Go-to-market strategy framework for early-stage startups (+ free AI VP of Marketing tool)
A go-to-market strategy framework for early-stage founders from operator Suhas Ghante: get buyer, pain and trust right. Plus a free AI VP of Marketing tool.
A go-to-market strategy framework from operator Suhas Ghante: three questions on buyer, pain and trust. Plus a free AI VP of Marketing tool you can build this week.
I'm Jurģis, community & brand lead at BADideas.fund and host of the Bad Advice podcast. Each newsletter issue covers go-to-market problems from the show and gives you a free tool to work on them, such as an AI VP of Sales or Marketing.
The short version, for the people in a hurry. Most startups that fail early never worked out how to sell their product. Suhas Ghante, who's advised startups that have raised over $100M combined, boils that framework down to three questions: who's the buyer, how acute is the pain, and how much trust is needed before they pay. Get those right and pricing, channel and messaging follow. (We've also packaged the operator side of it into a free AI VP of Marketing tool. Grab it below.)
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I sat down with Suhas for an hour on our podcast, Bad Advice. Here's the go-to-market strategy framework that stuck.
"The salesperson you hire is only inheriting your confusion"
It usually starts the same way. A founder raises a pre-seed round, an investor says "right, go get to $1M ARR," and the gut reaction is to hire someone to go sell. Suhas just shook his head at that.
"That's almost always the wrong thing to do. At the very earliest stages, the founder's job is to learn. The salesperson you hire is simply inheriting the confusion you already have. You can't outsource that."
His point: at pre-seed you don't have a sales problem, you have a learning problem. You're trying to figure out who actually signs the cheque, what pain is real enough to pay for, and how much trust has to be built first. Give that to a new hire and you pay someone to share your confusion.
The go-to-market strategy framework: buyer, pain, and trust
Ask Suhas what go-to-market actually means at pre-seed and he hands you a simple go-to-market strategy framework, three questions:
- Who is your buyer? The person who can actually sign the cheque: not the user, not the fan, the signer.
- How acute is the pain? Is this a painkiller or a vitamin? Vitamins don't get budget.
- How much trust is needed before the purchase? "Nobody's going to pay $200,000 without shaking your hand."
Your answers tell you how to sell:
- If value is easy to express and see, you've got a classic product-led growth (PLG) motion.
- If trust and implementation are heavy, it's enterprise sales: long conversations, dinners, procurement.
- If access and credibility are the barrier, it's partner-led: they won't even take the meeting unless you're "one of them".
He frames the early days as setting a trajectory:
"They're on a ship going west. If you get the degrees off by a bit, you can end up in South America instead of the US."
Spend six to eight weeks getting the direction right. That costs less than a year going the wrong way.
The real reason startups get stuck: a fuzzy ICP
When a founder comes to Suhas stuck, product built, a few users, no real traction, he looks at three things: the messaging, the ideal customer profile (ICP), and the go-to-market motion. One of them is almost always broken.
"I'd say 70% of the time, it's the ICP. The ICP is fuzzy. So your messaging is going to be fuzzy, because you don't know how to talk to the ICP, and your motion is going to be wrong."
If you are unclear on who buys, everything after that is unclear too. Suhas compares his role to "black sheep wall", a StarCraft cheat code that shows the whole map.
"When I work with founders, I try to be the black sheep wall. The cheat code that removes the fog and shows you where to go."
And the goal isn't a permanent answer. Every successful company he's worked with pivoted hard.
"Success isn't getting to a specific answer. It's reducing ambiguity."
Don't confuse activity with progress
The line Suhas keeps coming back to is one his first investor gave him: never confuse activity with progress. A thousand customer calls a month is activity. Progress is whether those calls actually answered buyer, pain and trust. Talking to customers is the input, not the strategy.
Distribution beats product now
The part founders most underestimate, he says, is distribution. Software is a commodity; anyone can vibe-code a product over a weekend. So what separates you?
"Distribution, I would argue these days, is more important than product."
His example is the one everyone feels: Slack is the better product, but Microsoft Teams won adoption because it ships inside Office. Distribution was already cracked. His advice: find a bigger product or company you can build on, so its growth brings you customers.
"Where can you find the flywheel effect where the symbiosis exists? Where is the North Star the same for you and them?"
Two more things that decide outcomes: communication and co-founder conflict
Two more things he's seen decide outcomes. First, communication:
"The best companies don't get funded. The best-communicated companies get funded."
Clarity of thought, distilling something complex into something anyone can grasp, is, in his words, "the highest form of intelligence." Second, and quieter: co-founder friction. He says 70% of his early read on a company is simply how well the founders handle disagreement. The ones who can air a hard thing and keep building tend to make it. The ones who can't tend not to.
The skill nobody teaches: spending the money
There's a moment in our Launchpad programme, the six weeks founders go through right after we back them, where Suhas opens with a warning: elation, followed by chaos. The skill that decides what happens next isn't making money or saving it. It's spending it.
"VCs gave you money to spend, not to hoard. Capital allocation is what separates the great companies."
Build your AI VP of Marketing
If the product no longer sets you apart and reaching customers does, one strong move is a marketing system that works like an experienced marketer, without hiring one. The tool uses the same three questions, buyer, pain and trust, and turns them into a daily routine.
So we wrote the whole spec: the database schema, the integrations, the AI prompts, the cron jobs, the build order. Paste it into your LLM agent (we've been using Replit Agent), point it at your own data, and you'll have a working v1 in a few days: a dashboard on your headline metric and a daily email with three to five specific moves for today. One founder, one AI agent, used every day. Every company we back gets this tool.
↓ Download the AI VP of Marketing spec
↓ Download the sample data bundle
Prefer the full walkthrough first? See the AI VP of Marketing page →
Watch / listen to the full episode
Suhas covers a lot more in the hour: his own cybersecurity startup that ran out of runway underestimating enterprise sales cycles, why "Silicon Valley is a mindset, not a location," and why optimism helps most on the hardest days.
▶︎ Watch on YouTube ▶︎ Listen on Spotify ▶︎ Book time with Suhas
Frequently asked questions
Usually not at pre-seed. The founder's job at the earliest stage is to learn who the buyer is, how acute the pain is, and how much trust is needed to close. A salesperson hired before that just inherits the founder's confusion. Hire once the motion is proven, not to discover it.
Work with BADideas.fund
We're an early-stage B2B fund across CEE and the Nordics, and everyone here has built companies before. We back founders who work unreasonably hard, and help them catch sales and marketing problems early, while there is still time to fix them.
If you're raising and want operators who've walked your exact walk in the room with you:
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