Your First GTM Strategy Will Be Wrong (and That's the Point)
When we started thinking about go-to-market at Sonic Linker, I did what every PM does. I wrote a GTM doc. Target personas, messaging matrix, channel strategy, pricing model. It looked thorough. It was also almost entirely wrong.
Our ICP wasn't who we thought. Our messaging didn't resonate the way we expected. The channel we bet on (paid ads) barely moved the needle. What actually worked was something we stumbled into: content-first outreach that educated the market on AI visibility before trying to sell them a tool.
Why Early GTM Is Different
Most GTM frameworks assume you have product-market fit. They're built for companies that know who their customer is, what message works, and which channels convert. At the early stage, you have none of that.
Growth at zero is fundamentally different from growth at scale. You don't have enough data for A/B tests. Your ICP is a hypothesis. Every user conversation is a research opportunity. The playbooks that work for Series B companies will mislead you at pre-PMF.
Early GTM is a search problem, not an optimization problem. You're searching for the right customer, the right message, and the right channel. Expecting to find all three on your first try is unrealistic.
The Content-First Approach
At Sonic Linker, the insight that changed everything was realizing our buyers needed education before they needed a product. Marketing teams at B2B companies didn't know that AI agents were recommending (or not recommending) their products. We had to teach the category before we could sell the solution.
So instead of running ads, we started writing. Blog posts explaining AI visibility. LinkedIn content about how LLM-driven discovery works. Direct outreach that shared useful insights instead of pitching features. That approach got us from zero to 40+ mid-sized and enterprise clients.
The lesson: if your market doesn't know the problem exists yet, your GTM strategy isn't about conversion. It's about education.
The Experimentation Framework
Here's how I think about early GTM now, after getting it wrong and then finding something that worked:
Month 1: Test messages, not channels. Talk to 20 potential customers. Try three different ways of explaining what you do. See which one makes people lean in. The right message matters more than the right channel.
Month 2: Find one channel. Not three, not five. One channel that works before you spread thin. For us it was content plus direct outreach. For you it might be something completely different. The point is to go deep, not wide.
Month 3: Build the repeatable motion. Once you find a message and channel that work, systematize them. Create templates, track conversion, establish a cadence. Now you're doing GTM execution, not GTM exploration.
What Most Teams Get Wrong
They commit too early. Someone writes a GTM plan in week one and the team executes it for six months without questioning the assumptions. By the time they realize it's not working, they've burned runway.
They optimize before they validate. A/B testing your landing page headline doesn't matter if you're targeting the wrong persona. Fix the big things first.
They confuse activity with progress. Posting on five social channels, running ads, attending events, sending cold emails. Activity feels productive, but if none of these are converting, you're just busy.
They copy what scaled companies do. Slack's growth playbook won't work for your 10-person startup. The strategies that work at zero are fundamentally different from the ones that work at scale.
The Uncomfortable Truth
Your first GTM strategy will be wrong. That's not a failure. That's the process. The companies that win aren't the ones that get it right on the first try. They're the ones that learn fastest, iterate, and don't get emotionally attached to their original plan.
The goal of early GTM isn't a perfect strategy. It's a fast learning loop. Build it, measure it, learn from it, and build the next version.