How will you get to $100M in revenues without spending $100M in marketing?

The Go-to-Market strategy (GTM) is, without doubt, the least understood and most poorly thought-out part of the startup business plan. Yet it is arguably the most important.

That’s because getting to your first $1M in revenues is easy. It takes no strategy, just connections and hustle. But getting to $100M in revenues every year is impossible on hustle alone.

Having a great product isn’t good enough. Build it and they won’t come. Not automatically. Not by magic. You have to get it front of users.

How will you find customers, or better, how will they find you? How will you, as a no-name startup with a tiny team and no budget ramp up sales? For most startups, the biggest challenge, the one that kills them, the one that limits revenue growth and leads to funding challenges, is getting heard.

You need a plan, one that works within the constraints of a limited budget and small team. Now will you pull that off? That’s the GTM. As an investor, that’s what I want to hear.

The name “go-to-market” is unfortunately is a misnomer that confuses many startup founders into presenting useless information.

What the go-to-market is: a strategy to get from $1M to $100M in revenues without spending a fortune.

What the go-to-market is not: a list of all the tactics you might use to market your product.

But what does that actually mean?

Whether you’re making a consumer product or a new battery chemistry, if you’re a startup, customers haven’t heard of you. Rising up out of the noise of daily life and busy work schedules to get heard is nearly impossible. Marketing is tough. And expensive. And you don’t have any money. So what’s your plan?

If you’re Coca-Cola and you’ve developed a new, organic probiotic drink, the go-to-market is easy. You go to market. You already have the distribution. You already have the shelf space. You already have a straight line into every news agency in the world. Your GTM is to go on GMA. All it takes is a billion dollar advertising campaign with Beyonce doing a Super Bowl ad singing about a stomachache. That’s the traditional GTM. It works for Coca-Cola (sometimes). It doesn’t work for startups.

B2B may be cheaper, but it isn’t any easier. You’ve developed a better battery. If you’re CATL or Panasonic, your GTM is simple — you call up the head of the battery groups at Tesla, GM, and Ford and ask how many millions of batteries they want to order. But if you’re at a startup, how are you going to get hold of those key decision makers? Hint: LinkedIn is the wrong answer. So are cold calls and email. Advertising will accomplish nothing. You need a strategy. An effective, efficient one.

The “go to market” is a misnomer because it’s not about going to the market. It’s not about first sales. It’s about succeeding in the market. It’s about scaling from $1M to that elusive $100M.

First sales are easy (in a relative sense) and shouldn’t cost any money. First sales are to people already in your network.

That first million of sales is customer discovery and feedback, not GTM. The point is to see what people will buy and what they won’t; what features they need; what messaging they respond do. It’s data collection, not a strategy.

What do I see on pitch decks for the GTM? It’s usually not a strategy to scale but a checkbox of marketing and sales tactics.

For consumer products, I often see a set of bullet points: sell on Amazon, sell on their own website, sell to stores, sell direct, sell through distribution. They’ll do advertising, they’ll give out free samples, they’ll take advantage of word of mouth, they’ll hire influencers, they’ll focus on social media, they’ll optimize for SEO.

For B2B products, it’s likely to say they’ll sell through distributors and they’ll sell direct. They’ll offer SDKs for white label integration and work with partners. They’ll go to trade shows and industry events, they’ll hire a sales team with deep industry connections, they’ll use LinkedIn, email, cold calls, and PR to reach potential customers.

Yes, you should try all of those things and see what works. I assume every company is. Your pitch deck doesn’t need a checklist of basic sales and marketing tactics. It needs a plan for something that’s viable with minimal budget. So tell me what’s going to work and why.

Do you have a niche product in a concentrated industry where your head of sales already knows the handful of decision makers who matter? Sounds good. Your GTM is direct sales. Make sure she has lots of equity in the business because she’s more important than you.

Selling a B2B product in a dispersed marketplace? That’s much tougher. Will you hire a big sales team or rely on distribution to reach thousands of customers? The former is expensive, the latter ineffective. Why will you succeed where so many others have failed?

Do you have a consumer product and signed up Beyonce as your social media spokesperson? Cool. What’s the deal terms and what’s going to stop her from bailing if you aren’t bringing her millions? Details matter.

Got a 2-sided marketplace? Ouch. Those are tough. What’s the secret sauce that’s going to drive one side to the site in big enough quantities to get the other side to pay big bucks?

Every business is unique. Even moving from a startup that made network accelerators to one that make network simulators turned out to require a different GTM. Even though the customers were nearly the same.

Network accelerators are a big ticket sale. Each one only costs $10K, but a company needs one for every office. That means a sale of 10 units, or 100, or sometimes even a thousand. Distributors loved us and put a lot of effort into introducing us to their customers.

Network simulators are sold to the same customers and also cost $10K, but each company only needs one or two. The same distributors I’d worked with in the previous company weren’t excited about make $2K.

It took a long time to find a GTM that did work for that product — Google Adwords. Anyone looking for a network simulator didn’t call their CDW rep; they searched for a solution online.

That didn’t mean I didn’t use distributors and resellers. And it would’ve been stupid not to exhibit at trade shows and conferences. Of course, I hired a team of salespeople who knew lots of customers. And I wrote frequent blog and LinkedIn posts. We even had a Facebook page in case anyone was looking. But it was keyword advertising that became our GTM and scaled the business.

So think long and hard about your GTM. Ask customers and industry experts where they find new products. Consider your specific product, how it gets used, what it gets used with, and how much it costs. Then come up with a plan that will get in front of every potential customer without spending more than you make.

Go-to-market is tough. It’s the reason most startups don’t survive. So when you’re pitching investor, be sure to tell us how you, an unknown startup with almost no budget and no brand recognition, plan to rise from nothing and become a $100M business in a few short years.