This chapter covers
- Have you got minimum viable product and product–market fit nailed? Time for go-to-market.
- Did you get 40 customer interviews across all your prospective vertical markets? It’s worth the effort.
- How do you go from initial revenues to market engagement and profitability? With a solid GTM strategy.
This topic is closely tied to anecdotes 14, “Getting to minimum viable product with lighthouse customers” and 15, “Product–market fit: Making sure the dogs will eat your dog food.” Here we will be building our go-to-market (GTM) strategy on top of minimum viable product (MVP) and product–market fit (PMF). In my first two startups, where I was going from academia into the technology startup world, I was not cognizant of what GTM really meant or of how to develop a strategy for it. But this did not hurt me because at my first startup I was down in the trenches of product development, and my second one was during the dot-com bubble so, without a GTM at all, we managed to sell it for $106 million on only $2 million in revenues. I literally thought all there was to GTM was getting out into the market, intuiting who the customers were who needed our product, knocking on their doors, and selling to them. This meant I had a real knowledge gap when it was up to me to drive the next company and make it into a real business. I had to learn how to develop a disciplined process to get customers and grow revenues.