💸 Get Your First Customers Today

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Building a great product is hard. Let’s say you managed to nail that process and built a great product.

Now, users should come by themselves, join your platform and love it all of a sudden, right? Likely, no.

The chances of getting users and having them love your product is through an effective GTM (Go-to-Market) strategy.

I must say, this edition is absolutely LOADED, and I hope it’s useful to you.

Here’s a snapshot of what’s on the menu today:

☝️ Scaled this past week: Light

Let there be Light! Light is the scale of the week with a rare seed exit!

Let’s say Light is a startup that thinks of the CFOs. CEO and co-founder of Light exits stealth with $13 million in a seed round of funding led by European VC giant Atomic.

The Copenhagen-based startup is reimagining general ledger software from the ground up, replete with AI to cleanse transactional data, while also enabling finance teams to ask plain-English questions and receive straightforward answers from their data.

🧠 Deep-dive: Going to Market

When it comes to GTM, there is no “one size fits all” approach for every business model.

Both in B2B and B2C context, there are different strategies, and often times, the right answer lies in some combination of some of these bundled together, rather than just one.

Experimentation is key here to figure out what works and what doesn’t.

Remember - humans do things that are rewarding, that’s why we do them. The point is to figure out what is rewarding for your business.

There appears to be 7 main strategies:

Inbound

Inbound marketing attracts customers through valuable content and SEO strategies.

• This approach builds trust and credibility by offering helpful content that addresses potential customers' pain points, leading to higher engagement and conversion rates.

• The key here is to get incoming traffic through a funnel. Other ways could be blogging, social media marketing, and creating lead magnets such as eBooks and webinars.

Outbound

Outbound marketing involves proactively reaching out to potential customers via traditional and digital ads.

• Outbound marketing can quickly generate leads and increase brand awareness by targeting a broad audience.

• “Cold calling” or “cold outreach” is the other term for it.

Paid Digital (Adverts)

Paid digital advertising uses online platforms like Google and Facebook to promote products.

• Paid digital ads offer precise targeting, measurable results, and the ability to reach a large audience quickly.

• Smoke-tests (or fake door tests) come in handy here. Strategies include pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, display ads, retargeting, and social media advertising to drive traffic and conversions.

Community

Community marketing builds and nurtures a loyal customer base around a brand.

👉 I recently met a “fresh mom” who used to take pilates classes for pregnant women. She is building a startup around selling baby toys in a subscription model with increased difficulty over time as the baby grows. Her strategy was to leverage the Whatsapp group of that community. Absolutely brilliant.

• A strong community fosters brand loyalty, generates word-of-mouth referrals, and provides valuable feedback for product development.

• Strategies include engaging with community members, hosting events, and creating exclusive content or offers for community members.

Partners

Partner marketing involves collaborations with other businesses or influencers for promotion.

• Partner marketing can expand reach, leverage complementary strengths, and reduce marketing costs.

• Effective strategies include identifying potential partners with aligned goals, creating joint marketing plans, and tracking the performance of partnership activities.

Here’s an example - AWS’s startup program is pretty neat in terms building those startup-to-startup relationships:

Account-Based Marketing (ABM)

ABM targets high-value accounts with personalized marketing and sales efforts.

👉 I have a friend back home in Istanbul, who is a real-estate agent. He only focuses on luxury areas near Bosphorous. He would never get a call back or even a reply from some of the high-end developers, who are leads for him with a portfolio of properties. He randomly started sending some of them boxes of chocolate, confectionery, and bottles of wine with a simple note in this format: “Name Surname Mobile - Can we talk for 10 mins?”. He got some clients from this strategy, worth every marketing budget spent.

• ABM leads to higher ROI by focusing resources on the most promising prospects, creating customized experiences that address specific needs.

• Key strategies include personalized content, targeted ads, and close collaboration between marketing and sales teams.

Product-Led Growth (PLG)

This is one of my favorite topics to discuss. However, it’s sometimes tough to justify PLG at the very early stages of a startup. I’m more in the school of thought where you should do things that do not scale.

Here is a full article about it in one of the previous editions of Scalable:
(Yes, I just shamelessly plugged my own newsletter in my own newsletter 😄)

In a nutshell:
PLG uses the product itself as the main driver for customer acquisition and retention.

• PLG reduces the need for heavy marketing and sales investment by leveraging the product's value to attract and retain customers.

• Effective strategies include optimizing user onboarding, enhancing product features based on user feedback, and utilizing in-product messaging to drive engagement and upgrades.

🗺️ Method: GTM Strategy Guidebook

Real-life use cases and applicability of these strategies are what I believe render them practical.

I’m a fan of sequence diagrams, they allow readers to read and digest information in a step-by-step approach, in the order of the events taking place one after the other.

That is why, I created this guidebook below, one that incorporates all of the strategies mentioned above, and provides examples alongside them.

It can come in handy while you are in the process of figuring out the right strategy, will help you find better.

Feel free to duplicate and get a copy of it for free to your private Notion workspace.

💡 Spotlight: Apollo.io

I came across Apollo.io a while ago, the first time I used it was quite recent.

In B2B context and getting high-quality leads that fit specific criteria, Apollo works exceptionally well.

If you want to find people with a certain job title, in a particular region, in a specific industry - this platform allows you to do that for free.

This feature is crucial for creating accurate prospect lists, which can be enriched and kept up-to-date automatically by connecting to your CRM.

Additionally, Apollo's search functionality is integrated with an AI-powered engine that can help prioritize high-quality leads and streamline the sales process, making it easier for sales teams to focus on the most promising opportunities.

The "Search" feature on Apollo.io allows users to leverage 65+ filters, such as job titles, company size, and buyer intent, to precisely target their ideal leads.

⚾️ Catch: A New Definition of AI: Apple Intelligence

Unless you’ve been under a rock recently - Apple redefined AI in their latest event as “Apple Intelligence”.

“AI for the rest of us” they say - with heavy focus on UX. Definitely a catch.

Here are some bullet-points to sum up:

• Personalization capabilities like never before - across multiple devices while maintaining a strong emphasis on on-device processing and user privacy.

• New features include enhanced natural language support in the Photos app, AI-powered editing tools, and improved functionality in the Notes and Mail apps, allowing users to interact with and generate content more intuitively.

• Apple emphasizes privacy by processing as many AI tasks as possible on-device and utilizing Private Cloud Compute for more complex requests, ensuring user data is handled securely

What this means for apps and other platforms might unlock a whole new chapter for a lot of startups, especially those who double down on UX.

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