Prioritizing for moonshots ☄️
Do one thing every day that scares you.
Dear GTM Strategist,
Einstein said that the definition of stupidity is doing the same things again and again and expecting different results.
My message this week is that playing safe in GTM will not get you far.
I get it—there are so many things to do, and it is easy to get caught up in the busy work.
But if you want to unlock the next business milestone, “playing safe” will only get you that far.
As you are making the final tweaks and prioritization for your Q2 GTM Strategy, ask yourself how many high-leverage opportunities you are pursuing in the next quarter.
I like to call them moonshots.
I first became interested in “moonshots” when I interviewed the previous Head of Growth at Foreo Sweden, Ignas Gee. For all the guys reading this: Foreo is a 9-figure e-commerce beauty brand and Ignas was their first marketer, aka GTM Strategist. The beauty industry is very competitive, and the survival rates for new brands are very low. Ignas explained that tweaking performance and email marketing only got them that far. Their philosophy of opening new markets has been: “Before we generate X million impressions, we will not even start selling. The market has to crave it before we launch.”
Here are some of Foreo’s moonshots:
Get to retailers such as Sephora and Duty-free shops (partners).
Get a mega influencer for their ads - they got Paris Hilton!
Convince tens of thousands of beauty influencers to post video reviews of their products.
Remember, we are not talking about L’Oréal Paris. Foreo is a much smaller European player, and the founder and early product team were from Croatia. In GTM, we need leverage to create maximum advantage. We are operating on scarce resources and within a limited window of opportunities.
#1: Think big - Usual hiding places of moonshot ideas
As the winning strategy is based on your strengths and competitors’ weaknesses, the best place to start thinking about moonshots are your strengths and proprietary resources.
According to entrepreneur and one of my favorite bro scientists Alex Hormozi, there are four levers of leverage to consider what is your proprietary advantage:
Labor - Can you add more people or partners to create more and better products or launch the product faster?
Capital - Can you invest more in marketing, sales, acquisitions, or R&D?
Content - Can you create content/marketing assets that will continue to bring leads to your business and “work when you sleep”?
Code - Can you algorithm the brain behind the operations to make the delivery cheaper, faster, and more effective for mass adoption?
In my freelancing class, I like to use much bolder terminology: you can either have FU skill, FU network, or FU money to win big in business.
Start digging deep.
Like no one is watching.
What is your superpower as a founder/professional?
If you are a great networker - the best place for a moonshot would be partnerships or collaboration.
If you are a great coder - you can build an amazing MVP in a weekend.
If your charm on camera can only be beaten by Leonardo di Caprio - video content might be it.
Now, think broader:
Does your company have lots of resources that you can center for speed?
Would onboarding new employees or outsourcing bring a competitive edge?
Is product/R&D sitting on the next big thing in the market?
Does marketing/sales know something about customers or the market that others do not?
Is there a trend in your industry that others are sleeping on?
Is there an existing network (community, influencer, media, event) that you could piggyback on?
Write the moonshot ideas down. What would make a radical difference in your business and change its trajectory?
What would 10x or 100x it?
Just start to think about it.
#2: Reveal the moonshots!
Let’s go through an example of a business that I am mentoring right now.
It is a no-code AI fintech solution builder. Brilliant product people. They sell through prototypes.
The business currently has 3 large regional clients (banks) and makes $33K a month (MRR).
ARR is currently around $100K.
The question that we are tackling is:
What would it take to make this a 1 million dollar business?
Before you grab your phone and open the calculator, let’s agree that:
“Business as usual” would be to add 27 more clients at existing pricing
The sales process for the new client lasts 3-6 months per salesperson
A salesperson can get 5-10 such clients a year - hypothetically, they could achieve this goal
Before you say that this is good enough, consider:
The window of opportunity for AI in their sector is not infinite - other players will come. We will be leaving the money on the table if we would be too slow.
The sales cycle stats are from the founding team. A new salesperson would take 3-6 months to onboard properly and it is doubtful that they could prototype with a client during the meetings as the founding team does.
The team is raising an investment and with only regional traction, they are unattractive to bigger investors that would give them more leverage and better conditions.
We need a moonshot 🤩
Idea dump for moonshots:
Raise prices: Negotiate a deal with global or innovation centers of these banks to 3-5x ARR per client, because the solution is expected to create 1.5x savings per branch.
Go product-led: Launch a product-led alternative and get investments to grow it based on the existing business traction.
Get a kick-ass fintech advisor to your advisory board and utilize their social capital to close the deals faster.
Go to the most important banking conference in the region and present the solution there.
Microsoft as a partner. They use Azure as one of the infra options for Enterprises.
EY & PwC partnership can get them faster to their portfolio clients
What else would you do?
Here is the ultimate challenge of moonshots: they are WAY too risky that they would go through a normal “prioritization matrix”, but those projects can give you a massive competitive advantage. They are too good to miss and play safe by betting on “business as usual” in GTM.
Actually, not just in GTM. Recently, Disney received a letter from some investors, recommending the company to make fewer sequels (which are safe bets) and to take more “shots on goal” to compete with Netflix.
🚫 ATTENTION: If you are working with the team, do not just tell them to think 10x
When I was working as an interim Business Unit lead in a tech company and the big boss told us to “add a zero to our plans” it really backfired and paralyzed most senior leaders.
The intention was great - he wanted us to “think ballsy”, but the result was low morale, the feeling of being trapped in these “ballsy projections,” and even disbelief that the team could achieve them. As a leader, create a space and environment where people feel free to express bold ideas without the fear of being accountable to execute them just yet.
#3: Select 1-3 moonshots a quarter and commit to them
Here is a problem with moonshots.
People either do not do them or rely on them too much as if they would be Elon Musk. As a result, it could sink their businesses if moonshots do not land well.
“Go big or go home” is not a reality for most bootstrapped entrepreneurs.
We have to keep the lights on and our payroll secure.
Yet, “playing safe” and “doing business as normal” is the enemy of GTM greatness.
Let’s agree to get the best out of both worlds.
We will balance “responsibility” with “subversiveness”.
You should limit the number of moonshot bets in your business to 1-3 a quarter and make constant and desirable efforts towards them.
One of the best tactics comes from Sean Ellis, legendary author of Hacking Growth:
“Spend 80-90% of your resources on what is confirmed to get you there and 10-20% on experiments that would really move the needle in business”.
I love this train of thought.
Imagine that your weekday has 40 work hours.
(You and I both know that we do not shut off our brains after that but for the sake of simple math.)
Let’s also acknowledge that a normal human can do 3-6 hours of deep work a day.
These are not meetings, answering emails, busy work and moving the Jira tickets around.
The deep work should produce assets, embrace creative thinking, focus on problem-solving and making continuous improvements toward moonshots.
To set free 20% of your “bandwidth” for moonshots and have a fair chance to have a quantum jump in your business, the best practice is to devote one working day to deliberately working on moonshots. Some do it on weekends as their “pet project”, others can reserve a day a week or part of the morning/evening to do this deep work.
What is crucial is that deep work does not happen in 30-minute slots between meetings or 15-minute breaks. The brain takes time to “get into it.” Each disruption that interrupts deep work takes a toll.
Last but not least, the only way to get “Paris Hilton to influence your product” is to send an email. You will never know if Paris will promote your product if you do not try to ask her.
The ultimate art of moonshots is to do one thing every day that “scares you”—to push deliberately towards the path of greatness and to saying no to “busy work”. Your responsibility as a GTM Strategist is to “think and act subversively”. No one won in business solely by playing safe and copying others.
Think of working hard vs. working smart. When you focus on your moonshot, forget about all other amazing options that appear on the way and stay laser-focused on the plan.
So what will it be?
What is the moonshot that you will pursue in Q2?
Commit and do the work to enter H2 bigger, stronger, and better than ever!
To the moon!
Maja Voje
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