Founders love their product. They can describe every feature, every technical advantage, every engineering decision that makes it better than what exists. They’ve spent two years building it. They know things about it that nobody asked to know. And then they write a website that sounds like a patent filing had a baby with a TED talk.
“Our proprietary platform leverages next-generation algorithms to seamlessly integrate with your existing workflow.” Nobody knows what that means. The founder knows what it means. The CTO knows what it means. The customer: the person who is supposed to give you money: has already closed the tab.
The product isn’t the problem. The translation is. Go-to-market strategy is fundamentally a translation exercise. You take what the founder knows about the product and translate it into what the customer cares about. These are almost never the same thing. The founder talks about features. The customer talks about problems. The founder talks about how it works. The customer talks about what changes. The founder talks about technical differentiation. The customer asks “is this worth the hassle of switching from the thing I already have?”
I’ve launched 30+ products. The process is always the same: find the people, learn their language (not your language, their language), build the narrative in their words, then go find them where they actually are. Most GTM consultants hand you a deck and wish you luck. I hand you a deck and then do the work.
I don’t start with channels. I start with the customer.
I interview or survey your best-fit customers. Not to validate what you already believe. To discover what you don’t know. The questions I’m asking: What problem were you trying to solve when you found this? What almost stopped you from buying? What would you tell a friend about it? The answers to these questions are your marketing. Everything else is guessing.
The one-sentence value proposition comes last, not first. Before I can tell you how to describe your product, I need to understand your competitive landscape, your pricing psychology, your buyer personas, and the specific moment in the customer’s life when they’re most receptive. Then I build segment-specific narratives, because the message that works for an enterprise buyer is not the message that works for an individual consumer, even if the product is the same.
Brand identity, website, landing pages, ad creative, email sequences, sales enablement materials. Most GTM consultants treat these as separate workstreams. I treat them as one system, because I build all of them myself. The brand voice on the website is the same voice in the ad is the same voice in the email is the same voice on the pitch deck. That coherence is what most launches lack and what most agencies can’t deliver because the work is spread across five people who’ve never met.
The first version is never the last version. I launch, measure, and iterate. The real GTM strategy emerges in the first 30-60 days of market contact, when you discover which personas respond, which channels convert, and which messages land. The plan is a hypothesis. The market is the experiment.
Got them into UF Innovate. Materials supported a successful clinical trial at Shands Hospital. The founders focused on the product. I focused on making the outside world understand why it mattered.
Mapped festival-goers, gym rats, and new parents to specific high-discomfort moments. $35K raised from 817 backers.
Launched and converting clients within weeks.
Secured partnerships with Insight Timer and retainer clients including the largest U.S. law firm.
New CEO, 15-year-old brand, underperforming agency. Complete brand refresh, rebuilt ad accounts across 5 channels, creative engine producing 30+ variants/month. CPA down 50%.
For 50th anniversary collector's edition. E-commerce, PR, social audience to 10K, affiliate partnerships with Red Bull.
