What I Learned About Go-to-Market as an Early-Stage Founder

When I started my first company, I thought go-to-market was about persuasion. I pictured the best salespeople as charismatic, naturally extroverted, always knowing exactly what to say.

That picture was completely wrong.

The founders I met who were constantly winning weren’t the best talkers or the most charismatic people in the room. They didn’t have a secret tactic or fancy tools. What they had were three things in common: they were genuinely curious about the problem space, they were great listeners, and they were exceptionally good at asking the questions that uncover the most burning problems inside an organization. Curiosity, listening, and good questions. Almost everything below comes back to those three.

Sell the Value, Not the Product.

The biggest shift in my thinking was realizing that nobody buys your product. They buy what it does for them.

Technical founders especially love to show off the thing they built: how fast the API is, the cool caching layer, the clean JSON schema. None of that matters to the person you’re selling to yet. They don’t care how it works. They care how it affects their business and their day-to-day.

So sell the value, not the product. Frame everything in terms of the outcome: How much time will this save them? How much new revenue does it unlock? What’s the ROI for their team? The better you understand their problem, the less selling you actually have to do. If the problem is urgent enough, the value sells the product for you.

Finding the Right People to Talk To.

Before any outreach matters, you have to find the right people. The best channel by far was warm intros: investors, friends, friends of friends. The best founders I’ve met would shamelessly ask anyone they knew for an intro.

Most people have a far larger warm network than they think. They’re just afraid to reach out to someone they haven’t spoken to in a while, or worried about being judged. The sooner you drop the ego and the fear, the better.

When warm intros ran out, the highest-leverage thing I could do was build targeted lists of the companies that benefit most from the product, then figure out who inside each one was actually worth reaching out to. It’s slow and it doesn’t scale, but it makes your outbound more authentic, focuses you on the companies most likely to care or give useful feedback, and forces you to really think through the value you’re providing.

Prove You’re a Human, Not an AI.

With AI flooding inboxes, generic outreach is dead. Dropping a company’s name or industry into your message isn’t enough anymore. You have to prove you did the work and that a real person is on the other end.

The single most effective thing I saw founders do was send short videos of themselves talking directly to the company and the person they were targeting. They’d use the person’s name, reference the company’s actual product, and talk specifically about the value they could bring and the gaps they’d noticed. People respond to that. You’re showing them you care about what they’re building instead of spamming everyone with the same template.

The same logic extends past the first reply. Once someone agrees to talk, meeting in person beats a Zoom call almost every time. In person you might get an impromptu lunch, you’ll walk around the office, you’ll talk about things that have nothing to do with work. All of it humanizes you. You stop being a vendor and become someone they actually know, and that relationship goes a long way, even if they decide your product isn’t the right fit.

People want to help people who are obviously trying hard. Use that.

Outbound That Works.

Instead of reaching as many people as possible in a day, I found that ten thoughtful, well-researched messages beat hundreds of generic ones, and the responses were far more useful.

Channel matters more than people realize. LinkedIn consistently beat email for me and most founders I know. Higher response rates, better conversations, and a normal message (not InMail, which reads like marketing) feels more authentic.

Whatever the channel, keep the copy short. Nobody reads your four-paragraph pitch. Say who you are, why you’re reaching out to them specifically, and what’s in it for them. The shorter the message, the easier it is to respond to and the more human it feels. It’s also a great forcing function: if you can’t describe why your product is valuable in a LinkedIn connection request, you haven’t thought about it hard enough.

One last thing: don’t slip into “sales mode.” Something strange happens when founders sit down to do outbound, especially after raising money. They stop writing like themselves and start writing like their idea of a salesperson: forced enthusiasm, “circling back,” “exciting opportunity.” I’ve watched founders who are genuinely likable in conversation turn stiff and generic the moment they typed a message. I did it myself, and my response rates tanked when I did. People sniff out the performance instantly, and it’s the fastest way to read as just another bot. Authenticity is the most powerful edge you have as a founder. Lean into it.

Get Something in Their Hands, Fast.

Customers are terrible at imagining software. I learned this one the hard way.

One of the best things you can do is build real demos. The good ones look familiar, use workflows the customer already recognizes, and ideally run on the customer’s own data, or data that looks like theirs. The less imagination required, the better. And with AI tools, it’s never been easier to spin up something convincing and tailored to a specific customer or segment.

But don’t stop at the demo. Get something real into their hands, then work with them to shape it. The customers who feel like co-creators become your most committed buyers. You’re not pitching at them anymore, you’re building together. It also clears the IT and approval hurdles early, and once you’re an approved vendor, upselling into deeper integrations gets dramatically easier.

Ship Insanely Fast. Make Them Think You’re a Magician.

This is the unfair advantage founders have, and almost nobody uses it fully.

When a customer mentions a problem or asks “can it do X?”, the magic isn’t saying yes. It’s showing them the working version the next morning. Ship so fast it feels like sleight of hand.

This is especially potent with enterprises, because they move so slowly that any speed at all feels superhuman. A team used to quarter-long roadmaps will be floored when you turn their feedback around in 48 hours. That velocity does two things at once: it proves you can execute, and it builds the kind of trust that closes deals.

Always Ask, and Make the Yes Effortless.

This sounds obvious, but it took me too long to learn. Ask for introductions. Ask for feedback. Ask for meetings. Ask for referrals. Ask for the sale.

It feels awkward at first, but one of the most surprising things about building a company was discovering how willing people are to help. Customers introduced me to other customers. A single conversation opened doors I didn’t know existed. One habit paid off more than almost anything: at the end of every conversation, I’d ask whether they knew anyone else I should talk to. People said yes constantly, and those referrals were some of my best leads, pre-warmed by someone the other person already trusted.

But asking is only half of it. The other half is making the yes effortless. Every ask adds a little work to someone’s plate, and the more work it is, the easier it is to put off until “later,” which usually means never. So do the work for them. Asking for a meeting? Drop in your scheduling link so they can book in one click. Asking for an intro? Write the forwardable blurb yourself so all they do is hit send. Asking for feedback? Point them at the exact thing you want eyes on. Asking for the sale? Have the link or the paperwork ready to go.

That last one matters most. When someone genuinely decides to move forward, stop talking and make it easy to buy. Have the agreement ready, the invoice ready, the payment link ready. The moment a customer is ready to pay, every extra step is a chance for them to cool off or get pulled into something else. Never make someone do work you could have done for them. Momentum disappears faster than you think.

Ignore Market Size (Early On).

This runs against common advice, but I believe it: early on, stop worrying about market size.

So much founder energy goes into sizing the TAM and convincing people the market is enormous. But most companies struggle to get even a single customer, let alone saturate a market. Whether the market is big enough is a problem you’ve earned only after you’ve proven anyone wants this at all.

Your real goal at the start is narrower and harder: find a few customers who genuinely couldn’t live without what you’re building. Not customers who think it’s interesting. Customers who’d be upset if you took it away. Find a handful of those and you have something real. How big it gets is a great problem to have later, and you don’t get to have it until you’ve cleared the first bar.

Everyone Loves Your Product, Until It’s Time to Buy It.

Every founder learns this one the hard way.

You meet a potential customer who says they love your product. Best thing since sliced bread, can’t believe everyone isn’t already using it. They ask you to send pricing so they can run it by their colleagues. You’re ecstatic, surely you’re about to close your first big deal. You send the pricing, and then… nothing. No number of follow-ups gets a reply.

You go from the top of the world to questioning everything. Did you send it too slow? Is the price too high? Did you somehow upset them?

The truth is, people are nice. They’ll tell you they’re interested, that they want to buy, that they’re excited, and in the moment they often mean it. You’ll hit this constantly. Don’t let it discourage you.

This is where being a good detective matters most. A detective doesn’t take a confession at face value; they look for evidence. “I love this” is a statement. The evidence is what someone does next. Did they bring you to the person who controls the budget? Did they put a meeting on the calendar? Did they ask what implementation looks like for their team? Your job is to read past the warm words and figure out whether there’s a real, urgent problem underneath.

Final Thoughts.

The biggest surprise wasn’t learning how GTM worked. It was learning what it actually is.

I used to think it was about persuasion. Now I think it’s mostly about understanding: how businesses operate, where money is being spent, which problems are urgent versus merely interesting. That comes straight back to the three traits I started with: curiosity, listening, and asking the right questions. The founders who get great at this aren’t the best presenters. They’re the best learners.

At the earliest stages, GTM isn’t really about selling. It’s about learning what the market wants badly enough to pay for, then making it absurdly easy, and absurdly fast, to give it to them.

Everything else gets easier once you figure that out.