From Bare Strategy
One idea at a time. New every week.
GTM Strategy · April 11, 2026 · 7 min read
Signups measure interest. Growth breaks later, at the first stage where a cohort quietly falls apart, and everything downstream of that stage is a symptom. Find that break and fix it before touching anything else, because more traffic only sends more people into the same gap.
GTM Strategy · April 5, 2026 · 7 min read
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 Strategy · April 3, 2026 · 7 min read
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.
Strategy · April 2, 2026 · 9 min read
Every competitive deal is scored on a list nobody wrote for this buyer. It gets inherited from the last evaluation, or set by the incumbent on an early call, and it favors the market leader by design. Call it the inherited scorecard. Scoring higher on it is the losing game. The way through is to add a line where the buyer's real problem lives and our answer is genuinely better, then plant questions we can answer, choosing references that match the situation, sequencing the demo around what's hard to show, and naming the switching cost before they do.
Strategy · April 1, 2026 · 8 min read
Most SaaS companies at a growth plateau decide the brand is broken. Usually the positioning stopped matching the market, and nobody noticed because positioning doesn't look like anything. A rebrand changes the identity. Repositioning changes what you stand for and who you serve. Run the five-question diagnostic before spending six figures on the version of the work that has a deliverable everyone can see.
GTM Strategy · March 29, 2026 · 8 min read
Most PLG attempts fail because we ship the front door and never build anything behind it. A free trial is a distribution tactic. Product-led growth is a decision about who does the selling. The thing to test before you launch a trial is the unescorted hour, and trial length has almost nothing to do with it.