Is having a 10X product good enough to win GTM?
Leverage your vision to fuel demand generation engine
Dear GTM Strategist!
Not so long ago, there was a founder with a great vision and super-shitty-scammy product who raised hundreds of millions … 🤠
Let’s get physical …
Famous founder Elisabeth Holmes raised more than US$700 million for Theranos. Their vision of "vast amounts of data from a few droplets of blood derived from the tip of a finger" could help billions of people—if the product worked.
And there is Ivan. He has 15 years of experience protecting government-grade secrets. He founded a company that provides world-class cybersecurity solutions for sensitive databases. Ivan prefers to speak about his product's features and technical robustness and shies away from using Ashley Madison-like taglines aka “Protect your secrets.” He is allergic to all that “marketing and sales fluff.”
Unfortunately, I know hundreds of Ivans with brilliant tech solutions who will probably run out of money because they do not “sell the story.”
If every big innovation needs some “hype,” does a “great story” matter as much as a “great product” in our age?
Even if you are a technical decision-maker, you have experienced the power of the Gartner visuals. You know - this bad boy. The technologies listed here are likely to attract more investors, early adopters, and media coverage:
Once we agree that telling a story is better than not telling it, we need an idea of what story to tell to create “hype”, “the momentum” for your product that will fuel your go-to-market journey.
Ultimately, we are setting up fundamentals for thought leadership, differentiation, and positioning.
OK, so you do X.
I should care because of Y?
Oh, and what is in it for me (Z)?
If you do this right, you will get much more free reach on social media, build a community of early adopters faster, get invited to speak at events and podcasts, attract free media/PR coverage, or simply make you and your team more excited to work with you.
My thesis here is that the winning story you will tell is deeply connected to your vision. In Carlos Eduardo Espinal’s Product-Market Fit Cycle model, the “big vision” inspires the journey to the product-market fit. Until recently, I did not pay much attention to “start with a big vision.” I assumed that it was the founder’s job to provide it, and then we, GTM people, and PMs get the job done. Looking back, this was linear, lazy thinking.
Here we bump into a practical problem:
Everyone told you that you need a strong vision …
… but no one told you how to get one.
In this Substack, I invite you to join me on a vision quest.
We will aim to answer the following questions:
What the vision even is?
How to become “more visionary”?
How do you create the “hype” that will fuel your GTM? I’ll share real examples.
What frameworks can you use to do this yourself?
Let’s keep our minds wide open and go on our first vision quest together!
What is a vision - and why should you care?
A quick look into an online etymology dictionary reveals this:
vision (n.) - c. 1300, "something seen in the imagination or in the supernatural," from Anglo-French visioun, Old French vision "presence, sight; view, look, appearance; dream, supernatural sight" (12c.).
That is useful.
Let’s dive deeper into how to make it useful in business.
👁️ What do you see that others do not?
How do you foresee the future of your industry?
How will your product change customers' lives for the better?
What is broken in the current way that people are solving the problem?
Why are you a 10x or even 100x solution to your customer’s problem?
Is there an enabler (technology, legislation, social changes) that could drive innovation?
To every significant trend, there is an anti-trend. What is hot now? What is its opposite?
At first, vision is a dream of a future (outcome) that is better for the customer.
A bit of an “imagine the world where …” or “I had a dream” moment.
The product, therefore, could be seen as a bridge between imperfect reality and a “dream future outcome.” Let’s imagine a world in which AI would write this Substack so I could enjoy spending time in my garden.
And the hero of this story is not you.
Neither is your product.
It is your customer.
How well you tell this story plays a vital role in how successful you will be in “selling” this vision to your customers, investors, employees, partners, and other stakeholders.
In his book TRANSFORMED, Marty Cagan suggests: "Inspiring product vision is your single best tool for recruiting the people on your product teams." Damn right, as a small business owner, I cannot pay their market rate to advisors from established mega-companies such as Meta, Google, Miro, etc. The only way how they would consider working with me is if I can convince them of my vision. Brilliant people love building cool stuff with the potential to change the world—or at least industry.
This also has implications for fundraising—a vision is part of your pitch deck. It helps investors understand how much further you can go than the existing 15 customers who are paying you $1000 MRR. It also helps them estimate the market size for this opportunity.
Vision also gives you permission to say “yes or no” to an idea. I get like 12 ideas a week and filter them through the “is it coherent with my vision” lens. It keeps me away from crazy jumps to non-related areas in which I do not have a sizable audience or capacity to create a true vision. Product Strategy Canvas by Melissa Perri can help you bring your vision to a more applicable product and GTM level.
Last but not least, your vision helps you win the hearts and minds of customers. They share your vision of the future you envision with them, your beliefs, values, and points of view. They will join you on your mission and support it with their purchases, recommendations, and brand love shared in communities.
But it is definitely not your customer’s job to tell you “the vision.”
You have to lead by it.
And that is easier said than done.
While I cannot give you a recipe for developing grand visions for your business, I can share some techniques that work well for me in my business.
Become more “visionary”
“Think outside the box” and “imagine tomorrow’s problems” are great tips but pretty useless if you do not know how to do it.
How to be more “visionary”? What can you do to become or continue to be an original thinker who will create a strategic edge in business and mesmerize tens of thousands with the power of their vision?
I do not go to the desert and take psychedelics to come up with new products.
Neither do I sit around and wait around for magic epiphanies.
But I do have two secret weapons that create a strategic edge in my business:
Robust sparring with my team
Dialectic thinking
Let me be more specific by sharing an example:
Two weeks ago my team had a workshop with our advisor for AI products, Simon Belak (ex. Metabase, Zebra BI).
My initial “product vision” for building AI-first products for the GTM Strategist was to create a “chatbot” from all the materials I have produced so far.
I have produced more than 7,000 pages of text. It would be so easy to “build a GTM chatbot.” Just use OpenAI, build a new interface, and launch it as a new sub-product under the GTM Strategist brand, or use it as an acquisition tool.
Simon called this vision “narrow-minded and cynical.”
And he was right.
After a very challenging, intellectually exhausting, and sparring discussion with my team, we came up with a 100x solution, which, if validated, will be launched in Q4.
We had to think value-first and about what our customers really want—not what we could easily build. That is lazy thinking.
So, no—you will not get a “Maja bot 🤖” at our website to quote where certain models are in the book because that would be marginal added value at best.
But hey, if someone wants to build that, go ahead. I am happy to provide materials.
This approach is not for everyone. You need a really powerful sparring partner, robust communication practice with your team, and an environment of extreme psychological safety where being “right as a person” and “protecting egos” are subordinated to “choosing the best strategic bets for the business.”
It does not feel awesome to be called out as a leader in front of the team to “think small” - but it is needed to get the best out of the intellectual capacity of the group in our case.
What is more accessible to most is dialectic thinking, a really cool word that Bryan Zmijewski (ex. Stanford lecturer and IDEO) taught me. Dialectic thinking is the ability to view issues from multiple perspectives and to arrive at the most economical and reasonable reconciliation of seemingly contradictory information and postures. Bryan visualized dialectic thinking like this:
Social sciences struggle to evolve as fast as technology. To make this more applicable, let me give you my street-smart example of how I actively seek anti-ideas at unusual places of inspiration so that I nurture my differentiation and intellectual edge:
Read books and articles outside my core fields of expertise - philosophy, history, science. Fun fact, some of the best people working in technology did not study computer science.
Actively seek contrarian views; do not get trapped in your intellectual bubble (thanks, social media). I am exploring AI space, and I want to hear from anyone who believes that this is a doomsday for humanity since I believe that technology will benefit society.
Your opinions and beliefs should not be static. If you spin all the inputs to support your preexisting beliefs, you will learn very little. Often, I like to assume that I know nothing so I can learn the most.
“Real people have real problems”—best-in-class thinking does not have much tangible value if it is not tested against reality. Stay in frequent touch with your customers (do interviews, socialize with them, chat with them on social media, move and live with them if you have to)—keep it real.
Work within very diverse groups in terms of age, gender, background, and character. Great innovation is rarely born from a consensus in homogenous groups. Jess Schell, the CEO of Schell Games and the author of "The Art of Game Design" shared an inspiring stat about team intelligence. Diversity in a team (for example, having an equal number of men and women in a group) increases the overall intelligence of that group.
Treat your right brain hemisphere: visit galleries, read science fiction, enjoy concerts, and indulge in music for inspiration. Grasping the emotional side of “truth-seeking” and symbolism is as much, if not more important than following the scientific method when it comes to vision.
You will find your own ways to do it, but you will need to find time and space for it. As a founder with a service business background, I struggled for years to fully embrace the fact that strategic thinking is part of “my job” and that it cannot happen during 30-minute breaks between meetings. Reserve time for strategic thinking.
But do not let your inspiration go to waste or stay in your head. Use ideation, creative thinking, and design thinking processes to refine your ideas, prioritize them, and develop testable hypotheses. Most PMs and founders in my network swear by the Double Diamond framework to do this. You can dive deeper into this valuable Substack article by Paweł Huryn’s article on how to use the double diamond.
Transforming your vision to unique positioning to create differentiation
You already know that the best Go-to-Market strategy is proprietary. It is not a copy of what another company did or a template that you fill in with figments of your imagination. It is purposefully developed from your unique market and competitive insights. It plays on your strengths and counters the opponents’ weaknesses.
A vision plays a huge role in GTM strategy. It manifests across the elements of GTM, but where it can really make all the difference is in positioning. Positioning is crucial for determining the story that you will tell to create early traction—to build demand for your product or service.
In his best-selling book “Playing to Win” strategy superhuman Roger Martin taught us that a business can only compete on two things - lower costs or differentiation.
Most of us lack operational excellence to create economies of scale to compete on costs. Neither is very sustainable because competing on price is a race to the bottom, and there can ultimately only be one cheapest player on the market. This is why most of us will have to think hard to deliver value by differentiating ourselves.
The holy grail of differentiation is to be so ahead that you make the competition seem irrelevant in the eyes of your target customers. Like this:
The right question to ask is not how you are better than your competitors. You should ask how you are different—radically different to really stand out. Ideally, you should create a class of your own where you are the only go-to solution.
And that is really hard to do if you are in a super competitive market unless you invent something new to “evangelize.”
What does positioning have to do with creating hype for your product?
Everything.
You need a compelling story, and you need to repeat it, repeat it, and broadcast it to as many target audience members as possible. They need to get to know you first, and later, you need to convince them to prefer you over competitive alternatives.
Great ideas are like viruses.
Seed them.
They will spread.
This is especially true among Early Adopters, who love to be “the first to grasp the future.” Your vision can be a huge magnet for them. They will even tolerate an imperfect (or even non-existent) product. They act as ambassadors.
Never underestimate the power of personal beliefs or emotional benefits that early adopters share with you. It is easier for me to get hyped about the idea of “open source self-hosted analytics software” because I am a sucker for data ownership and transparency and a bit of the cyberpunk here and there.
But if you want to get me excited about the 14th influencer management platform that I will get a cold email from this week, good luck. One exception: if I like you as a person, it is much more likely that we can work together, so do not be afraid to show your human side now and there.
It is all about “making me care” and “seeing what is in it for me.”
This is how we, early adopters, operate.
The story you will tell will determine if I am in or out.
But how to tell a compelling story?
Everyone keeps on talking about the hero's journey, strategic narratives, and visions of the future, but as a skeptical, pragmatic, and realistic thinker, I want my evidence. Okay, so you have a vision—how can I know that it is not some delirium but something that can actually be useful? Can you provide evidence that this works or could work not only for you but for other people, too? Again, positioning frameworks come to the rescue.
Questions to ask yourself:
Who is your ICP?
What are their problems (that you can actually solve)?
How are they solving these problems right now?
What sucks about that? :)
How is your solution different? (creates 10-100x value added)
How can you prove this is true? (evidence)
To answer these questions systematically, you are welcome to use Andrej Peršolja’s Positioning Framework:
💥 Build your GTM hype … oops … demand generation machine powered by your vision!
More often than not in my career I was forced to take an “underdog” position. While competitors were pumping millions into their marketing and PR, I was in some basement with 2-5 other people (mainly engineers) scratching our heads about how to outsmart their media-buying machinery and get some eyeballs to our technically superior product that no one knew yet.
We will wrap up this Substack by analyzing a couple of examples of how to build a gentle vision into a powerful demand generation machine. Thought leadership will be our secret ingredient, and we will mainly use free channels.
Buckle up and onboard the hype machine!
#1 Big Secret: Redefine how trust is built in value networks
Challenge: I first experienced the power of this approach when I was the CMO at OriginTrail. I did not have the budget to buy five-digit event placements and super-inflated influencer media buys. But we had founders who brought an amazing vision to the space and were very eager to share it again and again. We also had real use cases and case studies to show that the technology worked, and we utilized partnerships to get more relevant exposure.
Result: In 3 months we created the audience that helped us raise $22.5 m of funding.
Tactics: At first, the growth was painfully slow. We had to do a lot of things that do not scale - local events, extra-niche podcasts, and magazines. We had to talk to anybody who would listen. Until we created a critical mass. The most important channels were Twitter (X), Telegram communities, B2B enterprise communities, and partnerships. We launched a Medium publication and started a newsletter. In a year, we did 56 speaking engagements, published 85 blog posts, and secured more than 140 media placements.
If you are like: “Maja - good for you, but that was six years ago - is that repeatable?”
Watch me strike again.
#2 Big secret: GTM is not rocket science. You can get profitable traction fast.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/majavoje/
Challenge: When I launched GTM Strategist last year, I was off social media for more than five months to focus on my product. I had no audience to launch to.
Result: In merely 3 months, I have built a 3000 people-strong waitlist for the book that got the best-seller badge on the week of launching it with zero media buy budget.
Tactics: I consistently provided and shared value and talked to my community members to create better content for them. This was done through LinkedIn organic posts, some relevant podcast appearances, partnerships with industry thought leaders, and lots and lots of content creation.
Again, I can give you concrete numbers: 180+ LinkedIn posts (2x a day during the launch + niche influencer posts), 12 podcasts, and 7 events.
Oh, cool—does it work for others?
You guessed it!
#3 Big secret: “Vendor reported attribution is BS” + Dark Socials
Chris Walker, Refine Labs
Challenge: Agencies are really hard to differentiate. Once I asked a dev agency founder “How are you different?” and he answered: “All our team members have worked on the product before” - yeah, that is you and 10,000 other vendors. Give me something more to work with here so I can refer you. But Chris Walker did a stellar job in differentiating a service business. He genuinely leaned on some truths and pain points that were kind of known to all of us who are working in the industry, but he said them in a really really compelling way. Instead of saying: “The attribution you get from your vendor is utter crap - ask your customers where they are coming from to get real data,” he used the phrase “self-reported distribution” and implemented it as an open-ended question, as you can see on Refine Labs website.
Result: Scales a service company to an estimated $20M+ per year. For most service entrepreneurs, it is really hard to scale beyond $5-10M due to the diminishing returns of adding people to the process.
Tactics: Podcast, live community events, repurposing videos on social media, events and guest speaking opportunities, and content marketing on their blog, LinkedIn, and YouTube.
Let’s hop to SaaS businesses next …
#4 Big secret: One channel + clear POV + consistency
Yulia Olennikova, N.Rich
Challenge: Having to compete with huge brands backed up by hundreds of millions of investments to win in the crowded ABM tech space.
Result: N.Rich started developing LinkedIn as a channel systematically in early 2023. Now they have about 30% of their pipeline influenced or directly sourced by paid and organic LinkedIn, cumulative following of their employees is >70k. They closed several deals with ACV of up to $120k sourced directly through their LinkedIn posts, and this is hands down the channel with the best ROI.
Tactics: Regular content sharing (POVs, case studies, frameworks, graphics) on behalf of the company page and employees’ pages. Social selling challenges - the most active employees get rewarded.
Last but not least, let’s do it by now putting a person to the front.
#5 Big secret: Personalized in-app experiences convert MUCH better
Emilia Korczynska, Userpilot
Challenge: Educate the market on the importance of personalized in-app experiences and data-driven decision-making.
Result: Through consistent education and valuable content, 90% of their traffic now comes from content, driving significant market awareness and engagement.
Tactics: Blog content, webinars, collaborations, events/conferences, LinkedIn posts, and product benchmark reports to continuously educate the market. Tease: See Emilia in action at Userpilot’s upcoming Product Drive conference, where she’ll talk about “SaaS product Metrics Benchmarks report 2024 - how to measure & improve key product metrics without code” (register for FREE: https://summit.productdrive.io/)
Do not be afraid to lead with your vision.
It can make all the difference.
Now we bump into another tactical problem - how to communicate your vision to other stakeholders. One of the teams that I work with secretly complained:
“The founder wants us to do thought leadership posts, but we do not know what to write. It is all in his head and whenever we do try to write something, he calls it basic and as it was not written by me”.
I like to use the Strategic Narrative framework by demand generation expert Ognjen Bošković, which is very comprehensive and is part of my 100-Step Go-To-Market Checklist. But even if you simply do the positioning exercises from this Substack, your marketers will have plenty to work with.
Chris Tottman who is a partner and investor at a VC company Notion Capital (check them up if you are from Europe) asked me this:
“You know that US start-ups have 7x more people in product marketing than European startups & the people good at "product marketing in Europe" - do you know where to find them?”
I did not know what to answer - the world needs more great Product Marketers to bring our “visions” to life and help really good products get the brand love and traction they deserve. So if you know where they hang out, let me know in the comments so Chris and I can know where to search for them next.
If you are like my advisor Simon🤠, you will do something like this for your new “visionary product”, commit to building a demand generation engine and get shit done! He made me fill in this template and is now guilt-tripping me on WhatsApp about how we are progressing. Gotta love Simon.
Once you are excited about your product vision, it is time to make it happen. To help you get to market quicker and more efficiently, I created the 100-Step Go-To-Market Checklist. Hundreds of businesses that I work with have benefited from the assets from this checklist. I’m taking a vacation next week, so to celebrate, the checklist is now available with a $20 discount. Use the code SUMMER at checkout!
The code is valid until August 19th, when I am back on track.
Writing such well-researched posts takes me 20-30 hours. I love doing it because I learn a lot by bouncing ideas with world-class thinkers.
Collaborators and accountability partners for this Substack post:
Ebrahim Karimi, Senior Product Manager who made me rethink the entire structure and cut out 8 pages of text to make this Substack better + shared some really cool sources with me
Chris Tottman, Partner at Notion Capital and best-selling author of another awesome GTM book: The Go To Market Handbook for B2b Saas Leaders: How to Stack The Odds in Your Favour when Scaling Your Software Business for inspiring me to write this post in our discussion about divergent thinking and for reviewing the early draft. We will definitely collaborate soon.
Paweł Huryn for having a framework for anything I can possibly think of on his Substack The Product Compass.
Inspiration sources not quoted in the main text:
Espinal, C.E. (2013). The Product Market Fit Cycle https://seedcamp.com/resources/the-product-market-fit-cycle/
Fisher, M. (2009). Capitalism Realism - Is there no alternative https://www.amazon.com/Capitalist-Realism-There-No-Alternative/dp/1846943175
Lafley, A.G. & Martin, R. L. (2014). Playing to Win https://hbr.org/books/playing-to-win
Cagan, M. (2024). Transformed: Moving to the Product Operating Model https://www.amazon.com/Transformed-Becoming-Product-Driven-Company-Silicon/dp/1119697336.
Rachitsky, L. (2024). Pattern Breakers: How to find a breakthrough startup idea | Mike Maples, Jr. (Founding Partner at Floodgate, ex-Product at Silicon Graphics)
If you have other valuable resources that can add value to this discussion, please link in the comments. Thank you for reading this post. I hope it will help you grow.
Let’s go to market!
Maja
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Thanks for the mind-expanding journey, Maja!
Hi
Thanks Maja for this incredible article and I'm happy and honored to be a part of it.
Ebrahim Karimi