Most B2B founders I work with are smart, technical, and deeply knowledgeable about their space. But when it comes to standing up a V1 go-to-market strategy, they’re starting with a blank canvas and no north star. Time is against them. Budget is against them. And every week without a measurable thesis is a week they can’t predict — or improve — growth.
The fix isn’t a bigger campaign or a better sales deck. It’s clarity: knowing exactly who your buyers are and exactly what they value.
That’s the foundation of my core GTM methodology — the Persona-Value Matrix.
Why Persona Clarity Is the Whole Game
Most early-stage GTM failures share a root cause: the message doesn’t match the person receiving it. Not because the product is wrong, but because the same pitch was sent to a CFO, a VP of Sales, and an IT Director — as if they cared about the same things.
They don’t. A CFO is thinking about payback periods and audit trails. A VP of Sales is obsessed with ramp time and quota attainment. An IT Director wants to know about your API, your SSO, and your security posture. Speak to all three the same way and you resonate with none of them.
The Persona-Value Matrix solves this by mapping the intersection of who your buyers are and what they value most — at the individual level. Once you have that map, everything else in your GTM becomes a downstream output.
How It Works: The Five Steps
Step 1: Define Your Personas with Precision
Effective personas aren’t demographic profiles — they’re decision-maker maps. Start with firmographics (industry, company size, stage) to identify which companies are likely to have the problem you solve. Then go one level deeper: who inside those companies controls or influences the buying decision? The VP of RevOps. The IT Director. The CFO. Each of these is a distinct persona with a distinct set of priorities.
Step 2: Map Values to Each Persona
For every persona, identify the two or three value drivers that govern their decisions. This isn’t guesswork — it comes from customer discovery calls, win/loss interviews, and close observation of what language resonates during sales conversations. CFOs want ROI and compliance confidence. CROs want speed-to-quota and forecast accuracy. IT wants integration reliability and security posture. You’re building an intensity map: which values are primary, which are secondary, and which are irrelevant for each persona.
Step 3: Run Small, Targeted Experiments
Before you build out a full content and channel strategy, validate your hypotheses. Run small, persona-specific campaigns — a LinkedIn sequence targeting one title, an email cadence built around one value driver. Measure engagement, response rates, and downstream pipeline contribution. A/B test messaging at the persona level. Collect what works and what doesn’t, even if it’s just in a spreadsheet at this stage. This is how you build the matrix from evidence rather than assumption.
Step 4: Build and Refine the Matrix
As patterns emerge from your experiments, you’ll see which persona-value intersections generate the strongest signal. These become your matrix: a grid that shows, at a glance, where your GTM energy should concentrate. The hot intersections become your content and channel priorities. The cold intersections tell you what not to lead with — and where not to spend budget.
Step 5: Build Everything Downstream from the Matrix
This is where the real leverage comes in. Once the matrix is built, it becomes the foundation for every downstream GTM activity.
Bespoke content and thought leadership: Each persona gets messaging, case studies, and content tailored to their specific value drivers. A CFO gets a cost savings framework. A VP of Sales gets a quota attainment story. A CTO gets an architecture overview and security docs. Same product — different narrative for each audience.
SEO and AEO: The matrix drives your keyword and topic strategy at the intent level. You’re not targeting generic industry terms — you’re targeting persona-specific queries. “How to reduce sales rep ramp time” is a CRO query. “SaaS security compliance checklist” is an IT query. “ROI calculator for sales enablement” is a CFO query. The matrix tells you which queries to own for which audience.
Demand generation: Every campaign, ad, and nurture sequence maps to a persona’s primary value signal. No noise. No generic messaging. Demand gen built on the matrix converts better because it’s engineered for resonance, not reach.
Pipeline acceleration: When every touchpoint — from the first LinkedIn post to the sales deck to the follow-up email — maps to the persona’s primary value driver, deals move faster. The right message to the right stakeholder at every stage of the funnel compresses the sales cycle and improves close rates.
The Compounding Effect
What separates the Persona-Value Matrix from a standard ICP exercise is that it doesn’t just inform your targeting — it informs your entire content, channel, and messaging architecture. It’s the operating system underneath your GTM.
Build it right, and you’ll have a system that improves with every campaign you run. The matrix gets sharper, the messaging gets more precise, and the results compound. That’s what it means to treat GTM as a learning engine rather than a launch plan.
If you’re a B2B founder still working from a blank canvas, start here. Define your personas. Map their values. Test, measure, and build the matrix. Everything else follows.
Ready to build your Persona-Value Matrix? Book a session and we’ll map it out together.
Intro: GTM as a Learning Engine
Most early-stage teams treat go-to-market as a static launch plan instead of what it really is: an iterative learning engine to achieve product–market fit and then scale. GTM is the process by which you repeatedly test, measure, and refine how you create, communicate, and deliver value to a specific set of customers.
Scale is what happens after you’ve proven that equation with real customers and real revenue, then deliberately pour fuel on the parts that work. This article walks through a practical, founder-friendly way to approach GTM and scale, based on sessions I’ve run with multiple accelerator cohorts.
What Go-To-Market and Scale Really Mean
Go-to-market is not a beautiful slide deck, a launch date, or a campaign calendar. It is an ongoing process of validating who your customers are, what they care about, and how you can reliably reach and convert them.
Scale is phase two: once you’ve reached product–market fit with a clear ICP, repeatable motion, and predictable performance, you start investing more aggressively in channels, headcount, and systems. The common mistake is trying to scale before you’ve done the messy, unglamorous learning work.
Start With Customer Discovery, Not Code
The first step in GTM is not building more features; it’s customer discovery. User research is almost always cheaper and faster than product development, especially when you’re still figuring out the problem.
In practice, that means:
- Talk to prospective customers at conferences and industry events, and focus on their goals, pains, workflows, and preferences—not your pitch.
- Run short surveys through LinkedIn or other networks to test hypotheses about problems and priorities.
- Spin up simple waitlist landing pages and drive targeted ads to see who clicks, who signs up, and what messages resonate.
- Put prototypes in front of real users and watch how they behave, not just what they say.
- Treat every touchpoint—marketing tests, sales discovery, in-app prompts, support tickets—as ongoing customer discovery.
Your goal is simple: understand your customer deeply enough that you can define ideal customer profiles (ICPs), value propositions, and messaging that are anchored in reality, not guesses.
Orderly GTM: Personas, Value, and Channels
Once you have raw discovery data, you can move from chaos to orderly GTM. Instead of random acts of marketing, you structure your experiments across a small set of dimensions: personas, value propositions, and channels.
One helpful way to think about this is with a persona–value matrix, like the “Jamify” example in the deck:
- Define a few distinct personas (for Jamify, it’s “Rocker Rick,” “Funky Faith,” and “Beatbox Benny”).
- For each persona, score how much they value different “flavors” of your product (in the example, it’s classic rock, funk, and hip-hop).
- Use those scores to prioritize which persona–value pairs to test first.
You then extend that same thinking to channel and messaging tests:
- Pick channels where your personas already spend time (e.g., Facebook Ads, Google Ads, Reddit).
- Create tailored messaging angles for each persona (e.g., “Fast Funk,” “Family Funk,” “Funky Feels”) and test them in parallel.
- Measure which combinations of persona, channel, and message produce the best engagement and conversion, then double down on what works.
This creates a disciplined testing grid instead of a random set of campaigns.
GTM Is a Team Sport: Product, Marketing, Sales, CS
High-performing GTM is cross-functional by design. Different parts of your company see different slices of reality:
- Product: interviews, prototype tests, in-app metrics, NPS.
- Marketing: message testing, ad experiments, audience/profile tests, surveys.
- Sales: discovery calls, objections, win/loss reasons, direct feature requests.
- Customer success/support: complaints, usage patterns, expansion triggers, churn signals.
When you connect these data streams and treat them as a shared customer discovery engine, your GTM becomes smarter over time. The mantra is: test, measure, learn, repeat—and never stop.
A Practical GTM Checklist for Founders
To make this concrete, here is a streamlined checklist inspired by the appendix of the presentation:
- Research your customers, market, and competitors.
- Define your ideal customers and key decision-makers.
- Clarify your unique value proposition and positioning.
- Choose sales and distribution channels (self-serve, inside sales, partnerships, etc.).
- Plan marketing campaigns and channels aligned to your personas.
- Set packaging and pricing strategies appropriate for your segment and motion.
- Prepare onboarding, training, and support so new customers achieve value quickly.
- Establish key metrics and a recurring review process (weekly or biweekly).
- Allocate budget and resources across experiments with clear hypotheses.
- Develop a launch timeline with milestones, not just a single date.
- Identify major risks and design experiments to de-risk them.
- Set up feedback loops so learnings flow back into product and GTM.
- Ensure legal and compliance boxes are checked for your market.
- Explore strategic partnerships that can accelerate distribution or credibility.
You don’t need to execute all of this at once, but you do need a deliberate path through it.
From PMF to Scale
Once you’re consistently converting a well-defined ICP with a repeatable motion, you’re ready to think about scale. Scaling means:
- Investing more heavily in the channels and messages you’ve proven.
- Systematizing your sales and onboarding playbooks so new team members can ramp quickly.
- Tightening your metrics and instrumentation so you can see where incremental dollars and headcount produce the best returns.
The throughline is the same: disciplined experimentation, obsessive customer understanding, and a willingness to update your assumptions as you learn.
Recommended Reading and Resources
Here are some of the books I recommend at the end of this talk:
As a serial B2B tech founder, I can tell you that customer discovery is absolutely essential. It’s the foundation upon which successful products, effective marketing, efficient sales, and ultimately, satisfied customers are built. Customer discovery is the process of deeply understanding your potential customers’ needs, pain points, and motivations. It involves going out and talking to your target audience to gather insights that will inform every aspect of your business.
Product Development
- Validating the Problem: Customer discovery helps you validate whether the problem you’re trying to solve is actually a real problem for your target customers. Too often, startups build solutions based on assumptions, only to find out that nobody actually needs or wants what they’ve created. Talking to potential customers early on allows you to test your assumptions and ensure you’re building something that people will actually use.
- Identifying Unmet Needs: Through customer discovery, you can uncover unmet needs and pain points that you might not have been aware of. These insights can lead to new product features, improvements, or even entirely new product offerings.
- Prioritizing Features: Customer discovery helps you prioritize which features to build first. By understanding which problems are most pressing for your target customers, you can focus your development efforts on the features that will deliver the most value.
- Ensuring Product-Market Fit: Customer discovery is crucial for achieving product-market fit, which means that your product satisfies a real market need. Without it, you risk building a product that nobody wants, leading to wasted time, money, and effort.
- Iterating and Refining: Customer discovery is an iterative process. As you gather feedback from customers, you can refine your product and make sure it continues to meet their evolving needs. This ongoing feedback loop is essential for building a product that stays relevant and competitive.
- Reducing Development Risks: By building based on validated needs, you minimize the risk of costly product iterations.
Marketing
- Crafting Compelling Messaging: Customer discovery provides the insights you need to craft compelling marketing messages that resonate with your target audience. By understanding their pain points, motivations, and language, you can create messaging that speaks directly to their needs.
- Identifying the Right Channels: Customer discovery can help you identify the marketing channels where your target audience spends their time. This allows you to focus your marketing efforts on the channels that will be most effective in reaching your ideal customers.
- Creating Targeted Campaigns: With a deep understanding of your target audience, you can create highly targeted marketing campaigns that address their specific needs and interests. This leads to higher conversion rates and a better return on investment.
- Developing a Strong Value Proposition: Customer discovery helps you articulate your product’s unique value proposition. By understanding what your customers value most, you can communicate the benefits of your product in a way that resonates with them.
- Enhancing Lead Generation: Customer discovery informs marketing strategies, from enhancing lead generation to improving customer loyalty.
Sales
- Qualifying Leads: Customer discovery helps your sales team qualify leads more effectively. By understanding the needs and pain points of potential customers, they can quickly determine whether your product is a good fit.
- Tailoring Sales Pitches: Customer discovery enables your sales team to tailor their sales pitches to the specific needs of each prospect. This personalized approach increases the chances of closing a deal.
- Overcoming Objections: By understanding the objections that potential customers have, your sales team can prepare effective responses and overcome those objections.
- Building Relationships: Customer discovery helps your sales team build relationships with potential customers. By demonstrating a genuine interest in their needs and challenges, they can establish trust and rapport.
- Improving Closing Rates: Ultimately, customer discovery leads to higher closing rates. When your sales team understands the customer’s needs and can effectively communicate the value of your product, they are more likely to close deals.
- Aligning Sales with Customer Needs: Customer discovery ensures that your sales efforts are aligned with the actual needs and pain points of your target audience.
Customer Success
- Onboarding New Customers: Customer discovery informs the onboarding process for new customers. By understanding their needs and goals, you can create a customized onboarding experience that sets them up for success.
- Providing Ongoing Support: Customer discovery helps your customer success team provide ongoing support that meets the evolving needs of your customers. By staying in touch and gathering feedback, they can identify and address any challenges that customers may be facing.
- Driving Adoption and Engagement: Customer discovery can help you identify ways to drive adoption and engagement with your product. By understanding what motivates customers to use your product, you can create strategies to encourage them to use it more effectively.
- Increasing Customer Retention: Ultimately, customer discovery leads to higher customer retention rates. When customers feel that you understand their needs and are committed to their success, they are more likely to remain loyal to your business.
- Turning Customers into Advocates: Happy and successful customers are more likely to become advocates for your product. They will recommend it to others, write positive reviews, and serve as valuable sources of referrals.
Key Questions to Ask During Customer Discovery
To effectively conduct customer discovery, here are some key questions to ask your target audience:
- What are the biggest challenges you face in your workflow?
- How often do these issues occur?
- How are you currently solving these problems?
- Do your colleagues experience the same difficulties?
- Is this issue common in your industry?
- Would you be willing to switch to/pay for a new solution?
- What features in a solution are important to you?
By asking these types of questions, you can gain a deep understanding of your customers’ needs and pain points. This information will be invaluable in informing your product development, marketing, sales, and customer success efforts.
The Cost of Skipping Customer Discovery
Skipping customer discovery can have serious consequences for your B2B tech startup:
- Product Failure: The most common reason why startups fail is that they build a product that nobody wants. Customer discovery helps you avoid this by ensuring that you’re building something that solves a real problem for a specific target audience.
- Wasted Resources: Developing a product that nobody wants is a waste of time, money, and effort. Customer discovery helps you focus your resources on building something that will actually generate revenue.
- Missed Opportunities: By not talking to potential customers, you may miss out on valuable insights that could lead to new product features, improvements, or even entirely new product offerings.
- Ineffective Marketing: Without a deep understanding of your target audience, your marketing efforts are likely to be ineffective. Customer discovery helps you craft compelling messaging and identify the right channels to reach your ideal customers.
- Poor Sales Performance: If your sales team doesn’t understand the needs and pain points of potential customers, they will struggle to close deals. Customer discovery enables them to tailor their sales pitches and overcome objections more effectively.
- Customer Churn: If your customers don’t feel that you understand their needs and are committed to their success, they are likely to churn. Customer discovery helps you build lasting relationships with your customers and ensure that they are satisfied with your product.
In conclusion, customer discovery is not just a nice-to-have, it’s a must-have for B2B tech startups. It’s the foundation upon which successful products, effective marketing, efficient sales, and ultimately, satisfied customers are built. By investing the time and effort to deeply understand your target audience, you can significantly increase your chances of success.
Understanding Customer Discovery
Customer Discovery (CD) is a fundamental process that helps businesses understand their customers’ needs, pain points, and behaviors before developing a product or service. It involves engaging directly with potential users to validate assumptions about the market and gather insights that will inform product development, marketing strategies, sales approaches, and customer success initiatives.
The concept of customer discovery became prominent through the Lean Startup methodology, pioneered by Steve Blank and Eric Ries. This approach emphasizes the importance of getting out of the building to interact with customers, rather than relying solely on internal assumptions. The goal is to reduce risks, avoid costly mistakes, and create solutions that genuinely address customer needs.
Key Elements of Customer Discovery
- Engagement: Direct interaction with potential customers through interviews, surveys, and focus groups.
- Validation: Testing hypotheses about customer needs and market demand.
- Iteration: Continuously refining understanding based on feedback.
- Insight Generation: Uncovering deep insights about customer behavior and preferences.
Customer Discovery in Product Development
Designing Buyer Personas
Customer discovery plays a critical role in designing buyer personas, which are semi-fictional representations of your ideal customers based on real data and insights.
- Identifying Pain Points: Through customer interviews and discussions, businesses can identify specific pain points that different segments of their audience experience. This information is crucial for creating accurate buyer personas that reflect the needs and challenges of real users.
- Firmographic Segmentation: Firmographics refer to the characteristics of organizations such as industry, company size, location, and revenue. By integrating firmographic data into the customer discovery process, businesses can create more targeted buyer personas. For instance, a software company may find that mid-sized healthcare organizations face unique challenges compared to large enterprises. Understanding these distinctions allows for tailored product offerings.
- Account-Based Marketing (ABM): Customer discovery informs ABM strategies by ensuring that marketing efforts are aligned with the specific needs of targeted accounts. By understanding the personas within these accounts—such as decision-makers versus end-users—marketing teams can craft personalized messages that resonate with each group.
Achieving Product-Market Fit
The insights gained from customer discovery help ensure that products are developed with a clear understanding of market needs. This alignment is crucial for achieving product-market fit, where the product effectively addresses the identified pain points of the target audience.
Customer Discovery in Marketing
Persona-Value Matrix for Experimentation
A persona-value matrix is a strategic tool used in marketing to align buyer personas with the value propositions of a product or service.
- Creating Experiments: By mapping out how different personas perceive value from various features or benefits, marketing teams can design experiments aimed at improving conversion rates across the funnel. For example, if a particular persona values cost savings over innovation, marketing messages can be tailored to emphasize cost-effective solutions.
- Testing Messaging: Customer discovery allows marketers to test different messaging strategies based on insights gathered from potential customers. By running A/B tests on campaigns targeted at specific personas, businesses can determine which messages resonate best and refine their approach accordingly.
- Improving Conversion Rates: Continuous experimentation informed by customer discovery leads to optimized marketing strategies that improve conversion rates at various stages of the buyer’s journey—from awareness to decision-making.
Customer Discovery in Sales
Connecting to a Sales Discovery Playbook
Customer discovery is integral to developing a sales discovery playbook—a set of guidelines and best practices for sales teams when engaging with prospects.
- Understanding Buyer Needs: Insights from customer discovery inform sales teams about the specific challenges and pain points faced by potential customers. This knowledge enables sales representatives to tailor their pitches effectively.
- Qualifying Leads: A well-informed sales discovery playbook includes criteria for qualifying leads based on the insights gained during customer discovery. Sales teams can prioritize leads that closely match the identified buyer personas and their associated needs.
- Overcoming Objections: By understanding common objections raised by prospects during customer interactions, sales teams can prepare effective responses that address these concerns directly.
Customer Discovery in Customer Success
Feeding Insights Back into Customer Discovery Research
The role of customer success teams extends beyond ensuring satisfaction; they also play a vital role in feeding information back into the customer discovery process.
- Identifying Expansion Opportunities: Customer success teams interact with existing customers regularly and can identify opportunities for upselling or cross-selling based on their evolving needs. For example, if customers express interest in additional features or services during support interactions, this feedback can inform future product development efforts.
- Gathering Feedback for Iteration: Ongoing conversations with customers provide valuable insights into how well products are meeting their needs. This feedback loop allows businesses to iterate on their offerings continuously and refine their understanding of customer pain points.
- Enhancing Buyer Personas: As customer success teams gather data about existing customers’ experiences and challenges, they can update and refine buyer personas to reflect current market realities better. This ensures that all departments—product development, marketing, sales—are aligned with an accurate understanding of who their customers are.
Conclusion
Customer discovery is an essential process that underpins successful product development, marketing strategies, sales approaches, and customer success initiatives in B2B tech startups. By engaging directly with potential customers and gathering insights about their needs and pain points, businesses can create accurate buyer personas, optimize marketing efforts through experimentation, enhance sales strategies via a structured playbook, and ensure ongoing satisfaction through effective customer success practices.
Incorporating these principles into your business strategy not only reduces risks associated with product development but also fosters a culture of continuous learning and adaptation—key ingredients for long-term success in today’s competitive landscape.
Startups often dream of building “moonshot” products – solutions so innovative and impactful they revolutionize an industry and solve massive customer problems. The challenge, however, lies in bridging the gap between this ambitious vision and the practical reality of building a product in an agile, iterative way, focusing on delivering value early and often. This post explores how startup founders can effectively derisk their moonshot product by strategically decomposing it, prioritizing customer learning, and tackling the most challenging aspects head-on.
The “Moonshot Product” Mindset
Forget spaceships; think problem-solving superpowers. A “moonshot product” isn’t just about cutting-edge technology; it’s about identifying a deeply felt customer pain point and crafting a radical solution that seems almost impossible today. This solution should:
- Address a Significant Problem: Solve a problem that impacts a large segment of potential customers. The bigger the problem, the bigger the opportunity.
- Propose a Radical Solution: Go beyond incremental improvements. The solution should be fundamentally different and offer a 10x improvement over existing alternatives.
- Leverage Breakthrough Technology (or its smart application): Use technology in a novel way to achieve the desired outcome. This could involve new technologies, or simply applying existing technology in a more effective way.
The goal is to create a product so compelling that it fundamentally changes how customers solve their problems.
Embracing Customer-Centric Agile Iteration
Agile development, centered around delivering Minimum Viable Products (MVPs), is the antithesis of “build it and they will come.” It’s about constant learning and adaptation based directly on customer feedback. This means:
- Validating Ideas: Rigorously testing assumptions about customer needs and your proposed solution.
- Rapid Iteration: Adapting the product based on feedback at short intervals.
- Customer Focus: Ensuring the final product aligns with user needs and desires, making it more likely to attract paying customers.
Think of it as navigating to the moon, not in one giant leap, but in thousands of tiny, course-correcting maneuvers.
Decomposing the Moonshot: Identifying and Derisking the Hardest Parts
The key to derisking a moonshot product is to break it down into its fundamental components and systematically eliminate the most critical risks early on. Instead of focusing solely on “derisking,” prioritize customer learning and rapid validation of assumptions. This involves a shift in mindset from simply minimizing potential losses to actively seeking knowledge and accelerating the path to product-market fit.
- Map the Customer Journey & Problem: Start with a deep understanding of the customer’s problem. Map out their current journey, highlighting pain points and unmet needs. This creates a solid foundation for your solution.
- Identify Key Assumptions: List all the assumptions underlying your moonshot vision. These are the beliefs you hold to be true about your customers, the technology, and the market. Be brutally honest and challenge every assumption.
- Prioritize the Riskiest Assumptions: Identify the assumptions that, if proven false, would invalidate your entire product vision. These are your “kill signals.” Focus your initial efforts on validating (or invalidating) these assumptions.
- Experimentation is Key: Design experiments to test your riskiest assumptions. This doesn’t always require building a fully functional product. It can involve:
- Concierge MVP: Manually providing the service your product will eventually automate.
- Wizard of Oz MVP: Creating a product that appears fully functional but is actually powered by humans behind the scenes.
- Landing Page Test: Gauging customer interest and gathering emails before building anything.
- Focus on Customer Learning: Each experiment should be designed to answer a specific question about your customers and their needs. Are they willing to pay for this solution? Do they understand the value proposition? What are their biggest concerns?
- Iterate Based on Evidence: Use the data from your experiments to inform your product development. Be prepared to pivot or even abandon your initial vision if the evidence suggests it’s not viable.
Kill Signals: Knowing When to Fold
Even the most promising moonshots can fail. Setting clear “kill signals” upfront helps you make tough decisions based on data, not emotion. Kill signals are predefined metrics or outcomes that, if not met within a specific timeframe, signal that the project should be abandoned or significantly altered.
Examples of Kill Signals:
- “Less than 10% of users actively engage with the core feature after one week.”
- “Customer acquisition cost exceeds a pre-defined threshold.”
- “We are unable to achieve a minimum level of accuracy with our AI model after X months.”
The Power of Iteration: Navigating to Your Moonshot
The path to a successful moonshot product is rarely linear. It’s a journey of continuous learning, adaptation, and refinement. Embrace the iterative process, be ruthless in prioritizing customer learning, and be willing to adapt your vision as you gain new insights. By focusing on derisking the most challenging aspects early on, you can significantly increase your chances of building a killer product that truly solves a major customer problem.
Conclusion
Building a moonshot product is a bold endeavor. By embracing a customer-centric, agile approach, prioritizing customer learning, and focusing on derisking the most challenging aspects early on, startups can transform their ambitious visions into real-world solutions that revolutionize industries and create lasting value for customers. The journey to the moon is paved with validated assumptions and discarded hypotheses.
B2B SaaS for Construction Project Management: A Derisking Example
Imagine you’re building a B2B SaaS platform aimed at revolutionizing construction project management. Your moonshot vision is to create a platform that eliminates delays and cost overruns by providing real-time visibility, predictive analytics, and seamless communication across all stakeholders (general contractors, subcontractors, suppliers, and owners).
The Riskiest Assumption
“Subcontractors are willing to adopt a new platform for communication and project updates, even if it requires them to change their existing workflows.”
This is critical because if subcontractors, who are often resistant to new technology and have limited resources, don’t adopt the platform, the entire value proposition falls apart.
Alternative Derisking Experiment: The “Subcontractor Liaison Program”
Instead of building the entire platform with all the bells and whistles, you launch a “Subcontractor Liaison Program.” This involves the following:
- Identify Target Subcontractors: Select a small group of subcontractors representing different trades (e.g., electrical, plumbing, HVAC) and project sizes.
- Manual Data Collection and Input: Offer a dedicated “liaison” (a member of your team) to work directly with these subcontractors. The liaison attends their project meetings, collects relevant data (schedules, change orders, RFIs), and manually inputs it into a simplified spreadsheet or a basic project management tool.
- Personalized Reporting and Support: The liaison then generates personalized reports and insights for the subcontractors based on the data. This could include early warnings about potential delays, cost overrun projections, or summaries of key communication threads. You are manually providing a fraction of the benefit from your moonshot, to a small set of users.
- Gather Feedback and Iterate: Closely monitor the subcontractors’ engagement with the liaison and the reports. Gather feedback on the usefulness of the information, the ease of use of the process, and any pain points they experience.
Why this works:
- Low-Cost Validation: This approach allows you to test the core value proposition (real-time visibility and predictive insights) without building a complex platform.
- Direct Customer Interaction: You gain invaluable insights into the subcontractors’ workflows, communication patterns, and technology adoption barriers.
- Build Relationships: You build strong relationships with early adopters, who can become valuable advocates and sources of future feedback.
- Iterative Development: You can use the feedback to prioritize features and design a platform that truly meets the needs of your target users.
Kill Signals (Example):
- “Subcontractors consistently fail to provide data to the liaison, despite reminders and support.”
- “Subcontractors report that the insights provided by the liaison are not actionable or relevant to their work.”
- “Subcontractors are unwilling to dedicate time to review the reports or attend feedback sessions.”
Key Takeaway
The “Subcontractor Liaison Program” allows you to validate the core value proposition of your construction project management SaaS before investing heavily in building the full platform. It prioritizes customer learning and allows you to iterate based on real-world feedback, significantly derisking your moonshot.
This example moves away from complex AI and focuses on a more practical, customer-centric approach suitable for vertical B2B SaaS. The goal is to learn if your solution will actually solve the customer’s problem, before you build it.
I do a ton of meetings with B2B founders – most have a strong product management, marketing, sales or subject matter expertise – some even have a strong background in marketing at scale. But most have no idea how to standup a V1 Go-To-Market (GTM) strategy. And it’s understandable – starting with a blank canvas is like a map without coordinates and no north star. Worse still, everyone of them knows that time and budget are working against them. If they don’t develop a measurable thesis, they’ll never be able predict growth with any accuracy.
In the thrilling (and frightening) world of B2B startups, the name of the game is alignment—aligning your groundbreaking product with the folks who need it most. Instead of diving headfirst into the vast ocean of possibilities, why not try a more targeted, nimble approach to developing a GTM strategy?
Picture this: a series of tiny, targeted experiments that help you fine-tune your GTM. Intrigued? Let’s explore how you can build a persona-value matrix to uncover those golden customer segments and streamline your GTM efforts.
Why a Scattergun GTM Approach Will Kill Your Startup
We’ve all been there, casting a wide net with the hope of snagging a few interested fish. But for B2B startups, this unfocused GTM strategy can lead to a slippery slope of wasted resources. Think of it as throwing a party and inviting everyone on your contact list, only to realize you’re out of snacks before the real VIPs even arrive. Here’s a peek at the pitfalls of spreading yourself too thin:
Budget Blowouts
Going big with broad campaigns can mean big bucks. Without clearly defined personas, efforts to reach the masses often fall flat, leading to low engagement and conversion rates. It’s like handing out flyers for a rock concert at a knitting club—probably not the best fit.
- Ad Spend Sinkholes: Investing in generic ads results in clicks from folks who aren’t even remotely interested in buying. Your customer acquisition costs (CAC) balloon, and your ROI doesn’t even send a postcard.
- Content that Misses the Mark: Churning out content that’s too broad can leave even the most well-crafted pieces gathering digital dust. Remember, content is king—but only if it’s speaking the right language to the right audience.
Time Ticking Away
Time is your most precious currency, especially in the early stages. An unfocused GTM approach can turn learning into a slow crawl. Every second spent chasing the wrong leads is a second that could have been used to woo those high-potential prospects.
- Sales Cycle Stagnation: Long sales cycles with ill-suited leads can stretch your resources thin. It’s like trying to sell snow boots in the desert—tough and time-consuming with little payoff.
- Product Feedback Delays: Engaging with the wrong crowd means missing out on valuable feedback that could propel your product forward. You want insights, not crickets.
So What’s the Playbook?
Step 1: Laying the Groundwork with Personas and Value Propositions
Your GTM strategy’s secret sauce? A rock-solid understanding of Personas and Value Propositions. By defining these two dimensions, you can steer your experiments to align your solutions with the genuine needs of high-potential segments.
Crafting Hyper-Relevant Personas
Personas are your ticket to targeting with laser precision. Forget about those broad strokes—zero in on the decision-makers who hold the keys to the kingdom.
- Firmographics Focus: Identify key characteristics like industry, company size, and location. They’re your clues to whether a company might be grappling with challenges your product can solve.
- Role and Title Tuning: Within those firmographics, pinpoint the movers and shakers, like the VP of Revenue Operations or the IT Director. Knowing who’s calling the shots helps you tailor your outreach.
Mapping Value Propositions (Pains)
Next, connect the dots between personas and their specific pain points. Whether it’s “increased revenue predictability” or “streamlined data integration,” knowing what makes them tick is your ace in the hole.
- Pain Point Profiles: Lay out the challenges your product addresses, like cost optimization or scalability. Align these with your personas for maximum impact.
- Value Proposition Prioritization: Rank them by relevance to each persona. CFOs love a good ROI, while IT Managers might care more about seamless integration.
This foundation sets the stage for targeted experimentation, paving the way for a persona-value matrix that guides your GTM decisions.
Step 2: Running the Experimentation Gauntlet
Experimentation is where the magic happens. By launching small, focused campaigns, you gather insights that don’t break the bank.
Picking Channels and Crafting Campaigns
Startups should tailor their channel choices and campaign designs to meet each persona’s unique preferences.
- Channel Choices: Think LinkedIn, email outreach, or niche forums. Keeping it focused lets you concentrate your efforts where they’ll shine brightest.
- Pilot Campaigns: Target a single persona within a narrow segment. It’s like trying out a new recipe—start small, tweak as needed.
A/B Testing for Precision
Use A/B testing to fine-tune your efforts. Test different messages, subject lines, or styles, and let the data guide you to the sweet spot.
Collecting Data Like a Pro
Track engagement metrics to see which personas are vibing with your solution. This data fuels your persona-value matrix, highlighting where your pitch packs the most punch.
At the earliest stage, this might just be manual collection of results added to a Google Sheet. But over time, this process should mature into more detailed funnel metrics housed in your CRM.
Step 3: Constructing the Persona-Value Matrix
As the puzzle pieces fall into place, you’ll spot patterns in your data. This persona-value matrix becomes your treasure map, showing where demand is hot and guiding your GTM choices.
- Demand Pattern Mapping: Look for clusters of enthusiastic engagement. If healthcare IT managers love your security angle, that’s a lead worth chasing.
- Refining Target Personas: Continuously refine your personas based on insights, creating a clear roadmap for future outreach.
Step 4: Crafting Persona-Specific Messages
With your persona-value matrix in hand, tailor your messaging to speak directly to each persona’s needs. Personalized outreach equals happy, engaged prospects.
Role-Specific Storytelling
Make your message sing by focusing on each persona’s unique value drivers.
- Persona-Driven Content: Write distinct value propositions. CFOs want cost savings; IT Managers crave seamless integration.
- Format Fun: Experiment with formats like white papers, case studies, or videos. Different personas, different preferences.
Constant Refinement
Keep refining your messaging as feedback flows in. It’s an ongoing process that ensures your outreach stays relevant and impactful.
Step 5: Analyzing Conversion Patterns for Future GTM
Track conversion rates to understand what’s working. Your persona-value matrix helps predict ROI and shapes your future GTM strategies.
- Funnel Metrics Monitoring: Use the matrix to pinpoint high-conversion personas. That’s where you’ll find your sweet spot for future efforts.
Conclusion
By conducting small, efficient experiments, your B2B startup can turn those tiny, targeted experiments into a powerhouse GTM strategy. Here’s to building connections and creating value, one persona at a time!
