones do differently.

Confusing GTM with marketing

The most common mistake: treating go-to-market as a marketing problem. GTM is a business strategy that defines who you're selling to, through which channels, with what positioning, and at what price. Marketing executes that strategy. If the strategy is unclear, no amount of good copy or paid spend will fix it.

We see this often. A founder has a genuinely useful product but can't articulate who it's for in a way that resonates with any specific audience. The solution they reach for is usually better design or more content. The real solution is sharper positioning.

Targeting too broadly, too early

Early-stage GTM requires ruthless focus. Most founders try to appeal to everyone and end up resonating with no one. The instinct makes sense: more potential customers means more revenue. In practice, broad targeting produces diluted messaging that doesn't convert.

The founders who launch well start with a hyper-specific ideal customer profile. Not 'B2B SaaS companies' but 'Series A SaaS companies in the Netherlands with a sales team of five or fewer, selling to enterprise buyers'. The specificity feels constraining until you realise that resonant messaging to a small audience converts far better than generic messaging to a large one.

Building before validating

We've seen founders spend six months building a product based on assumptions they never tested. By the time they launch, the market has moved, the problem has been solved by a competitor, or the customers they imagined don't actually buy this way.

'Not having enough, or the right, conversations with their customers is the biggest misstep we see with early-stage founders', as one GTM expert puts it. A dozen honest conversations with prospective customers before you write a line of code will tell you more than months of desk research.

Launching to the wrong people first

Your first customers are not your average customers. They're early adopters who have the problem you're solving more acutely than most, who have appetite for an imperfect solution, and who are prepared to pay for access. Finding those people first, rather than trying to reach a broad market immediately, makes the difference between a launch that builds momentum and one that goes quiet.

The best first users often come from direct relationships, not paid acquisition. Founders consistently underestimate the value of their existing network for those critical first ten customers.

Measuring the wrong things

Early-stage GTM metrics should be about learning, not just revenue. What messages resonate? Which channels produce conversations, not just clicks? Which customers stay and which churn quickly? These qualitative signals are often more valuable than conversion rate data in the first three months.

One thing we track across every launch: the language customers use to describe the problem. The most effective marketing copy almost always mirrors the exact words early customers used when explaining why they needed the product. If your messaging doesn't sound like them, it won't convert them.

What this means

GTM is an ongoing process of hypothesis, testing, and refinement. Founders who treat it that way, who expect to iterate their positioning, channels, and pricing, find traction much faster than those waiting for the perfect launch strategy to materialise.

If you're preparing to launch and want a second pair of eyes on your GTM approach, we're happy to talk.