Celebrating One Year of GTM Strategist Book
How to self-publish a best-seller despite all odds
Dear GTM Strategist!
I cannot believe it! It has been a year since the GTM Strategist first broke free from my computer to your bookshelves.
And it has been a wild ride. Since many people have been pinging me to write a post on how to publish a book, this is a perfect occasion to look back and share some highs and lows of the book-writing journey.
And you know my style - I will tell it like it is. In this Substack, you will find:
hands-on inspiration and motivation on how to survive a year of maker mode
tips and tricks on how to run a successful launch (yes, numbers included)
guidance on creating a sustainable business model in less than a year.
I will break it down for you from the inception launch to the building and scaling a business out of an edu product. It is a bootstrapped business, and I have lived to tell this story.
Here it is …
The inception: Maja, why don’t you write a book?
It was August 2022, and we were hanging out with some friends in our backyard. I love my countryside home dearly. It gave me peace, freedom of thinking and boredom needed to undertake this journey.
While I was sharing my business adventures, one of our friends, Tim, interrupted my flow:
“Maja, you are so into this - why don’t you write a book?”
For a moment, this idea captured my mind, and I was thinking - why not 🤷… Maybe one day.
But this thought became my brainworm and stuck with me.
Why not?
Writing a book was never “a purpose of my life”. I cynically think a book is an extended business care and a tough business to pull off. But if it is so “old school” - why do I keep thinking about it?
So I did a little research. I asked a couple of my colleagues, such as Sean Ellis, Wes Bush, Morgan Brown, Ramli John, and Stoyan Yankov what is this book-writing journey all about and got some great tips and perspective.
I got inspired and committed to the journey of writing a book.
But what book? What should I talk about?
Solve a problem worth solving and solve it in a way that a person can DIY this
As a pragmatist, I like practical literature. I judge every post, article, book and whitepaper by its ability to transform the way I think and work. And if I am doing it - I want it to bring transformation in people’s lives.
I did some soul-searching and talking with past clients and colleagues. I asked them a question:
“What unique value did I bring you?”
Their answers were all over the place - from them naming me as a “business butterfly” 🦋, to the word energy ⚡ being used in every single review to an actually useful idea that “I can do a lot with very little and inspire the s*** out of teams to get work done”.
Oh, that was good!
So where could I apply this? Where do we need to make the best out of any situation and resources while bringing the best out of people?
Hello, go-to-market.
Now I had to inspect this from another angle - am I worthy to talk about go-to-market? Do I have relevant experience, proprietary ideas, and track record to take on this mission?
Looking back on my career, I was doing it the whole time, without knowing its name. My background is in growth. I love the scientific method, and absolutely adore the thought leaders in the industry but here was my big question - everybody told you you need a product market fit, but no one told you how to get there reliably and how to get your company ready for scaling.
Most of the hero stories out there were about Ubers, Dropboxes, and Airbnbs who were all VC-backed companies. And that is survivorship bias with examples from 10+ years ago.
I come from Europe. The capital is scarce and our mentality is more “I can tell you 100 reasons why not to do it instead of one good one why should you absolutely do it?”
That is a quest worth pursuing.
I live for a good challenge; the ultimate challenge is winning against all odds.
Can you do it as an underdog?
You say it is not possible? Watch me.
A heart of the challenger.
The other thing that resonated a lot was my love and affinity for freedom and creation. I sincerely believe that every good product deserves the best fighting chance. I am in love with the idea of helping people build and live their 3.0 lives - to become the best versions of themselves.
This period, which I call “discovery,” lasted for two months (September 2022-November 2022).
OK, so now we have a title - now we need a book.
One year of maker mode: How to develop a writing habit?
While my friend Simon bluntly asked me - “Maja, why don’t you interview some people and train ChatGPT to write the book for you,” I knew that it was not the type of book that would make me proud.
What would make me proud? I live by “world-class standard”. To create world-class products, services and ideas, you have to go all in. We still iterate, learning by doing and we can build in public, but the product has to be perfect enough - it has to wow people. Especially in the super crowded category of “selling books on Amazon” and as a first-time self-published author.
Building products that make you proud takes time and iterations.
More importantly, it takes iron discipline and good habit creation.
After studying Atomic Habits, I came to the conclusion that I first have to develop a writing habit. To sit down - look at that boring Google doc and do the work. Simple as that.
I started to condition myself to spend every morning (my mental energy peak) doing the work or at least sitting down and not allowing myself to be distracted by other things.
That was Sparta. Here is a very strict ritual I kept:
Wake up at 5.00 to 6.00 and have coffee
Go to your home office - do not check the phone
Turn on Mozart and start typing
Do it for at least 90 minutes in your pajamas - no time and decision-making power to waste
Say hi to Anze (my husband) and walk the dogs
Go back up to the office and clock at least 120 additional minutes of deep work
There were limitations I had to consider:
To the best of my ability, it was impossible to squeeze more than 5 hours of focused work a day.
Zero email and social media before noon. It hijacks the brain and scatters the attention you need for deep work.
There was a significant drop in productivity after lunch (I do intermediate fasting, which is a fancy word for skipping breakfast, for 15+ years, love it).
Since not every day was “perfect” in terms of the routine, I decided to also do writing (at least one slot) on weekends to never break the habit chain.
The quality of the work was the next thing I had to improve. I am not a trained writer. I learned on the go. So, the GTM Strategist project overall had 953 pages and 3 evolutionary stages:
Braindump: Stories from my work, what I think is true … It looked a little bit like this: “Back in 2016, I was in cold sweat when we were launching in some basement in Belgrade …”
Encyclopedia: I did a bunch of expert interviews and researched many mental models. A “sample”: Yes - to make sense out of customer discovery, you can use assumption mapping (boom - 3 pages) and/or double diamond (another 5 pages) and make sure you are also keeping a backlog of insights.
Handbook: Centered around the central model and with to-dos at the end of each chapter led to logical progression and finally achieved the vision of this book being a DIY manual on how to go to market for practitioners.
And this lasted from November 2022 to July 2023.
It was a battle of discipline and willpower. I literally have to prove to myself that I can do it.
Luckily, I had really awesome people (my family, friends, chapter reviewers, featured experts, community on LinkedIn, awesome editor and team members) to support me on this journey.
I will forever be grateful for this. Yes, in my experience, it takes “a village” to write a book.
🎯 Mission critical: Get 2000 customers
Oh shit - I was writing this book since November 2022, and now it is July.
I was off social media for months.
Will people still remember I exist?
Did I lose relevance and momentum?
All my efforts will go to waste if no one will read the book.
So, I put my marketing head back on and created a launch plan for the book.
As you know, I always like to start by reverse-engineering the objective.
I set my brain on the objective that I want to sell 2000 books by the end of 2023.
The number was projected so that I could recover my initial 15K investment into the project (editing, design, first print batch, marketing expenses, etc.) - I did not even calculate my salary and opportunity costs. I just wanted to be break-even.
I also knew that I wanted to make an Amazon bestseller. Upon gathering intelligence on how much sales of the book is needed to create the best seller on Amazon, I came to the conclusion that I have to sell 500 copies on the launch day to claim the badge. And I did not want to sell it dirt-cheap because I think it depreciates the value of the product. Let’s be honest - how many free ebooks have you read this year? I read two - did not like them.
I projected that I need to sell 600 copies on the launch date (just to be safe) and that I need a waitlist of 3,000 people to make this happen (projected 20% conversion rate). I exported my contacts from Gmail and filtered them. I had approximately 300 people that I knew would be a great fit - how to get 2700 more was a critical question to tackle.
So I went back to my target market. I did a simple experiment. I listed down all the potential “personas” who could be a good fit for my book and sent a video preview of the book to 50 “representatives of these profiles”. I mapped their feedback and color-coded it:
Green = hell yes
Yellow = meh
Red = hate it
I quickly realized that “personas” for the book are multiple-time founders, tech founders, product managers and empowered growth experts with a more holistic view on business. However, the book was not a “no-brainer” fit for people from hardware and “dropshipping (non-branded) ecommerce”.
Next, I had to tackle the question: where can I find those people?
The answer was LinkedIn. I went all-in to content creation, collaborations and community building for the remaining 3 months to launch. The key call-to-action was “sign up for launch”. The beginning was slow and painful. But just like with writing, I became good by putting the reps in.
The planned launch was mid-November, just before Black Friday and Holidays.
The workload was brutal. We were posting 2x a day, I was pitching podcasts, developing relationships with communities, we even did a mistake of launching our own podcast in that period and wasted resources on that (more about why I think this was foolish some other time), but luckily things worked out according to the plan.
I wish I could give you a better explanation - but all I really cared about at that point was that I finally got some good feedback after spending a year in maker mode with completely delayed gratification. You can imagine how happy was I to finally see some signals that we are onto something good here…
So we survived the launch … only to realize that:
Selling books on Amazon is not a sustainable business model for my product vision
My brother Jure Knehtl, a seasoned e-commerce entrepreneur with 2 exits under his belt, asked me the best question possible after the launch:
“Maja, what kind of life do you want to live now?”
I was speechless.
Being so focused on mission-critical: “Sell 2000 copies by the end of the year”, I really did not have the bandwidth to dream what my life will be after the launch.
So Jure helped me understand some strategic options:
You can be a professional speaker and travel around the world to do keynotes and costly workshops - meh, not for me, I like living and working in the tranches
You can create a kick-ass funnel, and you create a portfolio of digital products that will help people to DIY this, but you will have to invest a lot more into the operation - good but scary before I can recover my initial investment
Take some time off and relax - find your new mission. Hell, no! If you launch something, you should promote it. Best-selling author of 1-page marketing plan Allan Dib told me that a book is a 2-5 year project. He was right. I have to ride the momentum and make the best out of this business. No matter how tired I am. New mission critical: Build a sustainable business out of this operation.
So digital funnel or a value ladder was my new mission for 2024. I am happy to share numbers.
If I sell 100 books on Amazon, I make $900. Amazon’s fees are crazy, but I will continue to sell there because it is the only way how I can get your printed copies without turning my house into a storage and shipping unit. And this is really not my vision of the business.
But I would also like to grow this business, hire new team members and get customer data to have an opportunity to speak to my customers (I get zero customer data from Amazon) - the best I can do is to offer free resources to download in a book and if someone connects with me on LinkedIn.
GTM Strategist deserves better, so I invested another 20K in building a value ladder to turn the “book project” into a sustainable business operation.
In 2024, we launched 3 new products in the GTM family:
GTM Strategist bundle: an enhanced digital version of the GTM Strategist book with additional resources and a quick-start video.
GTM Checklist: 100-step checklist tested on 750+ launches with templates (emails, launch plans, posts, landing pages), which will guide you from getting ready to launch to an impactful launch and scaling stage.
GTM Bootcamp: 5-hour deep-dive into GTM strategy that guides you to choose ICP (target market), pricing, positioning & selection of best GTM Motion (channels, tactics).
And I can finally say that we have a sustainable business.
We grow organically with LinkedIn, through partnerships, and with Meta ads.
And I can finally sleep easily knowing that we have secured product market fit.
Or can I?
Nope - I had to defend it every single day.
Show up and do the work.
This is not some passive income dream, but honest and hard work of helping more than 10,000 companies cross the chasm. The mission is never done. But I did learn to balance. New in Q4 - I can take every second weekend off 🤠- still grinding, but I am happy to see this venture grow and evolve.
Me being “smart” about my business after a year in the GTM Strategist venture
A French podcaster Carlota Güell, Product Marketing Manager at Decathlon, asked me a really interesting question last week: “What would you do differently now?”
Upon reflection, there are 3 things I will do better if I ever get on this journey again:
Start promoting the book way sooner - at least 6 months.
When you launch, go on a book tour immediately. Have everything planned out.
Double down on the funnel from the beginning on. Don’t overthink about how to write a book - you can hire an editor to help you. Think more about how to build a business.
And to celebrate this launch with the community - here are some gifts 🎁:
I improved one of my most popular frameworks. Here are 3 new examples of Power Hour: one pre-product market fit, one is ours (at product market fit), and cofounder of folk CRM did the third one (post-product market fit - how to get to 10K customers).
Announcement of the announcement: With my 🇪🇸 partner Product Hackers, we will launch the Spanish version of the GTM Strategist. The launch event will be in Barcelona on December 11th. I will keep you posted. If you are there, let’s shake hands and exchange some GTM gems.
If you missed my presentation on how AI products go to market in Dublin or Bologna, you can watch the recording here:
GTM Strategist methodology keeps on getting momentum. I was proud to share my take on go-to-market strategies for AI products with G2. Read the interview here: https://learn.g2.com/professional-spotlight-maja-voje
And something that I failed to deliver: I wanted to surprise you with an AI agent to celebrate this milestone, but the MVP was not world-class. I do not want to launch half-baked products. We will take more time to make it perfect enough, but it is rolling in our backlog. Will keep on pushing!
If you have any questions, just hit reply. I am happy to chat now that I have better structured my thoughts.
Last but not least—this post would NEVER happen if it were not for you.
Your support, interest and feedback made it all possible. Thank you for sharing this journey with me.
Love from Maja and the GTM Strategist team
Are you ready to dive deeper and work on your Go-To-Market strategy and execution?
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Get the Checklist ($97)💫 Leader: Guide your team to successfully choose ICP (target market), pricing, positioning & selection of best GTM Motion (channels, tactics). GTM Bootcamp includes 5 hours of applicable videos and a personal Miro board.
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Congrats! A very nice read.