Go-to-Market — Launch, Distribute, and Grow

Overview

Go-to-market strategy, helping product teams plan launches, choose distribution channels, design growth loops, define ideal customer profiles, and execute GTM motions. This skill applies frameworks for product-led growth (PLG), sales-led growth, community-led growth, and viral loops.

Instructions

GTM Motion Selection

## Choose Your GTM Motion

### Product-Led Growth (PLG)
Users discover, try, and buy the product without talking to sales.

**Best for**: Developer tools, productivity software, SMB SaaS
**Revenue model**: Freemium or free trial → self-serve upgrade
**Key metrics**: Signup → Activation → Conversion rate
**Examples**: Slack, Notion, Figma, Vercel, Stripe

**Requirements**:
- Product delivers value before payment (free tier or trial)
- Low time-to-value (< 10 minutes to first "wow")
- Product can self-explain (no complex configuration)
- Viral or network effects (value increases with more users)

### Sales-Led Growth (SLG)
Sales team drives revenue through demos, proposals, and contracts.

**Best for**: Enterprise, complex products, high ACV (>$25K/year)
**Revenue model**: Annual contracts, custom pricing
**Key metrics**: Pipeline → Demo → Proposal → Close rate
**Examples**: Salesforce, Workday, Snowflake

**Requirements**:
- Complex buying process (multiple stakeholders)
- High contract value justifies sales cost
- Product needs customization or integration

### Community-Led Growth (CLG)
Community creates awareness, education, and trust before purchase.

**Best for**: Developer tools, open-source, creative tools
**Revenue model**: Open-core, enterprise features, support
**Key metrics**: Community members → Contributors → Enterprise leads
**Examples**: Supabase, Vercel, Hashicorp, dbt

**Requirements**:
- Target audience gathers in communities (Discord, GitHub, Reddit)
- Product benefits from shared knowledge
- Team can invest in content and community management

### Hybrid (Most Common at Scale)
Start with one motion, add others as you scale.
Typical evolution: PLG → PLG + Sales → PLG + Sales + Partners

Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)

## Define Your Ideal Customer Profile

### ICP Framework
Your ICP is the customer segment where you have the highest win rate,
shortest sales cycle, lowest churn, and highest expansion.

**Company characteristics**:
- Industry: SaaS, fintech, e-commerce, healthcare...
- Size: 10-50 employees, $1M-$10M ARR
- Stage: Seed, Series A/B, growth stage
- Tech stack: Uses React, AWS, Stripe...
- Pain trigger: Scaling from 5 to 20 engineers

**User characteristics (within the company)**:
- Role: Engineering Manager, CTO, DevOps Lead
- Seniority: Mid-level decision-maker, not C-suite
- Daily frustration: "I spend 3 hours/week on deployment issues"
- Current solution: Manual scripts, Jenkins

**Behavioral signals (how to identify them)**:
- Hiring for DevOps roles (LinkedIn job posts)
- Growing engineering team (crunchbase, github activity)
- Active in relevant communities (DevOps subreddit, KubeCon)
- Using complementary tools (Kubernetes, Terraform)

### Anti-ICP (Who to Avoid)
- Enterprise with 12-month procurement cycles (if you're early stage)
- Companies with in-house solutions they're invested in
- Price-sensitive customers who will churn at renewal

Launch Playbook

## Plan a Product Launch

### Pre-Launch (4-2 weeks before)

**Build anticipation**:
- Waitlist landing page (collect emails)
- Teaser content: "We're building something for [audience]"
- Early access for design partners (5-10 customers who co-build with you)
- Seed community channels (Discord, Slack)

**Prepare assets**:
- Product demo video (90 seconds, show the aha moment)
- Launch blog post (problem → solution → how it works → CTA)
- Social media assets (Twitter thread, LinkedIn post, short video)
- Press outreach (if relevant): Product Hunt, tech media, newsletters

**Technical prep**:
- Load testing (can you handle 10x normal traffic?)
- Monitoring and alerting (SigNoz, Sentry)
- Support channels ready (Intercom, Discord)

### Launch Day

**Sequence matters**:
1. **Early morning**: Product Hunt launch (if applicable)
2. **Morning**: Blog post goes live, email to waitlist
3. **Mid-morning**: Founder posts on Twitter/LinkedIn (personal > company)
4. **Afternoon**: Engage with comments, questions, feedback
5. **Evening**: Thank early users, share metrics with team

**Amplification**:
- Ask design partners to share their experience
- Respond to every comment (builds trust and algorithm signal)
- Cross-post to relevant subreddits, HN, Indie Hackers
- Newsletter shoutouts (partner with complementary tools)

### Post-Launch (1-4 weeks after)

**Capture momentum**:
- Share launch metrics publicly (transparency builds trust)
- Write "lessons learned" post (content from the launch itself)
- Follow up with every waitlist signup
- Collect testimonials from early users

**Measure**:
- Signups vs goal
- Activation rate (did they actually use it?)
- Source attribution (where did converting users come from?)
- Feedback themes (what do people love? what's confusing?)

Growth Loops

## Design Growth Loops

A growth loop is a system where output from one cycle feeds the next.
Unlike funnels (linear), loops compound.

### User-Generated Content Loop
User creates content → Content indexed by Google → New user discovers content → New user creates content
Example: Stack Overflow, Reddit, Pinterest

### Viral Invitation Loop
User gets value → User invites teammate → Teammate gets value → Teammate invites...
Example: Slack, Dropbox, Notion
Key metric: Viral coefficient (invites per user × conversion rate)
If >1.0: exponential growth. If 0.3-0.5: strong assist channel.

### Paid Loop (Reinvestment)
Revenue from customer → Reinvest in ads → Acquire new customer → Revenue...
Example: Dollar Shave Club
Key: LTV > CAC with enough margin to reinvest

### Product-Led Sales Loop
Free user adopts product → Usage grows → Hits limit → Sales contacts for upgrade → Revenue → Fund product improvements → More free users
Example: Slack, Figma

### Community Loop
Expert shares knowledge → Community grows → Attracts more experts → More knowledge shared
Example: dbt, Supabase, Vercel

Examples

Example 1: Creating a gtm motion selection for a new product

User request:

We're launching a project management tool for remote design teams. Help me create a gtm motion selection.

The agent applies the Go To Market framework, asking clarifying questions about target audience, market positioning, and business model. It produces a structured deliverable with specific, actionable recommendations tailored to the design-tools market, including competitive positioning and key metrics to track.

Example 2: Reviewing and improving an existing GTM strategy

User request:

Here's our current go-to-market plan for our B2B analytics platform. Review it and identify gaps.

The agent analyzes the existing GTM plan against best practices, checks whether the ICP is specific enough, validates channel choices against the target audience, reviews the pricing-value alignment, and identifies missing elements like activation metrics or competitive positioning. It provides specific suggestions with reasoning, not generic advice.

Guidelines

1. ICP before channels — Define exactly who you're targeting before choosing how to reach them; channel strategy follows ICP
2. One GTM motion first — Master PLG or SLG before going hybrid; splitting focus early kills both motions
3. Launch is not a one-day event — A launch is a 6-week campaign: 2 weeks building anticipation, launch day, 3 weeks of follow-up
4. Growth loops > funnels — Funnels are linear and require constant input; loops compound and create sustainable growth
5. PLG requires low time-to-value — If users can't get value in 10 minutes without help, PLG won't work; invest in onboarding
6. Design partners for credibility — Launch with 5-10 customers who helped build the product; their testimonials are your best marketing
7. Channel-market fit — Not every channel works for every product; find the 1-2 channels that work and double down before diversifying
8. Measure by cohort — Compare launch week cohort retention to organic cohorts; launch traffic often has different quality