Product or GTM - which comes first?

The product offered by your company is your bread-earner. Your customers buy your product and pay you for the product. Therefore, it’s common sense that the product comes first on your priority list as a founder. Your Go-to-market (GTM) should therefore come next on the priority list and follow your product in that sequence. Right?

Well, here is what I will tell you.

In terms of priority between product and GTM, neither comes before the other. They go together!?

A common mistake made by first time entrepreneurs is to put the Product ahead of GTM in terms of priority during the early formative years of the company. Designing and building the product takes so much precedence in the entrepreneur’s mind that not enough time is left to think of GTM in those early days. And this is a disaster waiting to unfold once you fast forward your journey by 2-3 years when the entire focus of all stakeholders shifts to “growth”.

Infact, in hindsight, I will stick my neck out and dare to say?

Prioritise GTM over your Product early on! Get the GTM right while your product is still substandard. You can always fix the product later.

Friends, don’t get me wrong - By no means am I demeaning the importance of your product or the people who are sweating behind the scenes in making it world class. All I am saying is your GTM needs laser sharp focus, is a lot of work and is a full time job from day zero which most first time entrepreneurs do not realise early on and when they do, it is often too late.

Why do I say so??

1. GTM is trial and error and hence takes a long time to get it right- before starting, you might think GTM is easy because you know exactly how you will sell and distribute your product to lots of customers. But once you start, you will realise that in the start-up world things don't quite work the way you thought they did. There are surprises, hurdles, wrong decisions etc hidden in the process and the only way to find out is keep trying different ideas as fast as you can and see which ones click. In summary, it takes a long time to set up your GTM motion and hence it is essential you start on it right from the word go. So “START EARLY! PLEASE! ??”
2. GTM is expensive and hence cannot be an after-thought - While the cost of building your product is predictable to some extent (assuming your product vision is clear), predicting the cost for setting up your GTM engine that works is very hard. Every experiment you do - whether a new channel, a new sales team, a new partnership, a new pricing model or a new website - it costs a ton of money upfront and often takes multiple iterations before you get it right. So “START EARLY! PLEASE! ??”
3. Your product shortcomings can be fixed later but not your GTM - You can live for some time with your product shortcomings and they can be fixed later as long as you know what needs to be fixed. But GTM is that lynch-pin function of your company that drives your ability to scale at later stages and needs constant attention, constant tweaking through trial and error that cannot be left for later. So “START EARLY! PLEASE! ??”

The below is the blueprint of the GTM engine we designed for ourselves at AskSid AI. Parts of it has worked for us and I am sharing this as an evidence to back what I have written above -?

a) GTM is a complex beast and deserves the founders full time focus right from day zero.

b) GTM is expensive - each box below costs upfront and if you budget for multiple iterations before you get things right, this is some serious cost you cannot afford to go wrong with.?

c) GTM needs constant monitoring, learning and experimenting before you can really identify the different “viral loops” in the process that will supercharge your company’s future growth.

The mistake I made was I did not focus on designing my GTM blueprint early on in the journey. For the first 2 years, everything was about our early customers, the product and the tech we were building and very little time and budget was spared for GTM. I myself find this strange now given that I am an outright GTM guy all through my career. Why did I not sort this out earlier? I don’t have the answer yet but some reflections being

1. A mindset of “If we have an awesome product, growth will automatically follow” - Sorry, it does not work that way.
2. A little too confident that I know “how it works” and allowing myself to focus solely on the product and the initial customer implementations. Realised only later that what had worked during my corporate sales world does not work in the startup world.
3. I underestimated how much time a founder needs to spend on other operational and transactional tasks involved in running a company. Hence ended up struggling for time for tasks that matter the most.

Despite the above, we ended up on the net positive side of the fence and eventually had a healthy exit through acquisition - thanks to the relentless focus we as a team had on building an awesome world class product. So, I repeat what I said before - In no way am I demeaning the importance of your product and your product teams. It stays at the core. My only point is to start your GTM playbook early on so that your journey from a start-up to a scale-up becomes that much easier later on.

So to summarise, here are the 3 takeaways for my #firsttimeentrepreneur friends

1. “If we have an awesome product, growth will automatically follow” - does not work.
2. Your product shortcomings can be fixed later but not your GTM. So fix GTM early.
3. Getting your GTM motion right is hard! So start early.

I hope this was helpful to some of you. Would love to hear your experiences and learnings in the comments section below.?

Wish you all the very best. “Damn the Torpedoes, Full speed ahead” ??