Three tips for mastering GTM as a technical founder

As the foundations of the internet were being developed at the turn of the 21st century, many entrepreneurs lived by the adage “build and they will come.” They developed groundbreaking web browsers, payment networks, and search engines from scratch with the belief that if the technology was good enough, consumers would figure out a way to use it and begin paying. 

But the technology industry has matured significantly in the last 20 years. It’s never been easier to build something new, and buyers have access to more information than ever before. To create billion-dollar companies today, founders must be equally adept at building a solution and taking it to market. Otherwise they risk building a great product that no one actually needs. 

Here at Every we get the chance to work with pioneering founders shaping the future of industries from legal tech to travel and everything in between. We’ve seen first-hand that many of the most successful founders have been able to marry technical expertise with market understanding and sales skills. Excelling at go-to-market is not necessarily easy, but like most things, it’s a skill that any founder, technical or not, can learn. From conversations with dozens of founders, here are three tips for technical founders trying to develop their go-to-market motion.

Do user research, then do more

Understanding your ideal customer is step zero for developing your go-to-market strategy. With insight into your buyers’ pain points, goals, and workflows, you can optimize your product and messaging to meet their needs. A great way to get started is to speak to as many current and prospective customers as you can. 

When setting out to build enterprise sales platform Hyperbound, co-founders Atul Raghunathan and Sriharsha Guduguntla performed around 2,000 user interviews, as encouraged by their YC partner. Atul explains that “those user interviews really taught us about the space, and prevented us from building out an incredible product only to find that no one wanted it.” 

To turn those raw conversations into practical learnings, the co-founders developed a systematic process for tracking keywords across interviews and using that information to make objective decisions. “This understanding allowed us to have unbiased discussions. It wasn’t just that a user made a convincing point. It was about what the data shows.”

Hannah Sorkin, co-founder of sports partnership platform Playmaker, had a similar experience. Hannah and her co-founder initially spoke to about 30 potential customers before setting out to build their product. But an investor advised they increase that number to beyond 100. The team ended up doing over 200 discovery calls, 150 of which were before they started building. 

This deeper understanding helped Playmaker build a product that was a perfect fit for their users’ needs. Hannah explains, “we wanted to make sure we were building a true solution based on a problem that people have, as opposed to a solution in search of a problem.” In Hannah’s view, the extra legwork has led to transformative outcomes for the company.

“When we show potential customers our product, you can see the reaction in their eyes—‘you hit the nail on the head, this solves all the things I currently hate about existing solutions.’” - Hannah Sorkin, CEO and co-founder of Playmaker

Investing in user research at the beginning of your company’s journey is critical for setting your product on the right course. But gathering and responding to user feedback is not a one-off exercise, it’s a continuous process.

Get product validation through sales and usage

A founder’s unique vision is what sets them apart from the norm and allows them to build great companies. But at times, that same single-minded focus can hinder you from building an effective product. 

Many of the leaders we’ve spoken to insist that instead of building in a vacuum in pursuit of the perfect product, it’s important for founders to bring their minimum viable solutions to market and get validation through sales and usage. 

Shaun Lane, CEO and co-founder of AI voice company Riviera, explains that many founders get bogged down in product development, waiting to finalize the ideal product before trying to sell. But the best way to understand if your product is actually “good enough” is to see if people are willing to pay for it. “Your belief about your product being good enough or not doesn’t represent how good it actually is. Your product’s value is purely a function of whether people are willing to pay for it or not. You may think your product sucks, but if people are willing to pay for it, it’s an objectively good product.” 

On the other hand, Shaun explains, “you could spend months and months building something, and you could think it’s the best product ever, but if no one's going to pay you for it, then what’s the point?”

For Tanguy Chau, CEO and co-founder of Paxton.ai, bringing the early version of his product to market fundamentally changed the trajectory of his company. Though Tanguy initially set out to help large banks process unstructured data for compliance, he quickly found that the long sales cycles and barriers to entry inherent to banking were making it difficult to gain traction. He noticed, however, that lawyers, specifically at small and solo-GP firms, were really interested in the solution, as they too needed a way to digest and synthesize large amounts of information. The team began offering their product to lawyers, and it “resonated immediately,” with sign-ups skyrocketing. Tanguy and his co-founders decided to listen to the market and focus on building the best solution for that audience, using user engagement data to guide their GTM and product decision-making. And it’s paid off—in the last nine months alone, Paxton has achieved 14x growth in monthly recurring revenue and an 8x increase in active customers.

Now, Tanguy describes, “the feedback from our customers has been the single biggest driver of features we've implemented at Paxton. This has helped shorten our iteration cycle significantly.”

Without these market inputs, Tanguy and his team could have spent months and months trying to build a solution for financial services, only to miss the ideal target audience sitting under their noses. Although it may be your vision of what to build that gets you started on your founder journey, it’s important to balance intuition with market feedback to ensure you reach the best destination.

The importance of discovery in sales conversations

Once you understand who your ideal customers are, and have a product that solves their needs, you need to be able to translate interest into revenue.  

To some, sales is a dirty word. Especially engineers, many of whom would prefer to sign-up for a tool for free than speak to a salesperson in any capacity. 

But as a founder, being able to sell your solution is just as important as being able to build it. Atul and Sriharsha at Hyperbound learned this the hard way. After building an AI email personalization tool from scratch, they had to figure out how to close paying customers else risk going out of business. 

After developing their own sales training environment, the team scaled revenue from $0 to $250k in just three months. Atul explains that his mindset changed when he began viewing sales as an ‘academic’ sport. “When you get into it, sales actually has a lot more in common with chess than engineering or other hard tech disciplines. What matters is application and skill, not experience. However you acquire those skills, it doesn’t matter, it’s just how well you know them and which scenarios to apply them in.” 

In particular, Atul emphasizes the importance of nailing discovery as a sales skill. Discovery is the process of investigating and uncovering the prospective customer’s needs, pain points, and decision-making criteria to determine fit and craft a tailored solution. “Deals are won and lost in discovery,” Atul explains. “You have to get into the mind of the buyer, understand what’s important to them, and what’s going to drive them to make a purchasing decision.” 

Although technical founders may lean more on engineering expertise than charisma, Atul notes that “without an ability to build rapport with the buyer and relate to the challenges they’re going through, it’s hard to close any deals.”

Focus on continuous improvement

Developing a GTM motion as a technical founder can seem like a daunting task. 

Ishan Mehta, founder of Nimbic AI, shares from his experience that “coding and development is one side of it, and I found that to be the easiest part. It’s hard to talk to people. I’d never tried sales calls before. A lot of this stuff is very new.” 

As you develop your strategy, it’s important to think in the long term. Although most startup founders are constantly sprinting, especially in this rapid cycle of AI iteration, it’s helpful to optimize for long-term relationships. As Caroline Zhang, CEO and co-founder of Knowtex, says, “It’s a marathon journey. It’s so important to have a long-term view. Long-term industry and vendor partnerships matter. So build for long-term relationships.”

At the same time, embrace continuous improvement as you go. Sales, Marketing, and Partnerships are skills, and can be mastered as you get more reps. The best thing you can do is get started.