Growth & GTM
A product nobody uses is not a product
Go to market
Six steps, and the first two are not marketing
Positioning
Who it is for, what it replaces, and why it is worth switching. Written as one sentence a stranger can repeat — if the team cannot say it the same way twice, no campaign will fix that.
Pricing
What is charged, per what, and what happens at the edges — free tiers, annual discounts, refunds. Pricing is the fastest lever a young company has and the one most often set once and never revisited.
The launch
A dated plan rather than a day: the pages, the announcement, the listings, the first outreach and who is on standby when something breaks in the first hour.
Technical SEO
Built into the pages as they are written — server-rendered copy, structured data, canonicals, sitemaps and internal linking. Added afterwards it is a retrofit; built in it is free.
Paid acquisition
Meta and Google, started small and judged on cost per qualified lead rather than on impressions. The lead has to land in the CRM with its source attached, or the number means nothing.
The desk behind it
A CRM, a follow-up sequence and a person who calls back. Spending on acquisition without this is buying enquiries and dropping them.
Traction
Six numbers, defined once
Activation
The share of signups that reach the moment the product is actually useful — defined precisely, once, and not moved afterwards.
Retention
Cohorts by month, not an average. An average hides the only curve an investor cares about.
CAC and payback
What a customer costs to acquire and how many months until they have repaid it, with the spend definition written next to the number.
Unit economics
Contribution per customer after the costs that vary with each one. The line between a business and an expensive hobby.
Pipeline
Enquiries, qualified leads, conversion rate and cycle length — straight out of the CRM rather than assembled by hand for the meeting.
Runway
Months of cash at current burn, updated monthly. The one number every board meeting opens with.
Funding readiness
The data room, assembled before it is asked for
- 01Cap table, clean, with every instrument and every option accounted for
- 02A financial model whose assumptions are visible and can be argued with
- 03Metric definitions written down, so two people cannot report the same number differently
- 04Incorporation documents, statutory filings and tax registrations, current
- 05Founder agreements, ESOP pool and any vesting already in place
- 06Customer contracts, or the standard terms customers actually accept
- 07A deck, and a demo script that survives being interrupted
- 08A technical overview an investor’s engineer can read without a call
What this is not. We do not introduce you to investors and we do not take a success fee on a round. What we do is make sure that when you meet one, the product works, the numbers are defined, the paperwork is current and the technical diligence is passable. Anyone promising the meeting itself is selling something different from this.
Building it and selling it are one job.
If you are already building with somebody else, this half can still be bought on its own — positioning, launch, acquisition and the metrics underneath them.