It is Monday morning and you see a new signup from a Reddit comment you left a few days ago. On Tuesday, a brand replies to a cold email you had forgotten you sent. By Thursday, a creator with a few thousand followers wants to use your app.
But you can’t let go of a positive signal. So you chase all three.
Maybe this wasn’t your exact week. But if you are an early-stage founder, you have probably been desperate enough to try every channel and every market just to get people to try your product.
In the example above, there are three different acquisition strategies at play. Some might call them different GTM strategies too. Because there are different channels, different messages, different amounts of effort. And none of them compound.
I have started to work with founders as their fractional head of GTM. Before that (long ago), I evaluated over 500 startups as an investor.
I have seen founders make the same GTM mistakes every single time. And every time they are told to pick their ICP. But I want to take it a step further. Even if you have a niche ICP, how you reach them is what confuses most founders.
So… let’s get into it.
Not Identifying Who This Hurts The Most
I am sure you are bored of hearing about vitamins and painkillers.
When I was building Shezaar, I used to hate and absolutely dread the times people told me “oh, you are building a vitamin not a painkiller… be careful!”
But almost every big tech company you know today was a vitamin when it started.
Think about it… no one needed Instagram or Facebook or Apple.
But you can always find a niche group for whom your product is a painkiller.
Most founders I talk to today don’t think about this when they narrow down their ICP. But that is the group you should start with.
Let’s say you are building a social app for someone who wants to share their pictures with their friends and family. Your target group should be people who have recently stopped using Instagram. These people would be happy to try out your new app.
In marketing they teach us that these are your innovators and early adopters. Every product needs them. But if you choose the wrong group to start with, you will kill your product.
Hi ! If you have a product and you are currently feeling stuck trying to pick your market, map your acquisition channels, or figure out why your outreach is hitting a wall… let’s fix it together!
I am opening up my calendar to offer free 20-minute GTM brainstorming calls to help you audit your current strategy and cut out the noise.
Not Picking Channels That Compound
In today’s world, picking an ICP is the easiest part. Reaching them requires a little bit of creativity and a whole lot of courage.
Most founders I talk to today believe that more channels means faster growth. But that is rarely the case.
When I was stuck in my multichannel GTM approach, I had to do the following:
Responding on Reddit took at least an hour of work every day
Recruiting micro creators required outreach, meetings, and a whole lot of back and forth
Creating content was at least 9-10 hours a week
Pitching and planning for popups was another 5-6 hours a week
All in all, my GTM efforts took me about 30 hours a week, and it was bleeding me dry.
Most founders forget that some channels actively fight each other.
A founder I worked with was building a booking app for independent stylists.
Their ICP was spot on:
Stylists who had just left a salon to work for themselves. They were fully booked and took every appointment through Instagram DMs.
But their acquisition plan was chaotic.
Posting hairstyle content on their Insta and TikTok
Cold DMing stylists
Posting in salon renter Facebook groups and Reddit communities
Hosting events and demo days for beauty schools
Launching their AI-powered app on Product Hunt
In four months, they had 2000 followers, 60 signups (from beauty schools) and hundreds of upvotes on the launch. But they only had 4 stylists using the free version of their app.
Because every channel they chose distracted them from the one that could work.
So we cut everything except the cold DMs and obviously used Claude to automate the outreach.
