GTM Zero to One: Insights on GTM & PMF
And the state of AI in production via Tribe AI, a rapidly growing AI company that just raised (but I think is going way beyond the hype)
Day 8 of writing.
Apologies for a longer post, but this was one of my favorite interview recently, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t share some key insights that link to GTM.
This was a conversation btw:
Full interview linked here and embedded below:
📱 PMF and AI’s JFK moment
Tribe AI started as a talent marketplace helping orgs hire fractional AI/ML talent.1
They've evolved into a services business helping companies go from 'we need to use AI' to testing how AI might unlock business value and getting it into production.
Tribe started in 2019, and went from having to convince potential clients of the value of AI to responding to market demand after AI's JFK moment (ChatGPT releasing in late 2022).
Conviction: Jacelyn was convinced every company would need to be an AI company. But not every company was convinced back when they started.
Serendipity/market timing: Now they’re experiencing PMF pull, going from bootstrapped to having raised a round recently.
The key insight about how the shape of demand changed:
🌪️ ChatGPT's growth and explosion helped focus the market demand from 100+ problems and use cases to about 10, which means you can actually begin to scale by building repeatable templates, systems, tools vs. having to reinvent the wheel and build bespoke for each client.
🎯 Focus and Niche Down
As a founder, it’s easy to be pulled in many directions, especially in the early stages. Tribe AI’s experience shows the power of niching down to focus on a few key use cases (in their case, the catalyst/trigger was the market).
This approach not only simplifies decision-making but also helps in creating scalable, repeatable solutions.
So for founders and leaders building new products or productizing a service / expertise: how do I prioritize
which problem to focus on for
which potential ICP/customers and thus
which features to build early on?
What’s truly the ‘minimum’ viable product that people will actually begin paying for?
Questions for Reflection:
🔍 How can you ‘niche down’ or narrow your focus to just a few high-impact areas?2
👥 Who exactly is your initial ICP, and who falls outside of it?3
🎯 What triggers might cause a potential customer to be open to or (better yet) looking for your solution?
🛠️ How do emerging technologies and lower costs change the feasibility of your offerings?4
🎡 Tribe’s Growth Strategy and Flywheel
A key part of Tribe AI’s growth recently has been fueled by a strategic partnership model5 that aligns incentives for all parties involved:
☁️ Cloud Providers/Big Tech: want to get AI products into production to generate revenue.
💼 Customers: (of cloud providers) want to unlock business value through AI.
🦾 Tribe AI: want to help customers test and build AI solutions.
By positioning themselves as a platform-agnostic player, Tribe AI has become a go-to node in the ecosystem where major cloud providers like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google refer potential customers.
🚀 AI in Production: Real-World Examples
Tribe AI has successfully implemented AI solutions across various industries, demonstrating the tangible benefits of AI in driving engagement, retention, and revenue growth. For example:
🎙️ MyFitnessPal: Developed a tool for seamless food logging via voice, creating a “magic moment” that boosts user engagement and retention.
📚 Online Textbook Company: Built a syllabus generator to simplify curriculum updates for teachers, increasing revenue by addressing a key barrier to buying new textbooks.
👩🔧 Software for Mechanics: Created a tool that increases daily customer capacity, now being used as an upsell feature due to its high value.
🔑 Conclusion:
Tribe AI’s journey offers valuable lessons for founders and leaders. By narrowing your focus, aligning with strategic partners, and leveraging AI to solve real-world problems, you can create scalable solutions that deliver significant value to your customers. Hopefully these insights, examples, and questions can be applied to pushing your own GTM and product thinking, and how you can position your business to capitalize on emerging opportunities.
Jacelyn was previously at CapitalG (Alphabet's Growth Equity fund, formerly known as Google Capital) - where one of the big things she mentioned in the interview was leveraging Google talent to support interviewing/hiring of AI/ML/data science talent for portfolio companies. Interesting how she built insights and differentiated/unfair advantage in connection with talent also (to support the supply side of her idea/marketplace).
Related side note, as a meta point, they also hired lots of fractional talent which made it easy to keep costs variable and scale with how the company was doing — I’ve seen and worked with other founders do this to great effect as well, whether bootstrapping or otherwise conserving resources to extend runway in a post-ZIRP world.
At a macro level, if you’re talking owners or people with P&L responsibility, they care about increasing revenue, growing costs, or increased efficiency (e.g., reducing time it takes for same output). If they care about this, underlying this are elements of having the right talent, knowing the problem, delivering customer value, unlocking customer love, etc. If you’re in education/edtech like I’ve been, outcomes and impact are also important (with key inputs being rigorous research, equity and sound learning experience design/pedagogy).
Who are the folks you want to serve in your initial ICP, and in turn who are those that also don’t fit?
are they growth-focused vs. profitability focused?
are they owners vs. general managers?
each of these questions and more have knock-on effects of your product strategy, GTM, marketing and messaging strategy, channels, outreach, warm and cold emails, etc.)
📉 Jacelyn talks about GenAI providers post ChatGPT have brought down cost for 'proof of concept' (enterprise speak for MVP/smallest test to see if an idea can unlock business value) --> from $1mm+ McKinsey or Accenture project to $50,000-100,000. And Tribe not only helps there, but if business value/case is proven for a PoC, then also putting it into production to actually unlock that value. I hope to be doing the same in my niche as a consultant/fractional.
Prior examples in the industry as well:
on prem —> cloud/AWS
music recording, DAWs
Amazon fulfillment and dropshipping enabling building ecomm businesses without holding inventory, etc.
mobile phone and the form factor bringing a computer into every person’s pocket
the cost of bandwidth reducing (and increase in down/up speeds) to the point of unlocking a new form factor (from downloading to streaming —> driving the growth of players like Spotify, Netflix and beyond)
Zero CAC they jokingly called it during the interview; it is and it is not paid, besides the personnel/staff time required to engage on the conversations but still, very low cost relative to other channels and tactics!