The Ultimate 7-Step GTM Framework
A Practical Guide to Growing Your Startup
We’re thrilled to feature a guest article by
, a seasoned innovation and startup expert with 15+ years of experience.He’s supported 20+ ventures, scaled his own startup to 970k MAUs, and worked on portfolios generating $50M-$100M ARR during his time at Google.
With 100+ GTM workshops under his belt, blending methodologies from Stanford d.school, IDEO, and Design Sprints, Majd brings practical strategies for founders on building, growth, and fundraising.
Get ready for expert insights on Go To Market
1️⃣ Introduction
The importance of a GTM strategy
Why GTM makes or breaks startups
2️⃣ The 7-Step Framework for Building Your GTM Strategy
Identify Your Audience
Benchmark Against Competitors
Position Your Product
Define Your Pricing Strategy
Activate Your Channels
Build Growth Loops
Measure and Optimize
3️⃣ Practical Case Studies
Examples from startups like Airbnb, Dropbox, and Zoom
4️⃣ Key Takeaways and Next Steps
Tools and insights to refine your GTM strategy
Listen, we’re living in a time where 10x solutions are RARE.
What will make a real difference then when it comes to most startups?
Go-To-Market.
Will you be able to enter the market powerfully, mastering positioning, pricing, acquisition and growth to claim the right market share?
We’ve developed this 7 step framework at Ruya Advisory on how to build the ultimate GTM strategy:
Let’s dive in:
1️⃣ Identify Your Audience
It’s all about niching down.
You’ve probably heard this before, but trust me. It WORKS. Targeting everyone means bringing value to no one.
Zero in on the customer niche most likely to benefit from your product and pay for it.
How to do it:
Segment your wider ICP into multiple niche profiles.
Create a 2x2 matrix that maps these niche profiles on pain severity vs. willingness to pay.
Prioritize the High Pain / High Willingness to pay quadrant. This is where you need to start.
You’ll always be able to expand into proximal audiences, but this is a great way to gain traction fast.
Especially in your early days. Remember, for an early stage startup, 100 customers is HUGE, and these can easily come from a single, well defined niche.
Airbnb started by targeting budget-conscious travelers attending conferences, like the SXSW crowd. And then expanded.
2️⃣ Benchmark Against Competitors
It’s important to see what’s out there.
Benchmarking involves analyzing competitors to identify opportunities for both (1) differentiation and (2) inspiration.
That being said, don’t do this exercise to simply copy competitors; their strategies may not align with your unique value proposition.
(They also might have done a terrible job themselves in their approach).
Use this as a reference, and select what makes the most sense for you, within your value proposition, and focused on the customer you’re serving.
3️⃣ Position Your Product
How do we establish your name in the market and with consumers?
Positioning is how you define your product’s value to customers in a way that’s clear (and ideally unique, differentiating you from competitors).
A lot of approaches are floating around here, but a remarkably easy win is just to use the Feature-Capability-Benefit (FCB) framework:
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