How to Create a GTM Strategy for Start-ups

Every time I introduced business and entrepreneurial concepts to my university students, I’d ask them how they’d promote their product or service.

Their response?

“If you build it, they will come…”

True story.

Unfortunately, real life isn’t Field of Dreams, and we aren’t about to see the 1919 White Sox magically walk onto the field.

The harsh reality is that great products don’t sell themselves. The successful start-ups eventually learn this truth and hammer out a go-to-market strategy, even if it takes them a bit of trial and error.

The journey from brilliant idea to product-market fit is filled with twists and turns that demand more than wishful thinking.

That’s why we’re taking a look at how start-ups can create a GTM strategy, as well as some of the tools you can use.

What is a go-to-market strategy?

A go-to-market (GTM) strategy is a detailed plan that outlines how you’re going to launch and sell a product, including how you’ll reach out and pitch your product to customers.

A strong GTM strategy begins by identifying a problem in the market you want to solve and how you’ll position your product as the solution.

Your GTM should answer these questions:

• What problem are you solving for customers?
• What are you offering as the solution? 
• Who is your ideal customer? Why will they want your product?
• Where and how will you sell? Why choose these channels and tactics?
• How will you measure the product’s success?

Keep in mind that a GTM strategy is not the same as a marketing strategy. A marketing strategy focuses on long-term brand goals while a GTM strategy is more focused, short-term, and product-specific.

As you can see, a GTM strategy covers more than just marketing. It also addresses other key elements like sales and distribution tactics.

Who needs a go-to-market strategy?

Short answer? Anyone launching a product.

Long answer?

If you’re a startup looking for investments, a GTM strategy is essential as most investors will want to see one. The same applies to startup accelerators like Y Combinator, which typically ask questions on your application like:

• Who is your target market?
• Where does your revenue come from?
• How will you make money?
• How do users find your product?

Investors and accelerators will use this information to assess the riskiness or promise of your startup.

GTM plans also go beyond getting financed. If you’re bootstrapping your startup, a GTM approach will help target your efforts and avoid costly mistakes.

That’s why even established businesses like Coca-Cola or Pepsi create a GTM plan, especially when they:

• Launch a new product to a new or existing market
• Enter a new market with a new or existing product
• Merge with another company and/or rebrand
• Change their business model

However, startups and established businesses approach their GTM strategies differently.

In the end, go-to-market for startups is about achieving ambitious goals with scarce resources while moving fast and building from scratch.

Why do startups need a strong GTM strategy?

The more limited your resources are, the smarter you need to be when allocating them. That’s why start-ups need to iron out a solid go-to-market strategy instead of just jumping in.

A good GTM plan for startups unlocks these benefits:

• Fewer costly mistakes – Put your money where it will get you users. Large companies can afford costly mistakes, but start-ups can burn through their runway, forcing them to pursue a new funding round and increasing pressure.
• Biggest impact when you launch – An early launch isn’t always better. You’ll want to find a sweet spot between rolling out your product early (at risk of losing customers because it lacks key features) and polishing it for too long (and giving competitors a chance to beat you to market).
• Sustainable momentum – Successful startups grow a “long tail” of sales where there’s excitement around your product when it launches, followed by more sales with each successive month. This kind of momentum convinces investors that your initial success wasn’t mere chance, and they give you cash to keep going.
• Resource optimization – You can achieve a lot with a little if you plan carefully and put your resources where they’ll make the most difference. For example, instead of supporting all sales channels, you focus on a few and only expand when ready.
• Path for long-term success – You might succeed by chance once, but you need a strategy to maintain success over time.
• Product-market fit – Product-market fit can make or break a start-up. You might have the best product in the world, but your start-up will go belly-up if no one’s paying for it. GTM strategies allow you to test and refine your PMF hypotheses.

Elements of a GTM strategy

GTM strategies for start-ups don’t need to be lengthy or elaborate. Even Y Combinator doesn’t expect start-ups to have a complete picture of their GTM when applying for YC.

That said, a start-up’s GTM should at least cover the essential elements.

Using AiSDR as an example, here’s a possible GTM strategy that a start-up might create.

Target market & audience segments

This is where you define the problem you solve and the audience for your product: Are you selling to startups, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), or large corporations? Are you targeting specific industries like software-as-a-service?

It might be tempting to mention the total market size for products like yours, such as “the global sales software market was $100 billion in 2024.” But that can come across as over-generalizing and unrealistic, which could put off investors instead of impressing them.

When in doubt, stick to a segment you can realistically target (“sales automation software tools market for North American startups and SMEs is about $10 billion”). 

Or you can leave out the total addressable market estimate entirely and have a professional investor figure that out from your description of the target segments.

But if you can create a basic estimate, it shows you’ve done your homework as a founder.

If you’re targeting multiple segments, identify one of them as primary: the one that can benefit most from your product.

Buyer persona(s)

A buyer persona is a model of the person who’s likely to make the purchase decision when you start reaching out to your ideal customers.

A buyer persona should include enough information about the person’s demographics and buyer behaviors (e.g. which social media channels they’re active on) so that you can answer questions like “Who are they?” and “What’s the best way to approach them?” 

These personas should also outline their goals, challenges, and pain points to answer the question, “Why will they want this product?”

If you’re an AI startup, you might also want to approximate the person’s likely level of AI literacy. Since AI tools are still in their infancy, not all buyers will understand or know how they fit into their company. In this situation, you’ll need to invest in content that can drive an informed decision.

If you’re targeting multiple customer segments, you’ll want to make separate buyer personas for each segment. For instance, you can create Persona 1 for startup founders and Persona 2 for SDR team leaders at large companies.

Market positioning/unique value proposition (UVP)

In this section, explain what sets your product apart, compressing it into a single sentence or a few bullet points.

It will be the shortest element in your GTM, but it might actually take you the longest to write.

Product positioning/brand messaging

This is where you outline your brand communication, touching on:

• Key messaging
• Product positioning
• Tone of voice

For the internal version of your GTM (after all, the GTM you show investors should be polished), you might even specify which message frameworks you’ll use or which sales leaders you want to emulate, like Justin Michael or Yurii Veremchuk.

Pricing model

Explain to your investor how your product will make money. What price will you set? How does it compare to similar offers in the market?

Most likely, you’ll use some kind of subscription model with tiers for companies with different needs.

Whether to include any free plans or not is a tricky question. On one hand, you lose revenue by giving away your product. On the other, you attract more users who can later upgrade to paid plans. To be most efficient, we recommend setting a free demo/trial period rather than a basic free plan.

If your product is new to customers (like an AI SDR to SDR team leads who’ve never heard of it before), a free trial can be a great way to educate them about it while also convincing them of the product’s benefits. 

This lets them take it for a spin rather than hear about it a hundred times. However, the drawback of free trials is that they need to deliver immediate value, otherwise free trials won’t turn into sales.

You can also include revenue goals and projections in your pricing model, but make sure to keep them realistic.

Sales strategy and channels

This one is self-explanatory: outline the tactics and channels you’ll use to sell your product.

Marketing strategy and channels

Outline your marketing channels and tactics to drive growthin this section. These should complement your sales channels and strategy.

For example, it might be LinkedIn ads targeting founders and sales leaders as a marketing tactic and LinkedIn direct outreach as a sales tactic.

But more channels isn’t always better as you don’t want to spread your budget too thin. In the end, it’s not about how many different channels you use, but how relevant each of them is for your prospects and how efficiently you use it.

Budget and resource allocation

As the saying goes, money makes the world go round. And this is where you need to outline how much money you need to put your plan into action and how you’re going to spend it.

Ultimately, your goal is to determine which activities will generate the most revenue-driving impact while staying within your financial constraints.

You’ll also want to calculate your burn rate and runway, which is the amount of time you can operate before running out of cash (i.e. runway = current cash reserves / monthly burn rate).

Performance indicators

State your success metrics and your goals. You want to set goals for adoption, sales, and engagement metrics.

Steps for creating a GTM strategy

Developing your go-to-market strategy requires a meaningful investment of time and effort, but fortunately you can design and power your GTM with several different tools.

Define your problem and target audience

Your first step is doing audience and market research. 

You’ll want to find the answers to these questions:

• Who is your target audience? 
• What can you learn about them? 
• Where and how can you connect with them?

Here are a few tools you can use to find your ideal customers:

• ZoomInfo: Provides detailed company and contact information, with easy search across industries
• Similarweb: Provides insights about competitors’ audiences, including demographics and interests
• AiSDR: Runs AI-powered searches to find signs of buying intent and reaches out to potential customers directly when their appetite is greatest

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Define your value proposition

You can do this the old-school way by brainstorming on your own. Or you can use AI tools to help you come up with value propositions that resonate with your audience:

• Copy.ai: Analyzes market data to identify key factors that drive purchasing decisions
• AiSDR: Scrapes your potential customers’ websites and creates sales content using wording that’s be meaningful to them, based on the language they use in their own website copy

Define your pricing model

While ironing out your pricing, it’s a good idea to look at the pricing models of your competitors. 

That doesn’t mean you should copy them though. You should price how you want, but you’ll want to know how your competitors price because you’ll need to prove to prospects why they should purchase your solution. 

These tools can help you navigate the variety of pricing models:

• Jeda.ai: Assists in establishing a pricing model that balances customer value perception with business goals
• Price Intelligently: Offers data-driven pricing strategies by analyzing market trends and customer willingness to pay

Choose your marketing and sales approach

Your approach will be defined by your audience and their preferences, as well as by your capabilities. You’ll need to also decide which channels will lead to the great results.

Here are a few options for tools that can map your strategy:

• Wrike: Provides project management features to help you plan and execute your GTM strategy
• Asana: Offers tools to organize your GTM strategy, visualize plans, and monitor progress

Craft your messaging

Include marketing communication examples in your GTM strategy to show investors that you not only know where your audience is and what it needs, but also that you can reach and engage them effectively. Even if you don’t have investors, you need to plan how you’ll craft communications.

You can use these tools to write create email content:

• Mediatool: Assists with developing marketing text, ensuring your messaging aligns with your business goals and audience preferences
• Right Mix Marketing: Provides guidance on crafting effective messaging across various channels
• AiSDR: Creates relevant, personalized inbound and outbound emails using lead data from a variety of sources (e.g. LinkedIn, HubSpot, ZoomInfo)

Set key performance indicators

While setting your KPIs, you can set a realistic target and an ambitious target. For that, you might use:

• Toptal: Offers guidance on setting measurable objectives and KPIs to track the success of your pre-launch campaign
• Smart Insights: Provides frameworks for developing GTM strategies, including guidance on defining KPIs

Launch and iterate

As a startup, you’re likely to modify your product significantly based on early customer feedback. Established companies with well-known products won’t need to iterate as often.

To help you manage iterations of your product and messaging, here are a few tools to use:

• Lean Canvas: A strategic management template for documenting and iterating product features
• Ignition’s GTM Guide: Offers comprehensive guidance on GTM strategies to assist with product launches and iterating based on market feedback
• AiSDR: Allows you to monitor your product’s sales and lead responses, and you can run A/B tests to fine-tune your messaging and positioning

Common mistakes start-ups make with GTM strategies

Start-ups are destined to make mistakes in their search for product-market fit. But what’s important isn’t the mistake made, but the ability to bounce back from the mistake.

Here are a few challenges that start-ups encounter when executing their GTM.

Failure to define a clear target audience

By trying to sell to everyone, you end up selling to no one. The makers of Fire Phone targeted budget-conscious users and premium phone buyers at the same time. As a result, their marketing communication resonated with none of the groups they wanted. 

That’s why it’s important for you to know your audience and talk directly to them.

If you’re not sure who you should target, you can check out who’s engaging your competitor’s LinkedIn posts (and even reach out to them on LinkedIn!).

And it’s okay to target a narrow audience at first. You can always expand your market later on or search for audience lookalikes based on your current customer base.

Weak or unclear value proposition

Your value proposition should be crystal clear, highlighting why your product solves the customer’s problem better than anything else could. Without a compelling value proposition, no amount of money poured into a startup will make it successful.

Think of Google Glass. As an internal Google startup, these guys seemed to have everything they needed to be successful, but what was the value of their product? Was it meant to boost productivity, to navigate augmented reality, or just to look fashionable? No one knew, and that’s why it flopped.

Ignoring early customer feedback

Early feedback is pure gold for a startup. People tell you what works, what’s broken, and what you completely overlooked — and they do it all for free!

Don’t be like Quibi. They ignored early testers who pointed out that the app wasn’t exactly user-friendly. Tweak your product as needed, and make sure that your target customers love it.

Overlooking sales and marketing alignment

Your sales and marketing tactics must fit together like peanut butter and jelly. Make sure you promote your product in channels where potential buyers are, and your sales team knows how to make use of all the leads pulled in by your marketing team.

Inconsistent messaging across channels

Double-check that you’re sending the same message everywhere. If your website promises a fun, dynamic, and affordable tool for startups and small teams, but your LinkedIn reads like a stiff, “corporate” entity, it will confuse your prospects.

Ideally, you should have the same team running brand communication across all channels. With AI tools to automate content creation, that’s now within reach even for small teams.

Not iterating quickly or often enough

We can’t stress this enough: If you’re not iterating based on feedback, you’re falling behind. As a startup, you’re competing against market giants, and the only advantage you have is your agility and willingness to adapt.

Think about Slack, which went from a failed gaming app to a ubiquitous team communication tool. Big companies can’t manage that kind of change quickly, but startups can.

Focusing too much on the product, not on the market

Making the product you love shouldn’t be your goal. You should be making the product your audience will pay for.

Juicero might’ve been the best juice machine at that time. Its makers honed every feature to perfection, only to find out no one really wanted it. So you should build for your audience, not for your own excitement.

Scaling before product–market fit

You’ve heard countless times that a startup should scale fast. Still, there is such a thing as scaling too quickly.

One example is Ofo. They scaled rapidly to all cities they could reach, with little consideration for whether there were enough customers who wanted their product. As a result, they used up all their funds and had to cease operation. Find your product-market fit first, then scale with confidence.