Four GTM Hacks for the Technical Founder

A combination of deep expertise and a sense of comfort makes us want to do more of one thing over others. If you are a technical founder and surrounded by co-founders who are also technical, your focus is most likely to be on all things technical. There is nothing wrong with technical indulgences every once in a while, as long as it doesn’t come at the expense of GTM.

If you are a technical founder who is motivated to start or amplify your GTM activities, I have two mindset hacks and two tactical hacks that I hope will come in handy. Before you know it, you might even become a GTM ninja!

Let’s dive in.

Mindset Hack 1: Prioritize learning over scaling

Highly skilled engineers want to build things that scale, but in the early stages of your startup, this is precisely the thing you should try not to do. If you have already invested some time and effort in GTM, start by reflecting upon what you have been doing.

Perhaps you put out a few blog posts, did a webinar, posted on Hacker News, talked to a few potential customers, channel partners, etc.

What did you learn from these interactions? Did a particular group engage better than others? Why is that? Have the refinements in your positioning led to more time spent on your website? What did the engagements or lack thereof in Hacker News tell you about that audience, your current product, and positioning?

Dare to systematically experiment with crucial aspects of GTM, especially the buyer and user persona, the positioning, target market, and use case.

As an example, during your next prospective customer meeting, use a different positioning message than the one you tried with the last customer. See if that yields an increased level of engagement.

A simple framework that you can use to summarize your learning will include something like this:

Message A works (or doesn’t) with customer profile B, whose main problem is C, and they have tried X, Y, and Z.

The more such learning you accumulate, the easier it becomes to finetune and eventually scale your GTM machinery.

While we are at it, I will also share another dirty secret — you cannot hire your way into product-market fit. Even if a startup has some revenue, outstanding sales and marketing leaders look for a robust set of foundational learnings that can help them build a GTM motion.

Mindset Hack 2: Practice satisficing on reversible decisions

Satisficing is a term coined by the Nobel Prize-winning economist Herbert Simon in the 1950s and derived by combining the words satisfying and sufficing. It is used to emphasize a decision-making process based on pragmatism and is satisfactory rather than precise and perfect. It is heartening to note that economists, one of the most left-brained, logical, and quantitatively oriented professionals, have embraced a way of thinking such as this. I would argue that making satisficing decisions could even become your secret superpower.

Now, let’s look at the reversible or irreversible nature of decisions to apply satisficing in a way that isn’t too expensive or damaging.

Unlike major architectural decisions or signing customer contracts based on promised product features, most GTM decisions are almost entirely reversible. You might start by thinking that your positioning should cater to the VP of Engineering only to realize later that it is the CIO who has the budget and decision-making authority. So, you might decide to change your sales deck and your website copy to reflect that.

Now, I don’t mean trivializing the time and resources that go into any given GTM motion. Still, it is vital to realize which decisions are reversible and which ones are not so as to become more comfortable satisficing on the reversible ones.

Tactical Hack 1: Have a GTM Roadmap

Just as product roadmaps serve the purpose of anchoring an engineering team to clearly defined short- and long-term goals, a GTM roadmap will have a similar effect — even if the GTM responsibility falls on just one founder.

A few more tips as you come up with your GTM roadmap:

• Always start with your revenue or product adoption goal. Then, use a simple thumb rule to assess how much work is needed to accomplish that goal. For example, if you need one paying customer in 6 months, you likely need to engage with at least six highly qualified and engaged prospective customers. Assuming that you have a 25% chance of finding such customers, you need to have 24 (=6*4) customer meetings in the next couple of months.
• Prioritize your GTM activities. Just as you would ensure that your product roadmap has a prioritized and coherent set of features, similarly, prioritize what key actions you want to undertake and, most importantly, tie them to the goal that you laid out at the outset. Depending upon your product, user, and customer profiles, you may embark on a combination of activities such as blog posts, speaking at conferences, doing a webinar, podcasting on Software Engineering Daily, working with a reseller or system integrator, offering a free trial and so on. Rather than “spray and pray” across the board, prioritize which areas would be most helpful in achieving your goal and then prioritize them for a sprint or two at a time.
• Don’t forget to update your roadmap as you learn. As the Polish-American Mathematician Alfred Korzybski famously said, “The map is not the territory.” It is imperative to incorporate your learnings from every GTM activity and update the roadmap as needed. The more you execute on your GTM roadmap, the clearer the territory becomes.

Tactical Hack 2: Make GTM a habit

In his book “Tiny Habits,” Stanford Behavior scientist BJ Fogg has laid out a simple yet profound framework for what makes habits tick. According to him, no matter what the habit, the three cornerstones of what makes a habit are: Motivation, Ability, and Prompt. Motivation is, well, the motivation to take a specific action. Ability is the ability to take that action. Interestingly, his research has shown that one does not have to start with a very high degree of ability to begin a habit. The key is to tap into the interrelationship between Motivation and Ability.

The easier it is to do something (high ability), the higher the motivation. When it comes to cultivating GTM as a habit, tiny is mighty, as BJ likes to say. At the outset, start with a goal of just doing one GTM activity this month, say, a podcast or a blog post or something else.

The last but most crucial driver of a habit is the Prompt. It is not like the clock alarm or calendar invite whose snooze button is the most attractive feature. Instead, it is the routine that you already have that serves as a reminder to make the new habit a part of your current routine. BJ brings up flossing two teeth immediately after brushing as an example of a tiny habit — it involves low ability (only two teeth) and has a reliable prompt (done right after brushing).

For GTM, I would suggest aligning activities to product sprint milestones. That way, every few weeks, you have some significant GTM activity planned and will get executed right after that product development sprint is complete. Mind you, the GTM activity you undertake doesn’t have to be about what you did in that product sprint. Instead, use the completion of a product sprint as a reliable prompt that you can anchor to your new GTM habit.

I’d love to hear your feedback. Let me know if you find any of these techniques helpful and, more importantly, if you have any hacks you’d like to share with others.