Thread by @martin_casado

0/ Descriptions of finding product market fit, and category creation often miss the hard part of getting to $10m in ARR ...

... which is the crazy effort required to tug, pull and hammer the shit out of the product *and* the market to make them hold together 👇

1/ Navigating early markets is really hard, and softening the market (market annealing) can take years.

While there are few easy answers, here are things to keep in mind if you're in a market annealing situation ..

2/ Founder sales can easily take you to $4m+ with the help of a few senior reps to navigate the procurement process. But founders should be on the front line.

As @bhorowitz told me "you can't run a company without being piped into the nervous system of PMF"

3/ Don't hire a sales lead too early. I'd wait until you have 4-5 reps quota'd at 3-4xOTE and a few solid quarters of hitting quota.

Have a head of sales too early is the #1 mistake I've seen in early market GTM.

4/ Pipeline for early markets typically comes inbound from the product, or outbound from the founder/investor network, cold outreach or events.

Traditional DG almost never works, nor partner sales, outsourced DG, SIs, OEMs etc.

Either you sell the product or it sells itself.

5/ First marketing hires for most companies should be a generalist product marketer who can amplify founder messaging, handle events, social, enablement, managing design firms etc.

DO NOT hire a comms or traditional DG marketer early on.

6/ Core messaging and content almost always has to come from the founders. It's nearly impossible to hire into. So your marketing hire is unlikely to help here.

However, a good product marketer can run content campaigns to help with SEM.

7/ Traditional outbound comms is largely pointless in a very early market. It can nominally help with recruiting and raising.

However, crises comms both internal and external is important. So it's good to have an advisor or a firm to help here.

8/ The right GTM strategy is dictated by the market as much as by the company. While we'd all like to build the next GitHub, Slack, Figma not all markets are amenable to that.

Finding the right GTM is join effort between the founders, the sales reps, product and PMM.

9/ Marketing consulting exercises for "category creation" are useless for startups.

The answers to the questions they ask can only be found the hard way, through tremendous effort with product and in the field.

Don't waste your time or money on them.

10/ Don't be afraid of services. Some markets are so immature, that even if you sell a customer a product, they can't implement it, or won't see the value. You can de risk this with strong post sales either as services or a CS motion.

11/ Finally, market annealing is fucking hard. You can hammer away at a market for years and have almost nothing to show for it.

But even in incredibly unrelenting markets, it’s possible to build large companies. You just have to be able to endure the pain long enough. /fin