Most founders make the same mistake when building a Go-to-Market (GTM) strategy: they wait too long.
They wait until the product is finished.
They wait until the features are perfect.
They wait until they’re “ready.”
But here’s the reality:
If you wait until your product is fully built to start building your GTM strategy, you’re already too late.
Your GTM strategy isn’t something you tack on at the end. It’s not a marketing campaign you launch when the product is ready. It’s an ongoing process of discovery, adaptation, and optimization that starts before you even write a line of code.
What Is a Go-to-Market (GTM) Strategy?
A GTM strategy is your blueprint for how you will bring your product to market and drive revenue. It encompasses everything from audience research to messaging to distribution channels.
But more importantly, a great GTM strategy answers two critical questions:
- Who are you selling to?
- Why should they care?
If you can’t answer those questions with absolute clarity, your product is doomed to struggle, no matter how impressive it is.
Why You Should Build Your GTM Strategy Before Your Product
The traditional approach to product development looks like this:
- Build the product
- Launch the product
- Market the product
This approach creates a dangerous disconnect. By the time you start marketing, you’re already guessing who your audience is and what they care about.
What if your assumptions were wrong?
Building your GTM strategy before your product allows you to:
- Validate your target audience.
- Test messaging before committing to a full build.
- Adapt your product to better fit the needs of your audience.
- Reduce the risk of wasting months (or years) building something nobody wants.
How to Build a GTM Strategy Before Your Product Exists
Creating a GTM strategy before your product is fully developed requires a shift in mindset. You’re not just building a product; you’re building a market.
Here’s how:
Step 1: Identify Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
This isn’t about guessing who might be interested. It’s about deeply understanding who needs what you’re building.
- What industry are they in?
- What job titles do they hold?
- What pain points are they experiencing?
- What solutions are they currently using?
- What frustrates them about those solutions?
The more specific you can be, the better. “Small businesses” is not a target market. “B2B SaaS companies with under 50 employees struggling to scale their sales processes” is.
Step 2: Test Your Messaging (Without a Product)
The beauty of building a GTM strategy before your product exists is that you can validate your messaging without investing heavily in development.
Some of the best tools for testing messaging include:
- Landing Pages: Build simple landing pages that explain your product concept. Drive traffic through ads and track engagement. Which messages resonate? Which fall flat?
- Social Media Posts: Share value-driven content that addresses your audience’s pain points. See what generates conversation and interest.
- Surveys & Interviews: Directly ask your audience about their pain points, desires, and current solutions. Find out what language they use to describe their problems.
- Email Campaigns: Run cold outreach campaigns or newsletters focused on the problem you aim to solve. Measure responses and engagement.
You’re not selling your product at this stage. You’re selling the idea of your product.
If your messaging resonates, you’re on the right track. If not, you’ve just saved yourself months of wasted effort.
Step 3: Build a Pre-Launch Community
Most founders wait until their product is finished to start building their audience. That’s a mistake.
You should be building your audience from day one.
- Create a Newsletter: Share your journey, your insights, and your progress. Give your audience a reason to stick around.
- Launch a Private Beta Group: Invite early adopters to participate in your product’s development. Make them feel like insiders.
- Start Conversations: Join relevant communities, engage in forums, and become a trusted voice in your niche.
Building a community before you launch creates built-in demand for your product. When you’re finally ready to launch, you already have a waiting audience.
Step 4: Test Your Distribution Channels
How will you reach your audience? Instead of waiting until launch day, start experimenting early.
- Content Marketing: Test different types of content (blog posts, videos, case studies) and see what drives the most engagement.
- Paid Advertising: Run low-budget ad campaigns to see which messages attract the most attention.
- Partnerships & Collaborations: Identify influencers, bloggers, or organizations with audiences similar to yours. Test early collaborations to gauge interest.
The goal is to find the channels that give you the most traction — before you invest heavily in a full-scale launch.
Step 5: Iterate Based on Feedback
The biggest advantage of building a GTM strategy before your product is that you can adapt quickly.
Pay attention to:
- What messages generate the most interest.
- Which distribution channels are most effective.
- What feedback you’re receiving from early users and testers.
Then, use that data to refine your product before you even launch it.
The Benefits of This Approach
- Reduced Risk: You’re not betting everything on a finished product with untested messaging.
- Faster Iteration: You can adapt your messaging, audience, or channels without reworking your entire product.
- Stronger Launch: By the time you launch, you’ve already validated your GTM strategy, making success far more likely.
The Bottom Line
Your GTM strategy is not a marketing campaign. It’s a learning process. The earlier you start, the more time you have to adapt and optimize.
If you wait until your product is finished to build your GTM strategy, you’re already setting yourself up for failure.
Instead, build your GTM strategy while you build your product. Treat it like an evolving system, not a one-time effort.
