AI is changing the rules of the game in Go-to-Market 🔄

20 AI Tools to power up your go-to-market efforts

Maja Voje, best-selling author of GTM Strategist, explains in this post how AI is changing the rules of the game in Go-to-Market

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ChatGPT reached 100 million monthly active users in January 2023, just two months after launch, making it the fastest-growing consumer application in history. (Reuters)

Such stories are outliers.

Most founders and growth strategists struggle with getting the first 100 beta users and 10 paying clients. 

“Build it and they will come” simply does not work. 

Entry barriers are lower than ever (no-code tools and AI), competition is fierce and the chances of becoming the next ChatGPT are slim as an amoeba. ​​🧫 

We have to actively promote our products and attract users to them to gain data, insights, and initial traction and set ourselves up for success. It is unlikely that they will magically go viral. 

Whenever I see GTM Strategy written like this outside the e-commerce space, I get goosebumps: 

“We will work with 10 influencers and invest $2000 in Meta Ads to the first 200 buyers.” 

How to do better? 

🎯 Focus on what is mission critical: Do things that do not scale before you can scale them

I made a mistake once. 

(OK, more than once 😅)

But this one turned out to be a valuable lesson. 

Back in my 20ies, I was working in a marketing agency. A startup working on fitness tracking asked us to help them get their first 500 users and we did what we always did - ads! 

What a rookie mistake!! 🙈

When we started advertising, “Mainstream users” started pouring into the application, only to see that 7% of them finished the onboarding and merely 2.6% actually took the app for a spin—did a workout. 

What was so terribly wrong there? 

With broad social ads, we attracted users who wanted to lose weight but did not even exercise. We burned precious marketing budgets to achieve our KPI:

“Get us 500 registrations and keep your CPI - cost per install lower than $2.” 

This KPI led to suboptimal decisions.

Unfortunately, they wasted some of their precious resources, time, and budgets, but this is the lesson that we learned: 

It was not about the lack of Product-Market-Fit (PMF) - the issue was that we wanted to skip the rule of the game - to first learn from Early Customers.

Your early customers will: 

• Have high pain points - almost “shut and take my money” scenario;

• Use MVPs, understand that they are not perfect yet and generously contribute feedback for you to learn from;

• Happily refer the product to others, provide testimonials and help it grow. 

Bottom line: Your marketing for getting the first 100 users will look a lot different from what you will do when you are thinking about how to get the next 10,000 users. 

But where to find your first users?

Rule #1: Go where the audience is

Do not think of channels just yet. 

Instead of juggling through YouTube Shorts, Meta ads, LinkedIn organic and Discords, let’s first agree that there are 7 GTM motions: