GTM Strategy
Spoiler: you don't. You have to go find customers before you can zoom in on a strategy.
By Shannon Kearns and GoPMMNow, published 2026-08-20, 14 min read.
How do I build a go-to-market strategy when I have no customers yet? You don't build the full go-to-market strategy first. You run a small, deliberate search for your first customers, and let what you learn from them write the strategy.
We've had 50+ conversations with Founders, and here's what so many of them get wrong: They try to write a go-to-market strategy, and then go find people that match.
But contrary to what many think...
If you have zero customers, your strategy is to NOT write a strategy. Here's why.
Your first customers actually inform how you write your GTM strategy. It's research before revenue.
But that doesn't mean you just go pitching everyone in your network. There's something bigger you need:
Instead of going into your network to pitch everyone that kinda sorta fits a profile you think will pay, you need to have an approach that lets you tune early conversations in a way that will inform your GTM.
This week's post is co-written with my partner, GoPMMNow, a B2B consultancy that helps early stage Founders win with founder-led positioning and messaging.
Here's the five-step process for going to market when you have fewer than 10 customers.
In the beginning, you're the go-to-market. Your job is to make deliberate bets about who this is for, then use real conversations to fill in everything you don't know yet.
Your first ten customers move you through three steps.
The first step is to write out your best guesses. Since you don't yet have data, your brain is the data.
Lean on your expertise, previous conversations, And what you know about the market. Be honest about what you believe and why. And narrow as much as possible.
Write this down. Don't just let it live in your head. Ask the hard questions and recognize when you have little or no data backing what you're saying. It's not a blocker, it's just something that you'll want to validate.
That's Step 2.
In Section 1 you made a bet on your audience. At this stage, you might have two directions you want to go. If that's the case, don't panic. You're in the same boat as the rest of B2B SaaS companies!
But remember, your first 10 customers are a learning exercise. So stay focused on this question: "Which segment gives you the strongest mix of pull toward your product and a realistic shot at closing and learning right now?"
Start with a distinction most founders skip. Your first customer and your ideal customer are rarely the same person. Your eventual biggest market and your best first market are rarely the same either. (Here's a bit more on ICP vs. ECP.)
Early customers get chosen partly for how much you can learn from them. These are the questions you need to answer in order to determine if Enterprise or SMB is the right route.
There are trade-offs between starting with enterprise versus starting with SMBs.
It has a lot to do with what type of product you have, how much run rate you have, and how well you can perform in an enterprise procurement cycle.
So now you've got your audience. The next step is to actually get those clients.
Written by GoPMMNow
Remember, your first customers are there to help you learn. So don't think of getting clients as a lead-generation problem.
The biggest mistake at this stage, founders often jump straight into tactics, build a list, send 500 emails, post on LinkedIn, ask for introductions, run ads.
But if you put your product in front of 100 people and they don't immediately understand "this is for someone like me, and I have this problem right now," more activity only creates more noise.
So where does the messaging come from?
Start with the people you're trying to sell to. Talk to them before you try to sell to them. Pay attention to how they describe the problem, what they've already tried, what frustrates them, and what makes the problem urgent enough to act on. Those conversations give you the raw material for your messaging. Over time, you'll start to see the same problems, language, and triggers come up repeatedly. That's when you turn those patterns into your positioning and messaging, rather than guessing what you think will resonate.
Your first outreach should almost feel like an extension of those conversations. You're not trying to convince everyone that your product is great. You're trying to find the people who recognize the problem, care about solving it, and can help you understand it better.
The problem is that you're trying to sell the product before you've figured out the story that makes the product make sense.
You need three things before you need scale:
The stronger story is specific enough that the right person can see themselves in it: "If you're a RevOps leader at a growing SaaS company, and your team is spending hours piecing together customer data across five different tools, here's why that's becoming a problem, and what you can do about it."
That's the difference between describing what your product does and giving someone a reason to care about it.
Not "we help companies improve productivity."
More like: "We help Series A SaaS founders stop losing enterprise deals because their buyers can't understand the product quickly enough."
The second one gives you somewhere to go.
It also changes how you reach out.
Instead of:
"Hey Sarah, we've built an AI platform that helps SaaS companies improve productivity across their sales teams. Would love to show you how it works."
Try:
"Hey Sarah, I've been speaking with a few Series A SaaS teams and keep hearing the same thing: enterprise deals are getting stuck because buyers need too much context to understand the product. Is that showing up for you too?"
The second message isn't trying to sell the solution.
It starts with a problem the person might already recognize in their own world.
That's the shift founders need to make: become problem-focused before becoming solution-focused.
Talk about the pain before the product. Understand what's happening before explaining what you've built. And let the conversations tell you which parts of your story actually resonate.
Because your first 10 to 20 customers aren't just there to buy.
They're helping you figure out which problem is worth building the company around, how customers describe it, and what story makes your product make sense.
And this is where they become incredibly valuable. You're not just acquiring revenue. You're discovering the language your market already uses to describe the problem.
Here's how to do that:
That is the raw material for your positioning.
Also, resist the temptation to make your outreach "scale-ready" too early.
The goal is to learn why someone buys.
We saw this firsthand with a founder we worked with. He came to us thinking the next step was to get in front of more potential customers. But when we looked closely, the issue wasn't a lack of prospects, it was that the product wasn't immediately obvious to the right person. We worked backwards from the buyer: what problem were they actually trying to solve, how did they describe it, and what would make them care enough to act now? Once that became clear, the conversations changed. The lesson was simple: before you try to reach more people, make sure the right people can recognize themselves in what you're saying. Your first 10 to 20 customers should be teaching you that language.
So instead of asking:
"How do I get more people into my funnel?"
Ask:
"Who can help me pressure-test my assumptions about the problem, the solution, and the sales process?"
That answer is usually the beginning of your real go-to-market.
Written by GoPMMNow
When founders hear "brand," they often think about the company: the website, logo, messaging, product, and how the business shows up.
But there's another brand being built at the same time: the founder's brand.
They're connected, but they aren't the same thing.
Your company brand tells people what you've built and why it matters.
Your founder brand tells people what you believe, how you think, and why they should trust you.
Especially early on, people often discover the company through the founder first. They see your LinkedIn post, hear you explain a problem, read your perspective, or get introduced to you through someone they trust.
So you don't need to choose between building the company brand and building the founder brand.
Think of them as two sides of the same story.
Your company should be clear about the problem it solves and the value it creates.
You, as the founder, can build trust around why this problem matters, what you've learned from customers, what you believe about the space, and where you think it's going.
And the two should reinforce each other.
If your company says one thing while your personal content says something completely different, you create confusion.
But when your founder voice brings the problem to life and your company gives people a clear way to solve it, the two work together.
You don't need a huge personal brand. You need a credible founder presence that makes the company easier to understand, trust, and remember.
At 10-20 customers, you do not need to look like a company with 1,000 customers.
You need to look like a company that knows exactly what it's doing.
That distinction matters.
Early-stage founders often think "brand" means a polished website, beautiful visual identity, clever tagline, consistent social presence and a logo that finally feels real.
But your brand at this stage is much simpler:
It is the expectation you create before someone talks to you.
When a prospect lands on your website or LinkedIn profile, they should be able to answer three questions almost immediately:
If they can't, better design won't save you.
Your biggest brand asset this early is expertise. Not the number of followers you have.
Not how polished your website looks. It's how clearly you can show people that you understand the problem, the market, and what it takes to solve it.
One audience you understand deeply. One problem you can articulate better than most.
One clear promise. And enough evidence, even if that evidence is small, to make the promise believable.
You don't need ten case studies. You might have two.
You don't need 50 testimonials. You might have five really good customer quotes.
You don't need to pretend you're an established category leader.
In fact, trying to look bigger than you are can make you less credible.
The advantage of being small is that you can be specific.
Your messaging should come from what you've learned about the problem, the people experiencing it, and why existing solutions aren't working.
Ask yourself:
Then turn those insights into your message.
You can say:
The goal isn't to lead with "here's what our product does."
It's to make people think:
"They understand the problem I'm dealing with."
That's where your positioning starts.
We saw something similar with a founder we worked with who had a genuinely strong product, but his brand was trying to communicate too much at once. The website talked about the product, the technology, the category, the vision, but a potential buyer still had to work to understand "why does this matter to me?" Our job wasn't to make the company look bigger. It was to make the value obvious. We stripped the story back to the problem they owned, the person they solved it for, and the reason they were uniquely equipped to solve it. That shift made the brand feel sharper, more credible and much easier to understand. At this stage, your brand doesn't need to make everyone impressed. It needs to make the right customer say, "This is exactly what I've been looking for."
That is brand-building.
Because every customer interaction is teaching the market what to associate with you.
And that's why I'd be ruthless about what not to build yet.
You don't need a brand that can support the next ten years.
You need a brand that can make the next ten customers trust you enough to say yes.
Everything else can wait.
So now you've got your audience, your target list, your starter positioning and messaging, and a Founder profile that doesn't suck.
The last step here is to make sure you're creating learning loops that feed back into those "audience bets" you made initially.
One rule saves you from a pile of false positives: don't ask people what they'd want you to build. Don't ask them what feature they'd use. Or even if they'd buy it.
People are great at describing their lives.
They're terrible at predicting their purchases.
And they're 100% unreliable at predicting their usage of a product.
Every early customer is confirming and bruising the "bets" you made early on.
Watch for these tells:
Those answers point somewhere: self-serve, sales-assist, founder-led and high-touch, enterprise, services-heavy. You're not choosing on day one. You're reading it off the evidence as it comes in.
Pay careful attention to the real-world signals people give you. We once spoke with a founder who said nearly 80% of people said they would use it, but only 5% had actually signed up. That's a signal that shouldn't be ignored.
Here's how to think about the signal ladder, weakest to strongest:
"This is really cool" sits at the very bottom.
Every round, write down what you believed, what happened, and what changed.
It's as easy as putting together a little table and using your signals to inform where things changed.
That's how a real GTM strategy moves. Evidence replaces assumptions. And if you can't point to the evidence that changed your mind, you didn't learn. You just changed your mind.
Here's the shape this takes:
You don't, not first. Write down your audience hypotheses, then let your first ten customers tell you which ones were right. The strategy is the output of those conversations, not the input.
Choose based on which segment you can learn from fastest, not which one you eventually want. Can you reach 100 of them affordably, will they talk to you, can you survive a six-month procurement cycle, and will they tolerate a rough product?
Eight to twelve substantive conversations per segment is usually enough to start seeing repeated patterns. It is not enough to declare the market solved.
Ask about behavior, not opinion. What happens today, where it breaks, what that failure costs, what they use instead, why anything would change now, and how money actually moves.
Rank it. "I'd use that" is the weakest signal. Observed pain is better, existing workarounds better still, and a signed contract or a request for more seats is the strongest.
Read more articles, explore services and pricing, or take the free Go-to-Market Readiness Assessment.