Whether it's a solo founder finally making their business vision a reality by bringing a new company to life or a serial entrepreneur launching their latest startup, a founding team's go-to-market (GTM) strategy is one of the most critical components to their success or failure.
As a venture builder, a key area of support and value we deliver to co-founders is helping them devise a go-to-market plan and offering support and guidance as they prepare to launch the startup in earnest and fundraise.
Our team is made up of experienced and savvy former entrepreneurs who have started and run their own companies, sold and fundraised those ventures, and — now — advise other early-stage founders through the process of bringing a company to market and navigating the pain points and challenges that come along with it.
There are varying go-to-market approaches implemented by those who create new companies.
Here, we explain how our team, specifically, provides advantage to our portfolio co-founders in their efforts to launch their startups — assistance that enables them to hit the ground running with confidence.
What our go-to-market strategy entails
When we decide to launch a business concept we work on with a partner, our first task is usually recruiting the right founding team with deep expertise in the space.
From there, we provide hands-on support from day zero, with a focus on de-risking, helping them accelerate business development, and putting them in the strongest position to make the business successful.
The fact that we do take on this work actually helps us recruit and attract top CEO talent. Think about it:
Who wouldn't want a team of business experts to help bring your new product or service to market, craft a pricing strategy, build a sales team and initial customer base, and tackle the myriad other activities tied to go-to-market efforts?
"Our investment is in the form of sweat equity, being co-founders who contribute to the long-term success of these ventures," High Alpha Innovation CEO Elliott Parker shared in a recent Q&A with The Gallery. "It's a model that ensures our interests are continuously aligned with the startups we help create."
Back to the point. When building out a go-to-market strategy — a comprehensive plan to address the areas above and countless others — there are two high level forms of support our team provides co-founders:
- Operational, which is more process-oriented, less strategic in nature but are fundamental practices that have to be executed in order to be set up for success. Think defining your target audience, mapping out the logistics of bringing a new product or service to market, building a sales funnel and motion.
- Strategic, which is more thought-provoking and requires a higher degree of sales expertise and critical thinking as it relates to what will make for a successful GTM plan. Examples of this would be first-call deck creation and landing on a pricing and packaging strategy.
Both types of aid offered to our portfolio co-founders empower them to make quick yet intelligent decisions that help them raise capital, secure early customers, and, ultimately, ensure greater odds of success.
The pillars of go-to-market planning
Let's double-click a bit on our process. When thinking tactically about how to prepare our co-founders for go-to-market success, there are two specific facets of their business planning and launch preparation we focus on:
1) Targeting strategy
Many factors determine how a new startup will perform from day one: from ensuring there is a strong brand identity, to timing the launch of their company using relevant data and insights.
A key factor that dictates startup success is developing a hypothesis on an ideal customer profile (ICP) and aggressively testing that hypothesis. It's all about getting one's brand and product in front of the right people.
Knowing who the target customer is, understanding their Jobs to Be Done, and developing data-driven sales and marketing campaigns geared toward that ICP is what will drive customer acquisition near and long term.
Coming out of our venture-building programs and Sprint Weeks, our co-founders are given an informed opinion by our team of startup-creation experts on who their target market is and what their biggest pain points are.
That said, we hire co-founders with deep industry experience and savviness who always come to the table with their own unique thoughts and opinions. Generally, their opinions have a significant level of overlap with the findings of our Build team, but there is always a level of nuance and differing perspectives.
Our early discussions with co-founders help them figure out how to:
- Pitch their products to their ICP (i.e., nailing their pitch and first call deck for early-stage conversations)
- Deliver a strong customer experience that helps them retain their customers' business and loyalty.
- Reach out to potential customers and business advisors, the latter of whom could possibly join their board of directors and offer long-term counsel to them (e.g., share insights on revenue-growth avenues).
In short, it's all about giving co-founders the tools and mechanisms to establish a compelling and effective outreach strategy and develop pipeline efficiently and at scale — the cornerstones of any great go-to-market plan.
2) Sales execution
Once they've built a healthy, pre-GTM pipeline, based on direct conversations with low-hanging-fruit business opportunities (i.e., potential customers in the serviceable addressable market who seemingly would benefit greatly from their startup's solution today), it's vital for our co-founders to close some early deals and convert late-stage leads into new customers.
Our GTM team knows how to achieve this. Based on our experience and expertise, we advise co-founders on:
- How to leverage our sales playbook. Regardless of the business model of advantaged startups we co-create with partners or the industry they serve, our Go-to-Market team has designed a well-defined sales process that can be repeated across our portfolio. While modest modifications must be made by co-founders to 'speak' the same language as their ICP, we offer a proven blueprint that helps them initiate the right conversations and effectively nurture opportunities over time.
- The power of effective storytelling. Creating a strong pitch for their early customers and investors, even before they have a fully baked product (our Build team 'hands off' a high-level business model to co-founders after testing and validating it) is mission-critical to gain early traction. At Alloy 2024, High Alpha Mike Fitzgerald explained the best startup leaders must "tell a story of customers buying your solution ... and being upset if you were to take it away" to attract venture capital interest.
- Versatility in prospect conversations. All leads are different. Each has their own problems they need solved. While our co-founders' job is to promote their product as the solution to said problems, pitches must be tailored to each prospect. That's where scripting comes into play. We've launched startups in several sectors and verticals, so we know how to speak to the challenges facing leaders across industries. We give co-founders intel that helps them cover all their bases in prospect chats.
Beyond these core areas, our Go-to-Market team offers help with executive coaching, sales sourcing, deal and pipeline management, and other crucial areas that, collectively, provide advantage to our co-founders.
Example of a go-to-market strategy
A great example of a go-to-market strategy we've put into action this is our work with a co-founder of one of the agriculture-focused portfolio companies borne out of our partnership with DIAL Ventures, a venture studio based out of Purdue University that we've launched several startups to date with:
- When we began our work with the co-founders, the AgTech company had a broad, undefined ICP. Basically, any food company (e.g., consumer-packaged goods brands, fast casual restaurants chains) was a target. Additionally, there were multiple job-title paths and buyer personas within these organizations to potentially connect with and pitch.
- To test unproven beliefs and hypotheses about the target market, we needed to generate sales opportunities to find out where our value proposition would resonate the most.
- We started by curating a list of relevant prospects based on specific company types and titles: Marketing leaders inside of large restaurant groups, food-transparency leaders at quick-serving restaurants, and sustainability leaders inside of large CPGs. This allowed for highly focused business development outreach.
- Then, we engaged as many relevant personas inside our network as possible — notably, friendly network connections who live in this space and could share candid, honest business and product feedback. These efforts led to major early learnings and even a paid pilot opportunity that the company is now executing against.
Gaining that initial traction with a go-to-market strategy is one of the hardest parts of the startup journey. The early stages are filled with the unknown, and even the best ideas can flounder without an intentional GTM plan.
That's why having an external partner to offer pragmatic guidance based on their experiences bringing new businesses to market is a boon for startup founders. This support can not only expedite their path to customer traction and market penetration but also fuel the confidence they need to keep pushing forward.
