Writing · Tagged

gtm

7 pieces on this thread.

Positioning · May 22, 2026 · 10 min read

How to know if your messaging will actually work (before you ship it)

Internal sign-off measures internal alignment, not market resonance. The False Confidence Filter is a two-day protocol of four tests, each run with five ICP-matched buyers who have never met you. The Stranger Test catches clarity gaps, the Priority Test catches relevance gaps, the Clone Test catches differentiation gaps, and the Champion Test catches whether a champion can resell your value unaided. Stranger and Priority failures force a rewrite. Clone and Champion failures are usually fixable.

positioning messaging b2b-saas gtm pre-launch-validation voice-of-customer

GTM Strategy · April 5, 2026 · 7 min read

Scaling GTM too early is the most expensive mistake in SaaS

Budget, headcount, and new channels don't make a go-to-market motion work. They tell us whether it ever did, at the highest price that answer is ever sold for. Three questions get to the same answer for almost nothing. Who it's for, whether the message survives without a salesperson beside it, and whether the math holds at today's price.

gtm scaling saas-growth positioning unit-economics

GTM Strategy · April 3, 2026 · 7 min read

How to present your GTM strategy to your board (and actually get buy-in)

Boards don't fund activity. They fund a motion they believe will repeat at a cost they can model. Four moves cover it. Where we win, the motion behind it, the part that isn't working, and the one bet we're funding next. The third one buys the other three their credibility.

gtm board-presentation strategy saas

Strategy · March 25, 2026 · 7 min read

How to build a GTM story that investors actually believe

Investors pass on GTM stories that list what a team has been doing. They're scanning for one thing, evidence that the motion repeats. The clearest proof is the same-spot test. If we can name what our motion reliably gets wrong, we have a system. If everything went well and nothing went the same way twice, we have anecdotes. Five layers carry the story, and there are honest stand-ins for every one of them at pre-seed.

gtm fundraising positioning saas investors

GTM Strategy · March 22, 2026 · 7 min

Why sales and marketing can't agree on what qualified means

Dashboards and SLAs keep failing to settle the qualified-lead fight because each team is working from its own list of who the buyer is. One list came from the category, the other from what happened on calls. Build a shared buyer situation and a messaging house first, and the SLA finally holds.

gtm alignment positioning sales-marketing messaging

Growth · March 18, 2026 · 7 min

How to get your first 100 customers (without a sales team)

Your first ten customers bought you, not your positioning. Warm introductions close deals that teach you nothing about whether a stranger would pay, which is why so many teams stall at twelve and blame the sales hire. Getting to 100 means writing language that works when nobody in the room knows your name.

growth gtm early-stage sales icp

Positioning · March 14, 2026 · 7 min read

How to position your startup against much bigger competitors (and win)

An incumbent's size is a stack of commitments already made to their largest customers, and those commitments are load-bearing. Which means there are true things a smaller company can say that they can't say back. Three of those structural claims are available to almost anyone. Own the customer their model can't keep, turn their scale into the cost a buyer pays for it, and name a problem their category has no word for.

positioning competitive-strategy gtm saas-growth