The Mint Recap: Go-To-Market Panel
We had a great panel on all things early-stage GTM at The Mint, featuring a group of awesome founders: Trent Hedge from Pylon, Travis Hedge from Vouch, Gautam Sivakumar from Lunar, and Yoseph West from Relay.
Here are some of those insights and learnings:
1. Don’t worry about scale, just get to PMF.
At the earliest stages, it doesn’t matter if you’re built to scale; the only job is to get to product market fit. Building a company at the earliest stages is a journey of learning. In it, you will discover what you need to do to scale.
Trent added that, in enterprise sales, nothing is ever built for scale, but the ACVs justify that. Every enterprise deal is different, so he focuses more of his team’s efforts on how to make everything post-sale scalable.
2. Deeply understand the problem you’re solving for and stay flexible.
Spend as much time with your customers and potential customers as you can to ensure you really understand the problem they want you to solve. It may not be the one you originally envisioned, and that's okay!
3. Do whatever it takes to get your first 5 customers.
This will mostly be things that don’t scale.
E.g., get a desk at a co-working space and talk to everyone there, show up to trade shows and have awkward convos. Figure out any way to get in touch w/ anyone who might make sense to talk to.
4. Sell your vision and establish expectations!
In the early stages, you will need to sell your product vision even without a working product.
Your first version may not be perfect, and that's okay! You likely won’t be proud of the first version of your product. Expect it to break often.
However, it is crucial to communicate openly that early customers should anticipate a work in progress. If you set that expectation up front, it will help a ton when, inevitably, there is a problem down the line.
5. Sell yourselves!
In the earliest stages, your customers probably aren’t buying into your product, but rather, they are buying into YOU.
To that end…
6. Make your early customers your best friends.
Focus on human and personal relationships. You should be best friends with and texting your first few customers. Cultivating trust in that way doesn’t scale, but it definitely helps create momentum.
Some fun stories: Gautam spray painted mugs to send to customers. He couldn’t get mugs made fast enough, so he went to Crate & Barrel, stenciled the logo, and spray painted the mug on their office fire escape. Travis used to send aloe plants to early customers to say thanks for dealing with bumps and bruises.
7. Don’t focus on distribution channels too early.
Before talking to channel partners, you need to prove that customers want your product. The channel partners need to know WHY their customers want the product, and that there is a reason for them to push it.
8. If you’re a pre-seed company, don’t hire in sales.
You don’t need sales reps or leaders as a pre-seed company. You need to do founder-led sales. You really should be handling sales as founders as long as you possibly can / until you become a bottleneck.
Imagine you’re juggling balls. As things develop and progress, you add more and more. When you reach the point where you can no longer handle it, go get someone else who can help!
9. Don’t worry about competitors.
While your job is to understand the market and customer perspectives / how they view your company relative to others, what they are doing really doesn’t matter.
As Yoseph said, prioritize your customers over your competitors.
It is very rare that a company died because of their competitors. As Paul Graham says, “suicide is a far more common reason for startup death than homicide.”