Go-to-market strategy framework for early-stage startups (+ free AI VP of Marketing tool)
- BADideas.fund
- 4 days ago
- 6 min read
The go-to-market strategy framework a decade-deep operator uses to fix what quietly kills pre-seed startups - buyer, pain, and trust. Plus a free AI VP of Marketing tool you can build this week.
I'm Jurģis - community & brand lead at BADideas.fund and host of the Bad Advice podcast. Every newsletter issue digs into multiple go-to-market problems from the show and hands you a free downloadable tool to fix it (a skill, an md spec, an AI VP of Sales or Marketing, etc.).
The short version, for the people in a hurry. Most early-stage startups don't die because the product is bad - they die because they never built a real go-to-market strategy framework. Suhas Ghante, who's advised startups that have raised over $100M combined, boils that framework down to three questions: who's the buyer, how acute is the pain, and how much trust is needed before they pay. Get those right and the rest of the motion - pricing, channel, messaging - falls into place. (We've also packaged the operator side of it into a free AI VP of Marketing tool - grab it below.)
I sat down with Suhas for an hour on our podcast, Bad Advice. Here's the go-to-market strategy framework that stuck.
"The salesperson you hire is only inheriting your confusion"
It usually starts the same way. A founder raises a pre-seed round, an investor says "right, go get to $1M ARR," and the gut reaction is to hire someone to go sell. Suhas just shook his head at that.
"That's almost always the wrong thing to do. At the very earliest stages, the founder's job is to learn. The salesperson you hire is simply inheriting the confusion you already have. You can't outsource that."
His point: at pre-seed you don't have a sales problem, you have a learning problem. You're trying to figure out who actually signs the cheque, what pain is real enough to pay for, and how much trust has to be built first. Hand that to a new hire and you've just paid someone to inherit your fog.
The go-to-market strategy framework: buyer, pain, and trust
Ask Suhas what go-to-market actually means at pre-seed and he hands you a simple go-to-market strategy framework - three questions:
Who is your buyer? The person who can actually sign the cheque - not the user, not the fan, the signer.
How acute is the pain? Is this a painkiller or a vitamin? Vitamins don't get budget.
How much trust is needed before the purchase? "Nobody's going to pay $200,000 without shaking your hand."
Answer those three and the motion picks itself:
If value is easy to express and see, you've got a classic product-led growth (PLG) motion.
If trust and implementation are heavy - long conversations, dinners, procurement - it's enterprise sales.
If access and credibility are the barrier - they won't even take the meeting unless you're "one of them" - it's partner-led.
He frames the early days as setting a trajectory:
"They're on a ship going west. If you get the degrees off by a bit, you can end up in South America instead of the US."
Spend the six to eight weeks getting the heading right. It's cheaper than a year of rowing the wrong way.
The real reason startups get stuck: a fuzzy ICP
When a founder comes to Suhas stuck - product built, a few users, no real traction - he looks at three things: the messaging, the ideal customer profile (ICP), and the GTM motion. One of them is almost always broken.
"I'd say 70% of the time, it's the ICP. The ICP is fuzzy. So your messaging is going to be fuzzy, because you don't know how to talk to the ICP, and your motion is going to be wrong."
It's a domino effect. Blurry on who, and everything downstream blurs with it. His mental model is a cheat code - the one from StarCraft, "black sheep wall," that lifts the fog of war so you can see the whole map.
"When I work with founders, I try to be the black sheep wall. The cheat code that removes the fog and shows you where to go."
And the goal isn't a permanent answer. Every successful company he's worked with pivoted hard.
"Success isn't getting to a specific answer. It's reducing ambiguity."
Don't confuse activity with progress
The line Suhas keeps coming back to is one his first investor gave him: never confuse activity with progress. A thousand customer calls a month is activity. Progress is whether those calls actually answered buyer, pain and trust. Talking to customers is the input - not the strategy.
Distribution beats product now
The part founders most underestimate, he says, is distribution. Software is a commodity; anyone can vibe-code a product over a weekend. So what separates you?
"Distribution, I would argue these days, is more important than product."
His example is the one everyone feels: Slack is the better product, but Microsoft Teams won adoption because it ships inside Office. Distribution was already cracked. His advice is to find the flywheel - the bigger cog you can slot into.
"Where can you find the flywheel effect where the symbiosis exists? Where is the North Star the same for you and them?"
The other founder-killer: storytelling (and friction)
Two more things he's seen decide outcomes. First, communication:
"The best companies don't get funded. The best-communicated companies get funded."
Clarity of thought - distilling something complex into something anyone can grasp - is, in his words, "the highest form of intelligence." Second, and quieter: co-founder friction. He says 70% of his early read on a company is simply how well the founders handle disagreement. The ones who can air a hard thing and keep building tend to make it. The ones who can't tend not to.
The skill nobody teaches: spending the money
There's a moment in our Launchpad programme - the six weeks founders go through right after we back them - where Suhas opens with a warning: elation, followed by chaos. The skill that decides what happens next isn't making money or saving it. It's spending it.
"VCs gave you money to spend, not to hoard. Capital allocation is what separates the great companies."
Build your AI VP of Marketing
Here's where the episode turns practical. If the product isn't the edge anymore and getting to the right customers is, the highest-leverage thing an early-stage founder can do is run a marketing system that thinks like an operator - without hiring one. The same go-to-market strategy framework runs underneath it - the tool just turns buyer, pain and trust into a daily operating rhythm.
So we wrote the whole spec: the database schema, the integrations, the AI prompts, the cron jobs, the build order. Paste it into your LLM agent (we've been using Replit Agent), point it at your own data, and you'll have a working v1 in a few days - a dashboard on your headline metric and a daily email with three to five specific moves for today. One founder, one agent, running in production. Every company we back gets one. This is that one.
Prefer the full walkthrough first? See the AI VP of Marketing page →
Watch / listen to the full episode
Suhas covers a lot more in the hour - his own cybersecurity startup that ran out of runway underestimating enterprise sales cycles, why "Silicon Valley is a mindset, not a location," and why optimism is a force multiplier on the hardest days.
Frequently asked questions
Should an early-stage startup hire a salesperson?
Usually not at pre-seed. The founder's job at the earliest stage is to learn who the buyer is, how acute the pain is, and how much trust is needed to close. A salesperson hired before that just inherits the founder's confusion. Hire once the motion is proven, not to discover it.
What is a go-to-market strategy for a pre-seed startup?
At pre-seed, GTM comes down to three variables - buyer, pain, and trust. Those determine the right motion: product-led growth when value is easy to see, enterprise sales when trust and implementation are heavy, or partner-led when access is the barrier. The goal is to reduce ambiguity, not lock in a permanent answer.
Why do early-stage startups fail at go-to-market?
Most often because the ideal customer profile (ICP) is fuzzy. When you're unclear on who you're for, your messaging and your motion both go wrong. Suhas Ghante estimates a fuzzy ICP is behind roughly 70% of stuck early-stage startups.
Is distribution more important than product?
At the early stage, increasingly yes. Because anyone can build a product quickly now, the durable edge is distribution - slotting into a larger "flywheel" (the way Microsoft Teams rode Office) where your growth and a bigger platform's growth point the same way.
Work with BADideas.fund
We're an early-stage B2B fund across CEE and the Nordics, and everyone here has built companies before. We back founders whose drive borders on unreasonable and work alongside them on the GTM drift that kills startups between rounds - while there's still room to correct.
If you're raising and want operators who've walked your exact walk in the room with you: