GTM Zero to One: Tackling The Hardest Thing About GTM
This ties to my theme this last week from sales stack to cold emails/outreach
Day 5 of writing daily1
7. Specificity is fastest way to build market trust — “Wow, I feel like you understand this better than I do.”
~ Jen Abel
via an excellent X/Tweet thread listing 25 learnings/insights on founder-led & early-stage startup sales
It dawned on me today: my suggestion below for writing good cold emails is actually the hardest thing about all your work as an early founder.
🤔 Make it About Understanding Their Problems (rather than selling your solution
Or put another way, you’ve got to fall in love with the problem and deeply understand it to succeed.
Two of ways founders do this successfully are:
👩🔧 Solve Your Own Problems (you are your user)
🥾 Immerse Yourself and Walk In Your User’s Shoes
As an example, a founder I’m working with now:
has built and run a business for 2 years in a specific market
allowing them to deeply understand pain points and uncover insights that led them to the current business they’re validating and building, with:
an initial list of leads
some value they’ve generated and partners/social proof for outreach
a product MVP + roadmap
(even as this has to be tweaked for a different ICP and value prop)
an understanding of how the problem is currently solved (manually and with other tools), which shapes
an understanding of competitors/alternatives and
how they plan to compete (differentiated offering)
Or another founder I recently met:
worked inside of an organization that is their target customer
built a solution internally, and
even started configuring the solution sell to others
(which btw is how Amazon built AWS).
In conclusion, make your outreach and conversations about understanding the customer problem. This not only builds trust with them but also provides you valuable insights to enhance just about every aspect of your business from GTM to product, positioning, marketing, GTM, growth, sales and beyond.
Restarting LXD
tl;dr The core I hope to focus on is at the intersection of:
productization x go-to-market (GTM)
especially in the 0 → 1 days.
Reintroducing the artist formerly known as David Fu, writing under Learning By Design.
It’s been some time since I published here. I’m going to push myself to start publishing daily on weekdays.
The intent/cadence will be to publish:
shorter, snackable pieces (~200 words) daily
with a longer piece (1,000+ words) going out Fridays.
My intent is to start with doing it for all of August and September, and then see if I can hit 100 posts before end of the year.
If you unsubscribe, no hard feelings! Totally get it.
This will touch on everything from edtech to workforce developement to AI to product to honing your value proposition to 0 → 1 product.