291: Go-to-market strategy: what to do before you launch

A beautiful logo won’t save your startup.

If you treat go-to-market as a slick website and a rebrand, you’re already behind.

Here’s the thing. In tech, marketing isn’t a department. It’s product strategy. From day one.

In this episode, Sophia Matveeva breaks down the seven pillars of go-to-market strategy that every non-technical founder needs to understand before writing a single line of code.

No jargon. No “spray and pray” ads. No fantasy launch parties.

In this episode, you will hear:

• Why your “pretty logo” won’t save a bad go-to-market — and what actually drives early traction
• How to define your exact target customer so you stop building for everyone and start selling to someone
• The hidden cost of customer acquisition — and how to avoid burning 40% of your budget on ads
• Why your first 10 customers matter more than your first 1,000 — and how to land them without a flashy launch event

Resources from this Episode

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Get free access here: techfornontechies.co/aiclass

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TRANSCRIPT

[00:00:00] Sophia Matveeva: Have you ever bought something just because it had a pretty logo? I mean, I love the Apple logo, but that's not what makes me buy their product yet. This is what many people think. Marketing strategy is a nice logo, a good name, and a slick website, and that's exactly why most product launches fail. But here's what real go-to market strategy looks like.

[00:00:27] Hello and welcome to the Tech for Non-Techies Podcast. I'm your host, Sophia Mateeva. If you're a non-technical founder building a tech product or adding AI to your business, you are in the right base. Each week you'll get practical strategies. Step-by-step playbooks and real world case studies to help you launch and scale a tech business without learning to code.

[00:00:51] And this is not another startup show full of jargon, venture capital, theater or tech, bro bravado. Here we focus on building useful product. That make money without height and without code. I've written for the Harvard Business Review and lectured at Oxford London Business School and Chicago Booth, so you are in safe hands.

[00:01:11] I've also helped hundreds of founders, both from concept to scalable product, and now it's your turn. So let's dive in. Hello, smart people. How are you today? I wanna tell you about a conversation that I had recently with two early stage founders, and they're both really clever people, but they haven't yet left the big corporate jobs to launch their startups.

[00:01:35] So they're kind of new to this game and. I've been in their place, so I totally understand the mistakes that they're making because frankly, I've made them too. So anyway, they've built a consumer app and it's a pretty cool idea actually. They're about to launch and everything is ready to go. And so I asked them, so what have you done about marketing so far?

[00:01:55] And they said, well, we've got a web designer, we're changing the name and we can get somebody to work on the logo. And I thought, oh God. Oh no. You're gonna be in real trouble. Because this is basically what a lot of people who've never really done go to market properly. They think marketing strategy, is that a pretty logo?

[00:02:14] Catch your name, a nice looking website, but have you ever bought anything just because it had a pretty logo. Sure, I like the Apple logo, but that's not what makes me buy their product, right? I like their products because they solve problems, because they're sleek, because they integrate seamlessly. Like I'm so in the Apple ecosystem now.

[00:02:35] I'm probably never gonna get out. The user experience is exceptional. The best apps come out on Apple first, and so on the logo. Is just a logo. Sure. If they had a horrible logo, it would be kind of weird for Apple, but that's not what makes me buy stuff. And here's the thing. There's a core difference between how traditional businesses and tech businesses view marketing in traditional business.

[00:02:57] Marketing starts after the product is made. So you build the thing and then you figure out how to sell it. In tech marketing is part of product development, and this is why it's part of our tech for Nontechnical founders program. So basically we want you to integrate product marketing into product development because if you don't, basically you are going to be in real trouble when you release, and this is true of.

[00:03:21] Early stage product by two founders. And it's also true of massive, massive products like Instagram because product managers in big tech companies like Meta, they're literally thinking about how do we get more people to use our products more time? So, you know, if you're Instagram, they're literally gonna be thinking, how do we get people to come back over and over again and be more engaged and to tell people and to share our product.

[00:03:48] So in tech. Your product can actually grow itself and product development is part of marketing because you might have seen those screens, you know, that says share with a friend or share with a colleague. That's basically growth hacking strategy. So let's imagine that you've made a new analytics system for accountants.

[00:04:08] And your product development involves speaking to accountant. 'cause this is what you should be doing. You shouldn't just be sitting there and making stuff up in your head and then developing it. You should be speaking to people as you are doing your product development. Uh, you should be showing them new versions of your system and then improving it based on their feedback.

[00:04:25] So basically, if you follow that system, which we teach inside tech for our technical founders, then when you launch. You've basically got a bunch of people who have seen your work, who've seen the progress of what you're making, and they basically, you know, some of them will want to use your thing. Not all of them, but enough to get started.

[00:04:44] So that was a very, very quick overview, but. Today in this lesson, I want to talk to you about the seven pillars of go-to-market strategy. And these are the things that you need to be thinking about before you've built anything, before you've spoken to a developer. Like you need to think about this from the early, early stages because if you don't, again, it's gonna be really difficult and expensive to sort out later.

[00:05:09] And if you are sitting here listening to this thinking, oh, dear God, I've already built my product and I haven't done any of this. You know what? Let's start now. It is better late than never because you're gonna have to do it at some point, but ideally, you would've started right at the start. Okay? Pillar one, know your Mrs.

[00:05:27] Valeria. Okay. I'll tell you who Mrs. Valeria is. Basically, you need to know who your target customer is, and you have to know this in great detail. So, you know, I've heard some people say our target customers are busy professionals, age from 25 to 45. That's really not specific enough because they could be very, very different people.

[00:05:49] So you need to imagine a person, a specific person, a specific person with a name and habits, and essentially who like imagine who they are and. This is inspired by the real life Willy Wonker and the real life Willy Wonka, like he actually exists and he's a multi multibillionaire. So of course I'm talking about Michaela Ferrero.

[00:06:11] He is the founder of Ferrero Roche, and that's the make of Nutella and kinder surprise. And basically, you know, this man has brought so much joy into my life, so I'm really glad he's a billionaire. When he first started Firo, he talked about Mrs. Valeria. And so Mrs. Valeria was the customer that they were making products for.

[00:06:31] So he was always thinking about, okay, and literally I learned about this company and they have this chocolate experimentation department where they just create delicious concoctions. Anyway, so in this chocolate experimentation department where they're making amazing things, they're always thinking about Mrs.

[00:06:48] Valeria. So. Would she buy this? Does she like this? What does she think about this? So essentially they know what she values and what problems she has and how to speak to her. And so my question to you is, do you know who your Mrs. Valeria is? And actually, here's an example from one of our students whom you would've heard from her just a few episodes ago.

[00:07:10] Her name is No. She built a tech product for small retailers, and when she was building this product, she didn't start off by saying, I'm going to build something for all retailers everywhere. She literally started by targeted like she was a small retailer. She had. Three small retail shops, and she had a specific problem, and you can listen to the episode that we had with her to understand her story, but essentially she had a problem that she was experiencing as a retailer.

[00:07:39] She then spoke to other retailers. She knew who had the same problems, and so she ended up creating a product, and as she was creating a product, she was kind of. Co-creating it with the retailers that she had in her network. So she knew their pain points, she knew their budget, she knew their workflows.

[00:07:56] Essentially that means that when she launched, she already had a bunch of people who were ready to use her product and she was able to grow really fast because she wasn't trying to be everything to everybody. And she had a really crystal clear picture of her first customers. And you might be thinking, well, this sounds really small, but I have big plaid.

[00:08:16] But to have big plans, you need to start small first. So now her business has expanded to serve other types of customers, but first you have to start with one specific person in mind. So basically, if you can't describe your target customer in vivid detail and like what they're doing on Tuesday morning and what frustrates them, what they care about, you don't know your market well enough yet, so go and get to know it.

[00:08:39] Pillar two, what are you gonna say to Mrs. Valeria when you meet her? So you need a plan for what you're going to tell her. And for this, you need to understand how she sees the problem that you're solving because she might agree with you that she has this problem, but she might frame it in a different way.

[00:08:54] And this is really, really important, and this is where I don't want you to mistake big brand marketing strategy for what you are doing. Because big brands like Coca-Cola, they kind of have these really. Big fuzzy general slogans like Open Happiness or Think Different for Apple. You know, something, something kind of like interesting, but very big and just doesn't really describe the product at the start.

[00:09:21] You know, at the start, you are not Apple and you're not Coca-Cola, so your market messaging has to be precise and descriptive of what you actually do. For example, one Dropbox launch. They didn't say experience the future of cloud harmony or just something random like that. They said your files anywhere.

[00:09:40] Uber, when they first launched, they said Tap a button, hail a ride. This is clear. This is specific. This tells your customer what the product does. So when you think about your messaging, ask yourself, can a stranger understand what I do in five seconds? If not, then simplify it. You can get creative later when you're getting bigger, but right at the start, you need clarity.

[00:10:04] Now, pillar three, where are you going to find your Mrs. Valeria? Where is she hanging out? Where are you going to find your target user? And critically, do you know how much it's gonna cost to find her? Because if it's B2C, you'll probably find your user hanging out on the meta platforms or TikTok, and that's great.

[00:10:22] But. That's really expensive. Have you budgeted for that? Do you know what your market, do you know what your customer requisition cost is gonna be? 'cause let me tell you, around 40% of the money that B2C app founders raise from venture capital go straight into advertising. I mean, why do you think. Mark Zuckerberg is so rich because founders like you are buying ads from him and I mean also me, so we're, we're buying ads from him, and your business model has to work with that.

[00:10:50] If you are building B2B, it's a different story because you're not going to run TikTok ads for enterprise software. You are going to basically the beginning have to do sales yourself. And if you're doing sales yourself, then my question is, do you know who you are going to approach? Who's the buy-in, who's the user?

[00:11:08] Because often in a corporate, they're gonna be different people. So maybe you have a junior employee who's going to love your product and who's going to really want to use it. But the person who signs the check is the CFO, who's never going to use the product. And essentially you need to prove to them that it's worth their money.

[00:11:26] So if you're only talking to the user corporate, you might not get the sale. So basically think who your Mrs Aria is and how you're going to get to her, and what is it going to cost you in time, in money, and in effort to reach her. Which brings me to pillar four, your distribution strategy, and your unfair advantages.

[00:11:45] This is the most underrated piece of go-to-market strategy usually because everybody likes to think about the product and very few people think about distribution early enough unless they're clever. And listen to this episode, which you are so well done anyway, so here's what I want you to ask yourself.

[00:12:04] How do you reach your misses aria at scale? More importantly, do you have an unfair advantage in reaching her? So maybe you already have an existing audience, maybe you already have partnerships. Maybe you have access to a community that your competitors don't have. So for example, if you're building a product for dentists and you used to work in dental sales.

[00:12:29] This is an unfair advantage because you have relationships, you know the industry, and you can get in the door. Maybe you are building a consumer app and you already have 50,000 followers on TikTok. That is an unfair advantage because you have a built-in audience. If you have no unfair advantage, do not despair because.

[00:12:49] You need to build one. It's not the same thing as just being born to rich parents. You can build this or you can find a way to piggyback on somebody else's distribution. So for B2C products, think about this. Paid ads are really expensive, so. What could you do for organic growth before you get an injection of capital to pay for ads?

[00:13:11] So do you have a viral loop? Is there a way that you can get people to share your product with friends? You know, can you incentivize them in some way that is basically cheaper than advertising for B2B? I want you to think about this. Really understand or try to predict, and I know it's hard, but try to predict your sales cycle.

[00:13:31] Is it going to take you three months, six months or longer to basically go from having conversations to sealing the deal and getting money in the door and have you budgeted for that runway? So I'll tell you a story. Uh, I'll give you an example of that. I know a founder who sells software, so he's a, it's a SaaS company, software as a service, and they sell to insurance companies, and his sales cycle is two years.

[00:13:58] But the thing is, once he's in, he's in, and the contracts stick for ages. So those two years of labor, it's worth it because then those contracts are really, really long term. But the thing is. In his case, you wanna be thinking about, do we have enough cash for the next two years to basically carry on to, to stay in this sales cycle?

[00:14:20] Because if you don't, then basically you just need to go and figure out how to get it. Again, it's a solvable problem, but you just need to know that, okay, our sales cycle is this long. We're going to run out of money before that, so we need to figure out a way to get money before the sales cycle basically brings in the cash.

[00:14:38] Okay. Pillar five, timing and market readiness. Do you remember when during the pandemic, basically everybody started using Zoom and Zoom had existed before, but the kind of the zoom boom really happened from 2020 onwards because the market was suddenly ready. So then basically think about this. Why is the time right for your product now?

[00:15:04] Why will customers care about this problem now and what has changed in the market that makes this problem really, really right for your product today? Because basically, if you're too early, or if you're trying to educate a market that doesn't even know it has a problem yet, that's going to difficult for a startup.

[00:15:24] So big companies do that. Essentially they have big budgets and they can afford to do that. If you don't have a lot of cash, that's going to be a problem because we don't want you to spend a lot of cash trying to convince people that they have a problem in the first place. They should know that they have this problem, and then is just a question of convincing them to use your solution.

[00:15:46] And if you're too late. And everybody already has a solution that they're happy with, then you're going to struggle to get people to switch. So basically ask yourself, is the market ready for what I'm doing or am I going to have to drag them kicking and screaming into caring or, yes, the problem exists, but is everybody quite happy What with what they've got?

[00:16:09] Because you could build. A super, super great product, but if everybody's really happy with what they've got, then it doesn't really matter. Okay, let's get a bit more cheerful. Let's talk about pillar six. Your first 10 customers, a strategy. How are you going to get your first 10 customers? So not your first million, not your first a thousand, your first 10.

[00:16:31] Most founders think too big, too fast, and they just want to scale. But the thing is, you're not gonna get to 1000 if you don't know how to get to 10. That is the mathematical truth. So can you name 10 specific humans, all companies and humans within those companies that you are going to approach before you launch?

[00:16:54] Not something random, like small businesses in London, not busy moms who care about health, but 10 actual people with names and emails and phone numbers. If you can't do that, you basically don't have a go-to-market strategy because you have a fantasy. Ideally, as I had mentioned before, you should have met these people in your product testing phase, which is what we get founders to do now to do in our program, which is why they go from nothing to product to revenue so quickly.

[00:17:24] If you don't have your 10 already, if you don't, you know, if you are kind of like those two founders that I spoke to, if you have a product that you're about to launch and. You are not entirely sure which, which customers you're going to target first. Okay? You can figure this out. This is figureoutable.

[00:17:42] You're not gonna die, but you just need to do it. You just need to do it. So sit down and make a list for the first 10 people you're going to talk to 10 of your target users, not your mom. What are you gonna say to them? What are you gonna offer them? This is how you start. Do things that don't scale. Like that famous Paul Graham essay.

[00:17:59] You're not starting with a big marketing campaign. And please, for the love of God, do not do a launch event for an app that has no uses. Start with 10 real conversations. With your first users, you are really, really going to know them. I remember in my first company, the first users literally had my phone number and I would text them.

[00:18:19] I mean, I don't think they really wanted to talk to me. They were just like, I downloaded this app, I just want to use it, and the founder keeps texting me, but you know. I wanted to make sure that they kept on using it, but also I really wanted to find out when they're using it. And you know, I did, I did go a bit above and beyond, maybe a bit too much.

[00:18:39] Anyway, I was keen, right? Pillar seven, growth hacking, build it into the product. The seventh pillar, and this is critical, is growth hacking. Growth hacking means that you are doing absolutely everything you can to get people. To share your product themselves so you can reduce your ad costs. So basically, instead of Mark Zuckerberg getting even richer, it's you who's getting even richer.

[00:19:04] This is really not something that I. You should leave till last minute because this is literally like you are thinking about your screens, you are thinking about your designs, you're thinking about the philosophy of your product. This has to be built into the, into the product from day one. So here's a classic example.

[00:19:23] The classic example is Instagram. When Instagram first came out, every time you posted a photo on Facebook that was made with Instagram, it said made with Instagram at the bottom. Do you remember that this made people curious because they would see beautiful filtered photos on Facebook and they'll think, well, I want my photos to look pretty like that too, so I'm gonna check out this Instagram thing.

[00:19:45] So they downloaded it and Instagram didn't have to pay for ads. The product marketed itself and then you know, you know the rest is history. Then Facebook bought it, essentially. Yes, it was a good product, but it was growing this really, really smart way through growth hacking. Think about this. This is different to what a traditional marketing approach is.

[00:20:06] This is not a billboard and a highway. This is why even if you understand traditional marketing strategy, you need to understand growth hacking, which is a different take, which is a tech company take on go to market. So basically think about your product. What is the built-in mechanism that makes people share it?

[00:20:25] What is the viral loop? Do you have one? You have to exhaust every opportunity for your product to grow itself. And if you're relying entirely on paid ads or on your salesmanship, if it's B2B to grow, then it's going to be essentially really difficult or it's gonna be even more difficult for you to get off the ground.

[00:20:43] Okay, so now we've gone through the seven pillars. Let's bring this all together. Basically, if you're gonna remember anything, just remember that marketing is not what happens after you build marketing is what happens before it happens simultaneously. Product development and you go to market strategy are happening together at the same time.

[00:21:02] This is very different to what happens in traditional businesses where you have the marketing department, you know, like in Coca-Cola, the people who are doing marketing and the people who are actually making the fizzy drinks. They're completely different people than they've never met before. In tech, you know they're gonna be the same, the same person, or the same team.

[00:21:20] If you don't know exactly who will buy, why they'll buy, where you'll find them and what it costs to acquire your customers, then. You don't have a business strategy yet, which is, which is fine, but you just need to go and figure that out. So when you are thinking about your go-to market strategy, let's just summarize what we've learned today.

[00:21:39] These are the seven pillars I want you to focus on. Number one, know your Mrs. Valeria in vivid detail. Number two, know what you're going to say to her. Be precise and descriptive in your messaging, and don't do vague brand vibes. Until you're super famous, then you can get away with it. Number three, know where you're going to find your Mrs.

[00:22:02] Valeria and what it costs to reach her in time, in money and in effort. Number four, build a distribution strategy and identify your unfair advantages. Or if you don't have any unfair advantages, create them. Number five, understand timing. Why now? Why will people care about this problem and this solution right now?

[00:22:23] Number six, figure out how you're going to get your first 10 customers. Get specific names with phone numbers, not generic product categories. Number seven, build growth hacking into your product from day one and make it easy for users to share. These are the things that will help you. Basically have a good realistic product launch in a product launch.

[00:22:47] This is not gonna be like a Hollywood production where you have a massive event and you invite everybody. You can do that when you have enough users and you have some data and you actually have something to like really celebrate in, in terms of people using it. At the beginning, you are moving quite slowly.

[00:23:04] You are doing things that don't scale, but this is how you create something sustainable that can then. Basically grow really, really quickly. And you know what, don't worry about the name. Don't worry about a pretty logo. I remember in my first company, I think we changed the name like four times, so don't, don't worry too much about it.

[00:23:24] It's not like Apple changing their name. Like nobody's really gonna know or care about yours anyway, all of this stuff, if it just sounds like I've given you a lot of information and you are kind of feeling a bit overwhelmed. It's fine. All of this is learnable. It's not magic, it's strategy. You can totally learn it.

[00:23:42] Obviously, you can go and learn it by yourself, but if you learn it with experts like us, it's going to go faster and you're going to get much more ROI on your effort. So well done for taking the time to learn these skills with me today. And my dear smart person, if you found this episode useful, here is how you can help this show reach other smart, non-technical founders like you.

[00:24:06] So number one, hit subscribe so you don't miss next week's episode Number two, give us a five star rating wherever you get your podcast because it takes 10 seconds and it really helps the show get discovered by other. Clever people like you. And if you want to go the extra mile because you want calmer points, then leave a review telling us what clicked for you today.

[00:24:27] That really helps me and my team just know that you are out there and that I am speaking to people who are listening and that we're on the right track anyway. So thank you very much for that in advance. And on that note, I'm wishing you a lovely day, and I shall be back in your delightful matters next week.

[00:24:44] Ciao.