Go-To-Market Phases for Early Stage SaaS Businesses

I ran a survey recently of early stage SaaS Founders and asked "What is the greatest risk to your SaaS business?"

54% responded with "Obscurity"

How do you stop your SaaS business from dying in obscurity?

Simple: Don’t over-index on Product and under-index on Go-To-Market.

A thread on how to build a sound GTM strategy for your early stage SaaS business ??

1/ It’s easy to get overwhelmed on how to generate demand and awareness around your Startup. Don’t let it. There are really on three ways to generate demand:

a) Inbound

b) Outbound

c) Channels and Partnerships 

2/ First let’s talk about the absolute two works ways to start: “Content Marketing” and “ADs” and “Automated Outbound Emails.” This is what Founders often start with and you just end up with a spray and pray approach, burning valuable dollars on ADs and low quality leads.

3/ When you’re starting out and validating your product and market, you should always start with brass racks manual and highly personalized outbound into high fit potential customers. This is your GTM v1.0.

4/ Once you’ve used GTM v1.0 to get initial customers and fit then you should spin up Inbound. Use LinkedIn, Youtube and Twitter to build a audience of your potential customers. Again, don’t waste time with blogging because SEO is an 18 month minimum payout. This is GTM v2.0.

5/ Funnel your social tweets and engagement to a List in exchange for a PDF. I call this your Manifesto where you explain your value proposition and drive to a trial or sales conversation. This will drive more customer conversations and allow you to ship code & close deals.

6/ Use the inbound leads and social engagement to further strengthen your Manifeso, Messaging, Value Proposition and Ideal Customer Profile. Also use this to tighten your core product loop. This should get you to a good amount of revenues.

7/ As you get Inbound humming, and social growing, now use your battle tested Manifesto to turn on Outbound to a specific set of 100 customers who are in your ICP. This is GTM v3.0.

8/ As Outbound starts to drive more momentum, then turn on ADs. Start with retargeting and then focus on Cold or Lookalike audiences. This is GTM v4.0.

9/ And in those steps and phases, you’ll have a scalable, differentiated and humming GTM machine. All you do now is operate the two levers that matter most to drive growth: Ship Code. Close Deals.

10/ As your brand grows and platform grows, then start to explore complementary partnerships and channels to reach your well defined and proven ICP in more ways.

11/ In the end you’ll have a GTM machine that is serving Inbound, Outbound, ADs and Channels and then you’ll be Unstoppable.

To dig more into these concepts, I've put together a special training that goes into detail on how to build a scalable GTM machine for your early stage SaaS business. To watch it go here: https://offers.tkkader.com/saas-gtm-strategies