This newsletter is sponsored by Miro - where my frameworks actually come to life.
I’ve been a Miro power user since 2020 - workshops, planning, prototyping, inventing new models, you name it, I’ve got a board for it. This week, I ran my GTM Blueprint workshop live at Canvas 26 in London, and honestly, this is what Miro does best: an AI-powered workspace where teams come together to do the thinking.
Run these frameworks yourself, test Miro’s AI capabilities, and find the templates that turn you into a creativity powerhouse.
Dear GTM Strategist,
Most of the go-to-market “strategies” landing in my inbox lately are AI slop.
You know it, I know it, so let’s not pretend otherwise.
So this time I want to bring the conversation back to something material and timeless: the four models I run with every single consulting client.
I invented them, perfected them over five years, and stress-tested them on AI companies at every stage you can think of - launching a product, expanding into a new market, even crafting that first pre-PMF plan. More than 12,000 companies have used them so far. That’s 15 years of work distilled into a handful of frameworks - but who’s counting? :)
Here’s what I love most about them: they are collaborative. Every single one is built as a workshop because I still believe that real human brains, in a room, on a board, together, create something beautiful that no model can spit out on its own.
And they age really well. They still deliver tons of value when we’re developing our go-to-market plans with teams. I revisit them yearly for strategic planning in my business practice as well.
Why does this matter more than ever?
Products have never been easier to build or copy. AI demos overpromise and underdeliver, so buyers walk in more skeptical than they were even a year ago. In that world, your edge isn’t more output. It’s focus and proprietary insight.
These four models are how I take teams from GTM overwhelm to GTM-focused execution, fast. The templates are open-source and free (video tutorials included).
Here’s what you’ll walk away with:
A 60-minute diagnostic GTM Power Hour to map your whole motion and ship a v1 of your GTM plan
The Market Problem Map to get you from “my product can help everyone” to one testable ICP
A 5-stage Differentiated Positioning workflow so you stop sounding like every other “vanilla AI tool” that makes your target customer yawn 🥱
My best seller now on AI steroids: GTM Blueprint. A reverse-engineered, prioritized quarterly plan you can actually execute
The exact free templates, and where AI belongs in each step
Bon appétit 🍽️.
1. GTM Power Hour: Your first ballpark plan in 60 minutes
I invented this one in Belgrade during my Swiss Entrepreneurial Program, which was packed with back-to-back mentorship sessions. When I travel, I want to make the most of my time, but six 60-minute sessions in a day is heavy on context switching, even for me. So I sat down and thought hard about what would actually move the needle for entrepreneurs in the short window we had together.
After working on hundreds of GTM strategies, the pattern was obvious: founders bump into the exact same problems again and again (ballpark 90% of new products have ICP and positioning issues that need fixing before we turn on the marketing and sales megaphones).
But founders hate to hear that as a “go back and do your research homework” recommendation- what they need is an action plan, not another pile of “could-dos” that sinks them deeper into analysis paralysis. So I mapped an outline to help them spot the weak points in their current GTM and pinpoint the next opportunities to grab.
That’s how GTM Power Hour was born, and people love how simple and actionable it is. No heavy prior analysis required, so it works even when you’re just getting started. It helps you map the key elements of your go-to-market motion and ship version one of a plan to hit the traction that’s mission-critical for reaching your next stage.
One rule: constrain it to the next 3 to 6 months. Most people genuinely struggle to plan further out, and our landscape shifts so fast that half your assumptions go stale the moment the next AI model drops.
If your GTM plan reaches much further than six months out, it’s probably fiction. Plan for the next two quarters, then let reality (and the next model release) update you.
The output is a document you can hand to investors, colleagues, or partners. This one exercise pulls everything swirling around in your head into a clean, presentable structure.
You can get it here, with a video tutorial to walk you through it.
If you are already further ahead, share it with someone who needs this clarity. 🫶
2. Stop selling to “everyone”: Focus 🎯 - pick your beachhead with the Market Problem Map
Spray-and-pray (or its respectable-sounding cousin, “diversification strategy”) is a dangerous game in GTM. The number one mistake you can make is stretching yourself too thin. For most of us, GTM isn’t even the sole focus - we’re also wrangling finance, leading the team, shipping the product, and personal life, to name a few. The last thing you want is your attention and resources scattered across multiple bets.
If your AI BI tool “helps solo entrepreneurs, but also enterprises, and hey, why not the public sector too - and developers, yes, them too, because who doesn’t want to make data-driven decisions?! 😏” you are going to have a brutal time accumulating a critical mass of proof that your solution actually works in any one segment.
Why does that matter more than ever? Whoever you want to sell to wants to know who got results before them, and those reference customers need to be relatable in size, industry, and use case. Sure, radical innovations can catch the wings of virality by making innovators and early adopters fall in love. But most of us (sorry) aren’t building something differentiated enough to bet the company on “users are gonna love it, they won’t be able to shut up about it.”
Beachhead to the rescue. Your ECP (early customer profile) should not be “finance people in startups and scaleups” or “anyone with a budget,” but the specific, winnable slice of the market where your solution creates obvious, repeatable value. The beachhead segment.
A well-defined beachhead segment hits four criteria:
A pressing need for your solution (high pain point)
Adequate willingness to pay (budget already exists)
The ability to produce case studies, testimonials, and references that help you move into bigger adjacent segments (healthy markets, reasonable TAM)
Accessibility - you can realistically reach it from where you sit today
Usually there’s more than one beachhead hypothesis worth testing before you bet the next three to six months of GTM on winning it. Most teams come up with three to five ICP hypotheses, and it’s extremely hard to validate all of them at once. So we test gradually, and the Market Problem Map is the best tool I know for choosing which bet to test first.
How it works: you map the relevant industry problems you solve, the pain points, and how they manifest across your segments. Then you score on three criteria - level of pain, ease of reaching them, and ease of implementation. On the other side, you get either your best segment, or sometimes even the best problem to address across several segments.
This is the exercise that takes you from “who could we possibly help?” to “who do we test first?” - and you can start today.
That output is gold for early positioning and messaging, and everything around it: LinkedIn posts, outreach emails, sales decks, landing pages, all of it. And yes, the result will shift over time as your product matures and you learn more about your market. That’s expected. Iterate with it rather than trying to nail it on the first try.
3. Positioning: the 5-stage workflow that kills the “vanilla AI tool” vibe
Now that we roughly know who we’re talking to and what problems we’re solving, we can sharpen our communication with a legit positioning exercise.
Fair warning: this is usually the toughest one, especially for technical teams. Marketers have a slight head start here because we’ve been trained to think this way. But the real magic happens in the collision of both worlds, where you come up with something that absolutely does not sound like AI slop or another me-too AI tool.
I built this workflow by combining models from three people I learn from: Andrej Peršolja, Emma Stratton (her book Make It Punchy is excellent), and, believe it or not, Alex Hormozi - his value-prop formula is my cheat sheet, I use it constantly.
It runs in five stages:
Map the competitive alternatives. What are people actually using instead of you right now to fix this problem? Then map the evaluation criteria your ICP uses to decide whether something is the right solution.
Score how satisfied your ICP is with those alternatives. This shows you where you have the best shot to win. Usually you’ll find one or two criteria you can genuinely compete on, or an alternative people are so unhappy with that you can flat-out beat it (assuming you’ve got the capacity to solve it better).
Map your competitive assets. Careful here. “Great customer support” and “amazing team” are things anyone can claim, and that you should have anyway. Filter those out. What’s left, what’s genuinely and radically true for you, those are your real differentiators.
Translate differentiators into benefits and proof points. Proof points are increasingly non-negotiable. People have been burned by AI hype and enter the buying process far more skeptically than they were a year or two ago. Backing every claim is both smart and fair to your audience. Good business ethics.
Land your first version of positioning: a value proposition plus three benefits and features. This is exactly what feeds your landing page, your sales deck, and the context documents you’d drop into a Claude Code or Claude Cowork GTM setup.
The language always needs fine-tuning, and that’s where human plus AI iteration earns its keep, over multiple rounds, until it lands in the hearts and minds of your ICP.
Full honesty: This is a simplified scheme of the process, but in practice it’s a set of exercises that need to be adapted to the industry and GTM stage. You can find more examples (together with the templates and prompts for sales decks and landing pages) inside my GTM Checklist and GTM Bootcamp - links below.
4. GTM Blueprint 🛣️: reverse-engineer your next quarter of traction based on your objective
You’ve done the thinking. Now it’s time to bring in some traction - and oh boy, do I have a good one for this.
My starting move is always reverse engineering. Start with one measurable GTM objective, grounded in the next three to six months (locking plans in stone for 12 months is risky - at this stage we don’t know what we don’t know, and markets shift constantly). Then feed it two things:
The outside view - research on competitors, the market, and industry best practices.
The inside view - your team’s unique insights and experience.
That combination produces a proprietary, intelligent GTM plan instead of generic AI slop.
The winning move is to make your inputs actionable and testable. “Do a LinkedIn post” or “influencer collab” is directional, but not actionable. So prompt your team (and your AIs) in a way that yields ideas you can actually run and measure.
Say the objective is 500 new users by the end of next quarter. Your ideas might be:
A PVP (personalized value prop) campaign in Clay and Claude Code. Good old outbound, done intelligently enough to actually convert.
A performance campaign with an industry-relevant influencer who already has the audience and traction - assuming you nail the audience-influencer fit.
Squeeze more value from existing users - growth loops for sharing, or even a referral program.
I love ideation. Generating all these exciting ideas sparks so much joy. But here’s the trap: you can do anything, but you can’t do everything. We all operate with limited resources, so the next move is non-negotiable - a reality check on who does this work and what will actually move the needle.
That reality check is prioritization, and I run it with a dead-simple matrix: value vs. effort.
Value: If this works, how likely is it to move me toward my objective?
Effort: How expensive, slow, or hard is this to pull off?
🪄 Pro workshop tip: I hate to admit it, but AI can be far more objective than humans at prioritization. I’ll always value gut feel and human oversight, but AI doesn’t “fall in love with its own ideas” or push something just because it’s really, really awesome. So I prioritize with AI first, then revise with the team - it saves time and a lot of unpleasantness.
Once you’ve prioritized, you’re ready to commit. Present the plan as a roadmap or a downloadable doc - whatever is most visible and actionable for your team. Avoid slides: they’re too static and never get updated IRL.
I packaged this whole workshop as a Miro Blueprint, free to use. Take it for a spin before the summer out-of-office auto-reply purgatory sets in.
Where to start (and where to go deeper)
My one piece of advice on where to begin: start where your customer journey is most broken right now.
No clear segment yet? Run the Market Problem Map.
Clarity but no traction? Jump straight to the GTM Blueprint.
You’ve got four frameworks and enough to run one this week - that’s real, and it’s yours for free.
If you want the full systems behind them (the templates, prompts, and worked examples that make them sing), they live in my GTM Checklist. Grabbing it is also how you keep this work going - which means more free frameworks and tutorials landing in your inbox.
Let’s go to market!
Love 💛
Maja
✅ Need ready-to-use GTM assets and AI prompts? Get the 100-Step GTM Checklist with proven website templates, sales decks, landing pages, outbound sequences, LinkedIn post frameworks, email sequences, and 20+ workshops you can immediately run with your team.
📘 New to GTM? Learn fundamentals. Get my best-selling GTM Strategist book that helped 9,500+ companies to go to market with confidence - frameworks and online course included.
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🏅 Are you in charge of GTM and responsible for leading others? Grab the GTM Masterclass (6 hours of training, end-to-end GTM explained on examples, guided workshops) to get your team up and running in no time.
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the overwhelm to focus jump is the hard part. most early gtm hires get thrown in with none of this
frameworks are useful.
but i've noticed a lot of startups don't fail because they lacked a framework.
they fail because they spent too long following a framework that reality had already invalidated.