Go-To-Market

The most common diagnosis in an early-stage session is not a product problem or a positioning problem. It is that the prospect list has five names on it.

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Five prospects can easily yield zero. A hundred prospects, worked properly, reliably yields a handful. The instruction is not "refine your pitch." It is: make the list a hundred, work it, and come back with what you learned.

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The current state, honestly

Channels

Every channel gets a row. Untested channels are marked untested — not filled in with a guess.

Verdict is one of: working — scale it / promising — test more / dead — stop / untested.

Killing a channel is a result. A channel that produced nothing after a fair test belongs marked dead, in writing, so you stop half-heartedly returning to it.

The founder does the legwork

[TBD — where are you personally going this month, and how many?]

This is the highest-return activity available to an early founder in almost every sector, and it is the one most often delegated to an agency, an intern, or a plan.

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Go to the shops. Go to the societies. Go to the canteens. Go to the clinics. Walk in, say who you are, ask them to try it. Three things happen that cannot happen any other way: the pitch gets sharp because you watch people's faces, you hear the objection nobody would put in an email, and you get the photographs and stories that make everything else you publish real.

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It is also the cheapest market research that exists. Twenty-five doors in a day tells you more than a month of thinking.

The list of 100

One per active channel. The full builder is worksheets/list-of-100.md.

Where the list lives: [TBD — one sheet, one row per prospect: name, location, contact, source, last touch, status]

The cadence

The follow-up sequence, applied to everyone on the list. Most deals are lost to silence, not rejection.

Daily outreach target: [TBD — e.g. 10 emails a day, every working day]

Four follow-ups feels excessive and is not. The vast majority of people who eventually say yes did not reply to the first message. Founders stop at two and conclude the channel does not work.

Paid marketing

Current state

Spend something. A founder running zero paid marketing has no data and no baseline — and an ad account with no history performs badly when you finally do switch it on. Even a small daily budget is a learning cost, not a marketing cost.

A single early failed test proves nothing. Spending a small amount on a young account with untested creative and getting few orders is the expected outcome, not a verdict on the channel. Test again with a real setup before you conclude.

The step test

Do not jump the daily budget tenfold in one move. Double, hold, measure — watching two things at once.

You are looking for the inflection point where cost per lead stops holding — that is your ceiling on this channel, and it is worth knowing precisely.

The second column matters as much as the first. If demand doubles and you cannot deliver at the same quality, you have bought yourself bad reviews at a higher cost per lead. Before each step up, check the capacity ceiling in 06-operations. Go 8 → 16 → 32 → 64, and hold at each level until you are confident you can serve it — including on the day a technician does not show up.

Testing creative

Run two versions of every ad, changing one thing: the image, the headline, the call to action, the language. Video usually beats static. Real work usually beats stock. The local language usually beats English in a local market — check, do not assume.

If you use an agency

Agencies do the work. They do it much better when someone is holding them accountable.

Before you sign: read the deliverables list against the body of the proposal. Proposals routinely describe work — a landing page, A/B testing, a reporting cadence — that never appears in the deliverables. If it is described but not listed, it is not included.

Every week, ask to be walked through the campaign itself. Not a summary deck. The account: geography, keywords, audiences, budget split, live creative, what is being tested. An agency that will not screen-share the account is a problem, and you will find out eventually either way.

Check they exist. No public presence, no reviews, no verifiable clients, testimonials that appear nowhere but their own proposal — all worth a second look before the retainer starts.

Digital hygiene

Unglamorous, cheap, and quietly costing you customers. Work the list.

A welcome message on signup is free money and almost nobody does it. Someone downloads your app or joins your list and hears nothing. Send something within the hour: welcome, here is what to do next, here is a discount on your first order. This is the single cheapest conversion improvement available.

Attribution

If you cannot tell which effort produced which customer, you are optimising blind.

Incentivise the people doing the legwork. Anyone distributing flyers, canvassing an area or making introductions should have a code and a payment attached to results — a small amount per signup, a larger amount per first order. Someone on a flat salary handing out paper produces a fraction of what the same person on an outcome incentive produces, and without the code you cannot tell the difference.

Sales collateral

You need two different documents and founders usually have neither.

A shopkeeper cannot stock you if they do not know their margin, your minimum order, or how long delivery takes. That information on one sheet, with a QR code that opens a WhatsApp order, converts far better than a conversation they have to remember. Template: worksheets/trade-order-sheet.md.

Building in public

[TBD]

Publish your journey weekly. "This week we did X, here is what we learned, here are the numbers." It costs nothing, it compounds, and it does three jobs: it builds an audience before you need one, it makes you visible to investors and partners without asking them for anything, and it forces the weekly reflection you should be doing anyway.

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The format that works is boring and consistent: a founder, on camera or in text, same opening line every time, 45 to 60 seconds, on the company account rather than a personal one. Startups are interesting to people right now; founders telling their own story out-perform polished brand content at this stage by a wide margin.

Channel conflict

[TBD]

If you sell both to businesses that make finished goods and your own finished goods, you compete with your own customers. If you sell direct at a lower price than your retailers, you undercut the people stocking you.

Neither is automatically wrong, but both need a deliberate decision — and your buyers will work it out before you tell them. Write down which you are, or how you will stage it: supplier first, brand later.

Pricing

A trial offer that removes all risk gets you shelf space: leave a small quantity free or on consignment, one flyer, two weeks, then come back for feedback or a reorder. You are buying information as much as a sale.