Go-to-Market

How you'll actually get your first customers, and then more of them.

Build · 6 min

What is this?

Go-to-market (GTM) is your plan for how real customers find out about you, decide to try you, and become paying customers — and how that repeats without you personally doing it by hand forever.

It's different from marketing in general: it's specifically the first, repeatable path to customers, not every possible channel someday.

Why it matters

A brilliant product with no distribution plan doesn't grow. Investors want to see one credible, specific first channel — not a list of every marketing channel that exists.

Step by step

1Pick ONE primary channel to start (e.g. direct outreach, a specific community, partnerships, content, paid ads) rather than trying everything at once.
2Get your first handful of customers manually, even if it doesn't scale — this teaches you what actually resonates.
3Track a simple number: how much does it cost/take to get one customer through this channel?
4Look for one thing that's working better than the rest, and do more of that before adding new channels.
5Plan how the channel could work with less manual effort over time, once it's proven.

What good looks like

You can point to a specific, repeatable way you got your last few customers — not a hope, a habit.

Common mistakes

Trying five channels at once instead of proving one.
Assuming "it will go viral" or "the app store" counts as a go-to-market plan.
Never measuring what it actually costs to acquire a customer.
Scaling a channel before confirming it actually works profitably at small scale.

Checklist

You can name your one primary channel and why you picked it.
You've acquired at least a few real customers through it, even manually.
You have a rough sense of what it costs to acquire one customer.
You have a plan for what "more of what's working" looks like.