Your First 90 Days of Go-to-Market: A Founder's Playbook
Most founders stall. Not eventually, not if things go wrong. In the first 90 days.
The stall usually looks the same: the product exists, a few people have tried it, but nothing is converting and nobody knows why. By the time it happens, it's already too late to fix easily. The decisions that caused it were made in month one.
Harsha Vankayalapat, CEO and Co-Founder of AgentWeb, has a framework for avoiding it. He shared it with Every in a recent webinar series, and the core insight is simple: the first 90 days shouldn't be about building. They should be about learning what to build.
Weeks 1-3
This is the time for research, for figuring out the details of your product. This is when you take all of the ideas of what you want to build, and find out how to turn those ideas into something a customer actually needs. Before you write a spec or sketch an interface, Harsha's first rule is simple: talk to at least 30 people who match your ideal customer profile. Not to pitch them. To listen. Listen to their pain points, and figure out how you can build a product that solves those pain points.
Weeks 4-8
Now you should have a product design in mind, which means it’s time to find out if that product has an audience. Harsha calls this stage the “pre-totype” phase. Before you’ve written one line of code for your product, build a landing page, a Figma clickthrough, or a Loom demo to gauge interest. This will let you test the demand before actually building anything. “If people won’t sign up for that fake version of what you’re building, they’re definitely not going to sign up for a real version.”
Weeks 9-12
Weeks nine through twelve are about distribution: finding the channels that reach your customers without burning through budget. 'This is where most founders are going to stall, I've stalled here myself,' Harsha says. His recommendation is to run content and warm outbound in parallel, since the two strategies reinforce each other.
A lot of advice will tell you to take your initial marketing budget, put it into something like Apollo, get your initial leads, and start making those cold calls. Harsha disagrees, finding that strategy to be very low-leverage. If you’re starting small—if you’ve got $500 to spend—he recommends putting it into Meta or LinkedIn advertising, with the purpose of message testing.
So go into those first 90 days knowing that most founders stall, that most founders’ original idea is not the idea that becomes the successful startup. Spend those first three months researching, learning, and testing your product before you invest in building. You’ll come out of it with a better understanding of your product, your customer, and how to best reach them. Then the real work begins.
Up to 3,500 bonus and 3% cash-back on all card spend [3], 6 months off payroll, and 50% off bookkeeping for 6 months, free R&D credit.
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