First Principles GTM

Campaigns/activities become few and obvious.  Metrics become simple.  Every campaign builds on the next one so even “bad results” feel like wins.  The team executes in sync.

Few teams ever experience this way of operating… why?

Most go-to-market motions start with a siloed approach.  The product is built first.  Pricing is arbitrarily determined with a “worst => better => best” format.  Marketing is brought in to create awareness with the same playbook as everyone else, so you don’t stand out.  Sales is brought in to help tell the story better, but even they struggle and beg for “enablement” and new features. Instead of more solutions, you get more problems.

Why doesn’t this work?

1.    You’re building a “sales process”, not a “buying process” (starting with the customer). Yes, you’re building with customer feedback, but most of of that feedback is from early adopters who are different from the broader market you’re chasing.

2.  You create too many variables (people, processes, teams) that can’t be controlled.  This means that every experiment is inconclusive, and you never REALLY know what to do next. You’re pushed into correlation driven thinking, like “my ICP is a company with 50-150 employees in North America” instead of “my ICP is a person who’s at a company that just missed it’s first quarter and the person in charge of X just walked up to my ideal user and said Y to them”. This leads you down more and more blind alleys until you don’t even know how you got there.

The most profitable companies of all time don’t work this way. Just look at AWS — their customers spend $100k+ without ever speaking to a sales person upfront.  They offer perpetual free tiers for every product, yet charge more than the competition and win at impossible scale.  How do they do this?

We discovered the answer by applying the “Customer Led” methodology to our own business. 

In 18 months, we went from losing $4M/year to generating $1M in profit with far less stress (see our presentation at OpsStars 2022!).  We then applied it to our second SaaS business, which has ZERO full time employees and has run profitably since day one.

Now, we’re sharing it with other founders who don’t want to run on the VC driven hamster-wheel that barely worked the last decade, and which isn’t working today.

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