Go with G2M from Day One
In the past 10-15, I’ve often been the first person some founders would reach out to when they get an idea for a tech startup. However, I was not always doing the same type of work I do right now. Here is how the approach has been changing over the course of a decade or so.
Got an idea for a web app? Contract a programmer!
I’ve started my career as a software developer. Back in the days, many founders had the following strategy: I have an idea for an app, lemme hire a software developer. So they’d hire me as the first person on the project and immediately start telling me which functionalities to code. While I was completing my tasks professionally, I couldn’t help but wonder why we are doing this, who will be the person on the other end using this feature I’m coding and how this will solve their problems. Hence, I pivoted my career to one of a product manager, and guess what happened?
Got an idea? Validate it with a product manager!
As a product manager, more often than not, I’ve been the first person to be contracted by a founder with an idea for a tech product. It’s just that this time around it’s making a whole lot more sense. We’d do our market research, make sure we understand our target persona, validate our assumption that the problem we are identifying indeed is what our target persona would pay to solve, compare the existing alternatives and the ways our target persona is attempting to solve the problem currently with our solution, what exactly is our absolutely unique value proposition to them etc. Only then we’d start talking features and scoping our MVP release. That’s cos the startup community evolved and the founders got the memo: it’s not enough to build a great product if nobody wants it.
Got an idea? Create a g2m strategy!
As we keep evolving as a community focused on entrepreneurship and innovation, we’ve also come to a conclusion that
it’s not enough to build a great product
that certain users want
if you don’t reach them.
That’s why the go-to-market strategy needs to be present from day one. You remember the lean canvas and that field Channels that often gets postponed with a comment “once we build it we’ll get some marketing peeps on board to sell it”? Well, it shouldn’t be postponed, it should be defined from day one. With the boom of (micro)SaaS and Product Led Growth, the G2M strategies often rely on the actual features of the product. Which means those features need to be on your storyboard, in your backlog, in your MVP release plan and actively worked on by your dev team.
Lemme give you an example: gen AI micro SaaS popping up like mushrooms after rain, each ProductHunt newsletter announces more and more of them. How do most of the users get to a gen AI micro SaaS they are paying the subscription for? Here are some ways:
Opening the links from a Product Hunt newsletter in new tabs to check them out
Using an aggregator page like https://theresanaiforthat.com/ to search for AI tools for their need and then opening links in new tabs to check them out
Reading a post by their favorite influencer titled “Top 10 AI tools for…” and opening all 10 links in new tabs to check them out
Etc. etc.
You get the idea. They will open like 10 tabs, one of them being your landing page, and the rest your competitors. Do you think your desired customer will sign up at all 10, even with free trial etc? No, they won’t. They will try out those that showcase their generation capabilities right from the home page, and close the rest of the tabs. With the attention span getting critically low, you need to make sure your tab doesn’t get killed. You need to make sure your business doesn’t get killed.
Hence the go-to-market strategy from day one, in your features specs, prior to getting a programmer for your tech product idea.