Meenal Relekar (00:06)
Hello listeners. I am Meenal Relekar. I'm a PMM leader, consultant, and a coach. I have over 17 years of product marketing experience and had the privilege to work at some of the best companies like Adobe, Autodesk, Dropbox, Odash. Currently, I consult startups and also coach PMM leaders. And I'm excited to host today's podcast that is brought to you by Hexus, a platform that turns your products into demos, guides, and landing pages. In short, Hexus makes software that helps you explain your software. So thousands of teams, including Calendly and Apollo, use the platform, which suggests they're doing something really great. And today we have two wonderful guests and my friends from the PMM community, Hela and Renat, the co-founders of 10xGTM.

And they are advisors to VCs and startups that have gone from zero to $400 million. They work with founder led startups across industries as well as enterprise companies. So they are best suited for today's topic on startup GTM and why it matters.

Today, we will talk about turning founders' big vision into the predictable revenue and where GTM quietly breaks in before anyone notices. So we do have a bunch of exciting questions. Hila and Renat can't wait to get all the pro advice from you guys. So my very first question, which is super, super basic is like Everyone uses this term GTM so very loosely and differently.

And I would love to hear from you. What does GTM actually mean for the startup? It is beyond launches and tactics. So would love your insights.

Hila Lauterbach (02:01)
Before we jump in, just want to say good morning. I'm really, really happy to be here with you now.

Meenal Relekar (02:05)
Excited to be with you.

Renat Gersch (02:06)
Exactly! Good morning. We're so excited. Thank you for hosting us. And we're excited to dig into go-to-market and make it more practical. I love the question because it really hides in it the reality that there is confusion about go-to-market. And one reason for the confusion, especially amongst product marketers, right, PMMs, is that go-to-market and launch are often treated as the same, but really they're not. So how are they different? Well, I looked up a dictionary definition in order to talk about the launch. And so from the dictionary, a product launch is an organized cross-functional process of introducing a new product or service to the market, and it's designed to generate buzz, educate customers, drive sales, and create initial market momentum. OK, we all can relate to this definition. There is nothing new there. So For this launch, PMMs typically will develop positioning, messaging, competitive analysis, and many other assets, defining how the product and also how will we ultimately drive revenue. And in our work with founders, they share this type of knowledge based on their experience and conversations that they have with early prospects. And we call that founder conviction, or that's what really crystallizes the founder vision.

But it's really rare that the founder conviction or that the PMM launch assumptions and activities are so accurate that simply by repeating them will drive the level of revenue that is expected. And that's why we always want to have time for post-launch activities. And as PMMs, we know that that's sometimes more aspirational than reality because the next launch is going to be coming and...you know, we might not have the time to gather that feedback and continue to refine our launch. So that really sets the scene. Launch is our hypothesis. It gets us in the game.

And go to market is how we prove it and how we teach ourselves where we win and how we win systematically.

Hila Lauterbach (04:36)
And you know, it's interesting, like a lot of time we hear all this post-mortem and lesson learned discussion coming from different founders, but all the stories kind of like come and sum up to the same. We scale the company, we use the wrong ICPs, right? And we see like we had the sales too early and we hired early teams. The pipeline actually looked promising, but it didn't really convert in the end. And we did have traction, but not repeatable one.

Hila Lauterbach (05:03)
And this is something we hear a lot. And it's not actually a marketing failure, but what we call kind of like a short side of the go-to-markets, what we call the false positive

Hila Lauterbach (05:12)
that really got scaled but shouldn't. And I think that it comes back to what Renat and I say a lot, that we come to four core go-to-markets questions that kinda repeat and really need to be asked.

Hila Lauterbach (05:24)
1) Who are the clients, the buyers that really care a lot about a problem? 2) Why do they choose you over alternative? 3) What motion works for them? 4) And how them? 4) And how do you actually know that the motion does work with the clients? And when I think about these four questions, I would say that we ask ourselves all the time.

Hila Lauterbach (05:41)
do we have or who are these real buyer with a sense of urgency? And usually, founders obviously start

with the problem they relate to and they spend most of the time perfecting the solution, the feature and everything around that. But the big miss in my mind is developing the really deep anchoring understanding for the real buyer, not just their actual user for the day to day.

Another question we ask is why should they choose you over doing nothing or over the alternative and all other option? And it's not about to know the features yet, but it's coming to alternative to really understand what can help them to solve this pain rather than use the status quo or do nothing. And also thinking about what is going to advance or push a real buyer conversation. And this is coming for us for the marketing and sales perspective. in marketing perspective, you think about like, how are we actually going

Hila Lauterbach (06:31)
meet this buyer and when it comes to sales we ask ourselves, you met this you know you met the client how do you really going to move this deal forward? So this is crucial question and if I need to wrap it up I would say how do you really know that it's working or what you do is working and you get the signal which is great you're running experiments and all of that how do we ensure that you will process an alignment to really double down on what converts what really works for you and when it comes to what we do in 5A's framework when we deploy

Hila Lauterbach (07:01)
this go-to-market thinking, it's kind of a learning system to ensure that you really run through the question

in, I would say, systematic way to ensure that you gain the clarity. And just one thought I have as we finished wrapping this, we think about product marketing and specifically about go-to-market from a launch perspective. But what Renat and I are doing, we're taking this above all the layers, connecting the dots between the entire company and executive levels in the entire company to really make it like a deep-mode

Hila Lauterbach (07:31)
thoughts for how you penetrate the

market, how do you win the market, how do you repeat, rinse and repeat and think about these more holistically.

Meenal Relekar (07:39)
Awesome. I love Renat your statement, like how GTM is the broader umbrella on the which product launches, releases fit in and it defines how a company is taking their products to the market and product launches is just a part of it.

Hila Lauterbach (07:49)
Yeah.

Meenal Relekar (07:58)
That's a great definition. I think it's very important to have those basics very, very clearly established. And Hila I loved like any smart PMM they start with asking very intelligent very sharp questions and the questions you laid out are the foundation for making or breaking any strategy so love it and I will come back to your 5A framework, but before that I want to ask another

very interesting question is like, You must have seen companies go from literally nothing to hundreds of millions in ARR. What's the fastest signal that tells you the GTM is actually working versus it's just like, okay.

Hila Lauterbach (08:44)
You know, we see this quite often with clients and in conversation we had in the industry. I would say that the first kind of like signal for the go-to-market is the buyer-led momentum. Really the moment when you feel the buyer that's really excited enough to really pull the deal forward.

Hila Lauterbach (09:00)
What does it actually mean? When I think about buyer led momentum, it's kind of like something that we easily confuse with what we call product-market-fit, because in PMF we think about the pool. User now loves the beta or is starting to use the product. And now they insist to keep the product and keep using that. And I have an interesting example when you think about what GONG did early in their business when they came to the category. Their

early signal was that revenue leaders wanted to keep the product after the beta, even though the price point was quite higher than what they started, like meaningfully higher. And this is what we call product market fit. But I want to think about the idea of go-to market fit that's not often talked about. So I think about it as product market fit that's attached deeply to the understanding of the underserved segments.

Really, really deeply going to this buyer pain that is acute and crucial for them.

And when you have this idea of go to market fit, it means that the right targeting plus the right kind of conversation happening all together. And when you think about buyer-led momentum, it looks like I would say, I'll give you some idea of how it looks in practice. So deals really not stuck in the face that you say, "We'll keep it and revisit it back in the next quarter." It's kind of a loop that we see a lot. Or champions started to advance a conversation internally themselves.

And one of the beautiful things that happens is they actually reference your own language back to you. And I would say that for us as PMMs and for PMM leaders, it's a golden moment, right? And I have a nice example from a client that we recently worked with. He's a solution engineer, we started to see that he's championing their own companies, starting to take his demo video that they created in the company.

Hila Lauterbach (10:42)
to introduce this to their internal audience and

to kind of create champions for the champions in their own home companies. And they were in shock to see how they adapt their language. How did they really articulate the way that we try to sell and make it their own. So the way they adopted the narrative, I would say for PMMs, it's quite a beautiful moment when you really see that you win a message.

Hila Lauterbach (11:06)
I would call it a message market fit and you really land in the place that resonates.

Meenal Relekar (11:12)
Love this concept of

message market fit, Hila. I remember in my all those research moments where, you know, ⁓ users are able to tell me what the product does in a messaging which I have used. Or also sometimes they are way better than us. So it's all about us listening to them constantly and seeing if there is a message market fit. I love that.

Hila Lauterbach (11:36)
I love it. And I want to say that the two phrases you already love that I said, it's Renat. A lot of my inspiration come from her beautiful way of framing words.

Renat Gersch (11:41)
Yeah.

Thank you both. You know what? Message market fit is really important. And as PMMs, we spend so much time digging, diving, getting it right. But it's not what founders think about. Founders think about buyer-led momentum. That's their holy grail, right? So I'm not proposing that PMMs should start driving that signal, that it should be everything we think about, but definitely understanding it will help

Meenal Relekar (12:08)
Okay.

Renat Gersch (12:14)
prioritize and frame their work. So I thought of giving two examples of what I mean by that. Let's think about a company that's like stagnating at around the two to $5 million ARR mark. I'm sure that there are quite a few of the listeners that either have been in that situation, maybe they're in that situation now. Often what PMMs find here is like

a tired and frustrated sales team.

right, sales team that's constantly asking for more assets. Give me another pitch deck, refine the messaging, you know, give me another one pager. And PMMs do all of that. And it's like, you know, running on the treadmill, you're really not moving the needle. And that's because there isn't a go-to-market fit that's strong enough. And so it can't be fixed just with a better sales process. What's really needed is a go-to-market shift.

Renat Gersch (13:10)
Like you really need to have someone within the organization that is actually looking to run additional experiments that will end up finding a stronger fit. And if I take like another type of example that maybe listeners will connect to, it's kind of this larger company that's running at around $100 million ARR. So what's the go-to-market signal here? In this case, we might see that they have a pretty well-defined ICP,

Renat Gersch (13:39)
serving

multiple underserved segments and the buyer urgency is real, otherwise they won't be at that level of ARR. So PMMs in this case often spend most of their time removing silos, creating alignment. What it might look like is that PMMs are finding a lot of teams have their own KPIs, have different priorities, these priorities might even clash.

So what it feels like is that it's really hard to execute. And PMMs would be stepping in as in this like very important role of the connective tissue. But what we might be missing is that in this company, a new go-to-market challenge is also kind of rising, creeping to the surface. And founders are starting to obsess about their second major product line. You know, where are they going to get the next revenue growth?

Because at around 100 million, it's known that your first product line is kind of maturing and you have to find the next one. So founders would be seeking internal partners, maybe even looking at PMMs to be those partners. And for that, we really need to go back to square one of explorations. At this time, trying to stay agile while carrying like this much bigger, heavier operational organization, right?

Renat Gersch (15:02)
So that's the key. For PMMs, I think it's about seeing go-to-market signals, not necessarily owning it, but having those signals become a tool that allows you to really lead strategic plays, drive revenue momentum. And that's

true for companies that may be just now finding fit or for larger unicorns that are launching now the next product.

Meenal Relekar (15:27)
Thanks, I love it. I love the examples and the situations you discussed. It's pretty relatable. And I'm super curious about the 5A GTM framework. And you have been working with dozens of startups. So how have you built it? What exactly 5A's are?

I'm very curious. I love acronyms and what problem were you trying to solve when you created this program?

Hila Lauterbach (15:53)
Sure. So I think also a catchy name by Renat. The 5A framework really was born from necessity. It came from like having one more conversation with our own clients and with founders in the industry. And think about that. Everybody has a roadmap, right? And playbook for marketing for their product. It's very clear and articulated.

But while everybody speaks about go to market technically, and it seems like their job, it's not one job. And they don't have their own roadmap and playbook. And we, a lot of time meet like CPOs, product owner and founders. And they're so eager when they share their next move, their plans, their product roadmap, what is coming and the feature. But I'm asking them like, what's your go to market roadmap? And we see a pause.

we see their brain thinking and they say 1) What exactly is the go-to-market portion? or like 2) Who owns it? 3) Where should it start? 4) Where should it land? And I think that we see it so often that it makes us think and together Renat and I at 10xGTM really defined I would say the gap and the opportunity to define from scratch the go-to-market roadmap and we came with a deep point of view that

Hila Lauterbach (17:01)
this is the way that you're actually going to learn to create your revenue systematically. It's not just a signal. It's not just a momentum. It's not just the cool kids in the block that want to be out there and feel good. It's the moment that you kind of like systemize the demand,

systemize the logic, break it down, and build it in a way that's showing you systematic signals that create in the end the correlation between conviction and repeatable revenue.

Renat Gersch (17:26)
Yeah, yeah, you know, it's not a lot of founders are not thinking about their map to revenue. So the 5A framework, you know, it's not really a checklist

I have that I have that I have that was like, no, it's not intended as a checklist. It's actually intended as an iterative go to market operating group. Right. So

The five A's, they're Audience, Angle, Activation, Achievement, and Assessment. And each one of these really doubles down on a different crucial component of the overall go-to market. Each one can have one bullet or 10 pages underneath it. It really depends on where you are with the company and what it is that you need to do. But overall,

this needs to be quick experimentation, quick feedback loops, right? So that you can test, test, test and find what converts and where, ⁓ where it lands. And it's really a loop that you're going to revisit again and again, just like you do with a product roadmap.

Every quarter we sit down, we put together a quarter map and then the next quarter we change it because things have changed. The same is true for your go-to market right now.

Meenal Relekar (18:41)
Awesome. I love frameworks and especially frameworks which, you know, are very sticky. And all the PMMs you have come up with one, like the audience, angle, the messaging and everything. And what I love what you said was it's not like a checklist. It's not like once it's done, it's over. It's like a repetitive loop. And that's where the beauty lies. So what my next question is, is

Meenal Relekar (19:10)
AI is not changing that loop, like GTM has changed with the launch of AI and to me now product market fit is more like a changing goal. Like it keeps changing because products are changing every now and then. So where do you see AI genuinely helping startups today and where is it creating like that false positive or false confidence?

Hila Lauterbach (19:39)
Sure. So, you know Meenal, like us, you live in Silicon Valley Bay and the messaging around AI is everywhere, all day. right? It's very ambiguous. Everybody says they use AI. We see the signs everywhere. And I would say that we have the hope, we have the dream that AI is going to fix broken elements. But AI is not going to fix a broken go-to-market, right? The only thing it can do is amplify where the quality actually is and already built in the right way.

And where it actually

Hila Lauterbach (20:10)
works, the AI genuinely really helps PMMs, is mostly in speed. right? We see this in faster processes, for research, for content creation, for SDRs, analysis, follow-ups, all the good stuff. And I would say that for a team that already knows what good it looks like, the AI actually compresses the cycles and makes them more efficient.

Hila Lauterbach (20:33)
the place in my mind that many PMM speak with us, they really see and they really become the early adopter, obviously, of the LLM solution from Chat GPT to Gemini, Claude,

and all the others. And I would say that the false confidence from AI comes mostly in places that it's adding or it added to an already unclear or kind of fragmented, I would say, go-to-market system that's not really worked, that's broken. that still needs the overall look.

Hila Lauterbach (20:59)
and connecting the dots and thinking more strategically. And I would say that Renat and I speak a lot about patterns in the industry. We see two main patterns that come in again and again when speaking with PMM leaders.

One, everybody's right now, and we are not different from others. We also go to the scraps nicely. chasing the next AI tools - the SDR, the enrichment tools, research tools, and many others.

Hila Lauterbach (21:23)
But the issue is that it adds a lot of silos to the broken process instead of connecting the tissues and thinking about it from an end-to-end perspective. So a lot of silos. And then the other pattern, there's the assumption that tools are going to fix the big misses in the strategy

when they really just expose the crack.

And you cannot really replace today the strategic, creative, deep thought processes. Only thing you can do is to take something good and really well-thought in the right way to amplify and enable it.

Renat Gersch (21:58)
And I love diving into all this technical stuff, like a new product. I can test it out. Just tell me that there is something to be done, like I'm all over it. you know, Hila is like, Renat, let's test this, let's make sure it works well. And we've definitely experienced like the chasing and these patterns firsthand at 10X GTM.

Hila Lauterbach (22:13)
Yeah.

Renat Gersch (22:22)
And you know, like a lot of PMMs that DM me or that I speak to, they also see on LinkedIn, just like I did, that

Renat Gersch (22:31)
everybody is saying I've built my operating, ⁓ you know, my entire operating system is agents. I don't need people anymore. ⁓ I'm driving $100 million in ARR with two people and a 100 agents. So I said to Hila, yeah, you know, let's do it.

Renat Gersch (22:48)
And we started, I started, pushing to create these agents and Hila really held me back. And she was like, we need to

make sure first that what we developed is consistently good. So when we work with different LLMs, we create our own process, which we need, we find out that the outcomes are consistently good. And only when they are, do we translate that into

a GPT, a Gemini gem, a Claude project, whatever you want. right? And then we can scale it. right? We can give it to more people. We can use it and get tuned to that outcome, like with greater speed, but it doesn't happen out of thin air. And it doesn't happen by prompting AI to give us the instructions. No, we have to work at it. And we've learned that the hard way, that without oversight, AI will not get us there.

it will only scale fuzziness. And that teaching was so hard for me that it took me like six months and a lot of begging of my son, who's a computer engineer to actually step in and help me get my project back on track. I'd have to share this with you because I think it's a funny story, know, but maybe one that a lot of people or maybe some of the listeners have come across as well.

Renat Gersch (24:07)
So Hila and I had this great idea. We're talking about buyer first positioning. We really believe in buyer truth and a lot of the positioning agents and tools and thinking that's out there, it says the same thing, but like it doesn't hone on to buyer intent and buyer truth

as much as we wanted it. So we wanted to build an AI agent, because everything is AI these days, that will guide founders through this buyer first thinking. We call it...

thought provoking positioning agent. And I get excited about things. So I got excited about vibe coding and I was like, we can do it on our own. Early progress was awesome. It was fast. I had like an initial plan. I was vibe coding and all of a sudden the UI gets created and like the landing page gets created. And I sent this over to Hila and I'm like, just try it. Hila, what did you say?

Hila Lauterbach (25:02)
It was really

A hard moment.

Renat Gersch (25:05)
Hila's response was...

Hila Lauterbach (25:08)
This is broken. I cannot put it out there. It's not our quality.

Renat Gersch (25:12)
She's like,

what is this? Is there an output? I'm like, well, it's halfway through. Get the gist. Come on board. But she was absolutely right. And I had to develop much more in order for the product or the agent to be complete and sensible. And as I added more capability, the code started breaking. There were

Renat Gersch (25:35)
empty codes there, garbage code ⁓ entering in, because when you ask AI to change things, it adds things.

Long story short, there was no amount of prompting that could help me get this thing back on track. And we had to bring in an actual person who knows what computer science looks like and what real coding looks like. And they had to come in and fix it. And I think that really sends that message, right?

Renat Gersch (25:59)
AI is not going to fix something that is broken. cannot work without any oversight. And there's this entire concept of running go-to-market automation on its own. have Zapier, n8n, workflow agents. They all assume that you actually have a best practice workflow already in place. And with most startups, you don't. So it becomes patchwork of

of tools like compensating for workflows that don't really exist. And it even made me think back to our pre-SaaS days, right? When everything was custom build and custom integrations and the entire world has already come one time to the realization that custom building is not scalable.

Meenal Relekar (26:41)
Okay.

Renat Gersch (26:47)
Maybe we need to come to that realization again. So.

At the end of the day, would say AI is definitely an enabler, but humans have to supervise it so that we make sure the strategy is there, the expertise is there, and even tastefulness and compassion is there.

Meenal Relekar (27:06)
Yeah, tastefulness, compassion, empathy, and all these experiences which we as human have gathered over a period of time.

are so valuable, but what I love is fact that we have to, we need to continue to experiment with AI. We would fail and I'm sure there would be a time when it's way more sophisticated and I still don't think it will be useless. I totally think so. But that my second last question is more on like,

and I love this. love questions on where you think back on a GTM decision that you made and that went wrong for you in your career. What was your approach now?

Hila Lauterbach (27:54)
Sure. So I'm laughing a bit. You know, when you do a lot, you make a lot of mistakes and I've done many of them. So I want to speak today about pricing and packaging, if it makes sense.

So I would say one key element that comes to product marketeer, and sometimes I would say often they overlook, is the go-to-market element of pricing and packaging. And I'm not sure why it's become an afterthought or a downstream decision, but it's actually a core product marketing component in my mind that makes or breaks revenue streams. And I needed to learn it in a really hard way. I was early in my career with VP Marketing for a company in HR Tech, and I was overseeing the sales

Hila Lauterbach (28:33)
and marketing aspects. And one of my biggest mistake in go-to-market was to really set the wrong pricing and lead the creation of packaging that did not meet the actual client needs and deeply within that, the willingness to pay in the perceived value. So I led these teams in the B2B SaaS company, we were in HR tech and one of our core segment was legal firms. We

loved these clients, they loved us, they loved our CRM, our placement products. And we thought this is actually strong intention that they have a solid ARR. And they seem like a good segment to start with for our new employer branding platform we're going to launch. So I started to run one-on-one conversation in depth, what you call qualitative discovery in this group of loyal clients that used already our product.

Hila Lauterbach (29:22)
And they really clearly articulated the urgent problem and high interest in our solution. And they even said clearly they're going to use it and going to be the early adopter.

And I took this input back to my developer and product team, and we really completed the product development based on that. And I started to put my pricing and packaging based on that without really validating the willingness to pay and the actual perceived value. We ended up with 25 pilots, which seems great, successful. We got great feedback after that. But the big problem was that we had a very low intent and actual conversion.

Hila Lauterbach (29:57)
And we all know how demand look and signal versus reality sometimes and that's like bringing back to myself to rethink the pricing and packaging strategy and to make some critical obviously changes in the product itself

and I would say that from a product marketing perspective I have a few I would say lesson learned in blood one that the customer excitement early in the stage

and the demand we kind of see in mirage, it's not really buying signal. And it's for sure not a willingness to pay indicator that we can rely on. Also, when it comes to problem urgency, it does not really equal to the budget ownership.

And we started to see that once budget constraints and buying constraints came to the picture, budget is one, but alternative in the market, internal trade off doing nothing. So the willingness to pay also dropped off. And this really impacts the way that we approach things in 10X GTM, specifically pricing and packaging, but it's obviously bigger than that as a go-to-market motion. We anchor everything we do today, first with the buyer truth.

Hila Lauterbach (31:01)
before everything else. And for some reason, we see more teams that we speak with treat pricing kind of like margin exercise, I would say, rather than what we believe it should be a buyer decision. And this really can break a go-to market, even when you feel that your product market fit is quite strong.

And I know that pricing and packaging might be, as I said earlier, afterthought. But for me, it's a key pillar. And I wanted to give you some great examples from Scorpion. So when I worked for Scorpion, we had ⁓ one product as part of a partnership we had that was underutilized. It was a good solution for marketing pro with email marketing, with SMS marketing, and direct mail. And we had the low usage. This was a very complex solution.

We saw that we have other units in the company that were underutilized but was amazing and combining them together created a new stream for a new solution.

When I put this together with my team and built a pod squad for that, we started to create pricing and packaging to three different groups from SMB, mid-market, and enterprise. And what happened there was amazing. We talked to the clients very often. We learned their actual needs. We learned what are really valuable as a perceived value so we can make this a freemium feature that they want to unlock and pay more. We learned how to upgrade from package to package. We learned the entire idea of retention, what will bring them back, what will be the ROI they want to see.

And what it made in four months for us, it was actually triple the revenue that we projected beforehand. So then I learned the other side of success that right packaging and pricing can be, you know, a huge difference for go-to-market. And I would say that it's very iterative for go-to-market. It's something that you need to revisit. I know many PMMs will tell me, Hila, there's professionals for this. And a lot of times the CEO, the CRO, whatever, taking the lead on that when we launch. Fine. It's true. It's very hard to find your path into

that, but when you do after the first launch, ensure that you become very close to that work with the right people to understand your impact and the insight that you bring from the buyers to really shape the reality. And in the end of the day, because I think that kind of like pricing is the place that go-to-market meets reality, make sure that reality wins and remember that it's actually going to win your early assumptions.

Meenal Relekar (33:22)
I love that you gave example of Pricing and packaging, it's very near and dear to my heart. Shameless plug: I have spoken about pricing and packaging and I love that, know, pricing can never be enough. It should be built into your GTM strategy from day one. And like many other elements of GTM, it's an iterative

element that you need to keep on revisiting as the market changes competition to resemble AI. It has become one of the key element. It's like one of the best growth lever, which PMMs should get involved, should not shy away from. And if not take the ownership, at least meaningfully contribute. So I love that.

Hila Lauterbach (34:09)
Minal, just jumping

into that. And I will say that you're such an expert in this area of pricing and packaging, one of the best in the industry. And a lot of my understanding and learning came from listening to you speaking. So thank you for that as well.

Meenal Relekar (34:16)
Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. My last question to both of you is like, if you were to leave founders with one uncomfortable but honest GTM truth, what would it be?

Renat Gersch (34:37)
That is such a good question.

I think that often founders obsess about scale too early. And I'll give you an example of what I mean. It's like every founder we speak with wants more launches, more features released.

Renat Gersch (34:59)
and more leads, right? Now, both of these things are very important, but on their own, they don't solve for the crucial go-to-market signal,

which is buyer urgency. Because if you haven't really nailed a clear segment with a strong buyer pool, you know, we spoke about that before, you may have leads, you may even have interest in a bit of conversion, but what you don't have is a path to growth.

So it is a bit curious why founders are obsessed so much with features and campaigns. And my assumption is, and there is a bit on that online as well to read, but I think that it's mostly because it really feels productive, right? You can measure it. It's very visible. It feels under control. Whereas go-to-market is actually messier.

And I can tell you those are very hard conversations to have when we need to sit with a founder and kind of come to an admittance that, you know, we haven't found the right buyer yet, or that we're still spraying and praying and the ICP is not well defined, or that the need we're going after is a nice to have. It's not a must have. Or that we're telling a wrong story, right? Like all of these are really hard conversations to have.

And I think that this is where a very strong go-to-market partner can bring structure and rigor, which is the language that especially tech founders relate to and that they find it more intuitive. So back to that SaaStr advice around doing things that don't scale. What does it mean in the go-to-market context? You know, it might be, it really is about running experiments.

And a lot of them before you double down. So narrowing the ICP, which could be very counterintuitive, or duct taping experiments even before you have the full product rolled out. Trying out different selling angles, regardless of what it is that you have in your back pocket.

Renat Gersch (37:09)
All of those things obviously are not going to scale. But when you run them as a learning system and you do that in parallel to your product roadmap,

that's where you have an opportunity to expose with precision your way to repeatable revenue. So I think I want to end with a question. What is your go-to-market roadmap?

Meenal Relekar (37:32)
Well, you answered it all! Loved everything you said from being a very strategic thought partner, asking the right questions so that you are getting signals and eliminating the noise, ensuring and nailing down on the ICP and their willingness to pay and also defining what messaging would resonate, what pricing.

All of these elements are so crucial. But as you said, it also always starts with asking those honest, hard questions in the start, getting that philosophy right, getting that structure right and coming up with your five day framework to keep on experimenting and getting out there and testing and pressure testing and seeing what's working. So to me, that is like a great way of defining your GTM.

And ensuring that you have your audience drive and have your ICP drive. And based on that, everything else flows in. Your pricing flows in, your messaging flows in, how you're going to reach to them, what your top of funnel, end funnel looks like. So to me, it's like building for the audience and not for your own needs. It's like, the audience big enough? Is the need urgent enough?

And if the need or impact big enough and are you really able to solve that need? Yes. Yes, that's the love. That's the 5A framework. I can't tell you how much insights I have from both of you. And I'm sure this would have helped our listeners.

Renat Gersch (38:59)
Exactly, your audience, your angle, your activation, your achievement, your assessment. That's your look.

Meenal Relekar (39:19)
I lied though, this is not my last question. My last question is a little bit more serious. What are your holiday plans?

Renat Gersch (39:27)
I love that question too. I think we're going to have a lovely staycation. We've traveled not too long ago and so the downtime is going to do us really good, kind of energizing ahead of the next year to come, starting with a blast. We're hoping for a fantastic New Year's and wishing you one, Meenal and also all the listeners.

Hila Lauterbach (39:49)
I'll make mine short. My parents are here in the US after three years. It's the first visit for long. And honestly, just to be with them is huge. We're going to travel a bit. We're going to take about 10 days in San Diego area, but just being with family and feel close for me is everything. I wish you an amazing vacation and to all the listeners and really relaxed and peaceful holidays.

Meenal Relekar (40:11)
Yeah, I'm planning to go on some ski runs. So excited about that and wishing you all the best for 10xGTM. If any founders, any startups listening to

this podcast, feel free to reach. They're amazing, amazing PMMs and more than that, are genuinely really nice. So please connect with them and please take some break and enjoy your holidays. Happy holidays. I hope you learned a lot and see you again.

Renat Gersch (40:46)
Happy holidays!

Hila Lauterbach (40:46)
See you soon!

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