The New Reality of Early-Stage GTM
COO & Partner, Paul Irving, on the what has shifted and what teams need to know.
First, announcing a new GTMfund Event: 100X Your Campaign Launches Using Claude Code [February 17th in San Francisco]. This is for vertical SaaS founders and operators. You can request to join here.
Now, onto the edition.
The barrier to entry for building enterprise-ready software has collapsed. AI has compressed the time between ideation and shipping from years to weeks. Features converge, categories crowd overnight, and the “meaningful head start” that founders used to rely on now evaporates in a single quarter (trust me, we see it all the time from the venture lens).
In a recent conversation with TechCrunch, I (Paul Irving, COO & Partner at GTMfund) shared a sentiment we’re seeing across the portfolio:
The old GTM rules didn’t just evolve…they stopped working.
What’s replacing them? It’s not an evolved universal playbook, quite the opposite. Every go-to-market playbook is now highly nuanced.
HockeyStack is the AI platform for modern GTM teams. It unifies all your sales and marketing data into a single system of action. Built-in AI agents help teams prospect the right accounts, improve conversions, close and expand deals, and scale what works.
That’s why teams like RingCentral, Outreach, ActiveCampaign, and Fortune 100 companies rely on HockeyStack to eliminate wasted spend, take better decisions, and make space to think. Learn more at hockeystack.com
Distribution as the only durable moat
Building a product is no longer the hardest part of the founder journey. Getting that product into the hands of the right buyers and earning trust at scale is.
In the current landscape, distribution has become the most durable advantage an early-stage company can possess. I’m not talking about “distribution” in the sense of more channels or higher ad spend; I mean a GTM motion intentionally designed around how specific customers discover and adopt technology.
The strongest teams approach GTM the same way strong product teams approach product:
they start with the user
they design deliberately
they iterate based on real feedback
Paul Williamson, who helped Plaid scale from $3M to $300M ARR describes how to build a GTM roadmap in this podcast episode, which is a necessary piece to running it like a product.
The COO of Vercel, Jeanne Dewitt-Grosser, describes the importance of running GTM like a product and how she does so at Vercel in this podcast episode.
Early traction shows up when customers pull you forward
One of the most consistent signals of real early momentum is customer pull.
Some of the most promising companies early on may only have a small number of customers, but those customers:
expand quickly
renew earlier than expected
embed the product deeper into daily workflows
actively influence what gets built next
We would rather see a company with 10 customers that have deep embedding and alignment than 50 customers with surface-level trials. With less ARR, that’s still a more compelling company.
The old GTM hiring playbook is breaking down
For years, B2B SaaS followed a familiar hiring sequence. For example, SDRs first, then AEs, then leadership, then demand gen.
That model worked often enough to become default thinking.
Today, it often leads teams in the wrong direction.
The more useful question is not “who do companies like us usually hire next,” but “what is the bottleneck in our business right now.”
That bottleneck might be:
pipeline generation
time to value after a deal closes
implementation and deployment
customer education and adoption
In many AI-native companies, the right early hire isn’t sales at all. It may be a forward-deployed engineer, a customer success leader with consulting experience, or someone who can deeply embed the product into customer workflows.
Hiring in 2026 should follow constraints, rather than tradition.
Specificity creates leverage early
In 2026, specificity can outperform scale.
Generic outreach is easy to ignore. If anything, it makes hyper-relevant outreach almost impossible to ignore.
The advantage early-stage teams have today is access to better data and better tooling to act on it. When teams deeply understand who their buyer is, what signals matter, and what moments are time-sensitive, they can design GTM motions that feel less like selling and more like helping.
Early-stage GTM truly has nothing to do with volume. Relevance is the name of the game.
Spear fishing beats casting wide nets.
Focus matters more than ever
A common failure mode for early teams is trying to do too much at once. Too many channels, tools, and half-run experiments.
Companies that excel pick one or two channels where their customers genuinely show up and commit fully to executing them well.
These channels might look unscalable at first glance:
niche communities
industry-specific content
founder-led distribution
highly targeted partnerships
What matters is not how broad the channel is, but how well it aligns with the buyer.
Relationships still compound
Even in an AI-native GTM world, trust remains deeply human.
Founders who build strong networks lead with curiosity. They seek feedback, share context honestly, and treat conversations as learning rather than transactions.
Warm introductions matter, but the most meaningful relationships usually form over time, through a series of genuine interactions rather than a single pitch.
Technology can accelerate outreach, but it can’t replace trust.
Closing thoughts
There is no universal go-to-market playbook anymore.
The range of viable GTM paths has never been wider. The tools are more powerful. The pace is faster. That makes GTM harder to navigate, but it also creates real opportunity for teams willing to think clearly.
That is the new reality of early-stage GTM.
Tag @GTMnow so we can see your takeaways and help amplify them.
Capital One struck a $5.15B deal to acquire Brex. A reminder that fintech scale plus enterprise distribution still matters, even in an AI-heavy cycle. Worth watching what happens when a legacy bank absorbs a modern spend platform.
VWO and AB Tasty are joining forces, creating a $100M+ revenue experimentation platform with 4,000 customers globally. This one stands out for the long arc: bootstrapped roots, real revenue milestones, and a merger driven by product and customer alignment, not hype.
Sophie Buonassisi joined the Private Equity Marketeer podcast to talk about how GTMnow and GTMfund approach brand, media, and community. A behind-the-scenes look at what and how we’re building.
GTM 175: Why Most Go-To-Market Motions Collapse at Scale with Jeanne DeWitt Grosser
Get a sneak preview here. For the full thing, listen on Apple, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts by searching “The GTMnow Podcast.”
Statusphere - raised an $18M Series A to turn influencer marketing into something retailers can actually rely on. Less brand roulette, more repeatable performance. This feels like the next evolution of creator-led growth.
Listen Labs - just raised a $69M Series B and their GTM execution shows it. Strong social momentum, real customer proof, smart lead magnets, and enterprise-grade trust pages. This is what “content as a growth engine” actually looks like when it’s working.
Sendspark - was acquired by Xenon Partners after building a real brand in B2B video. 10k+ customers, clear customer love, and a team that stuck together. A thoughtful exit in a noisy category, with Abe Dearmer stepping in as CEO.
Director of Enterprise Sales at CaptivateIQ (Remote - Raleigh, NC/Nashville, TN/Toronto, Canada | Hybrid - Austin, TX/Menlo Park, CA)
Director, Customer Success Strategy & Operations at Writer (Hybrid - New York City)
Sr. Account Executive at Vividly (Remote - US)
Account Executive, Enterprise Expansion at Gorgias (Hybrid - Toronto, Canada)
Sales Development Representative - West Coast at Revefi (Remote)
See more top GTM jobs on the GTMfund Job Board.
Upcoming events you won’t want to miss:
Apollo LA Meetup: Build Your AI-Powered GTM Engine for 2026: January 29, 2026 (El Segundo, California)
Above the Fold (for marketers): February 9-11, 2026 (Fort Lauderdale, FL)
GTMfund Event - 100X Your Campaign Launches Using Claude Code: February 17, 2026 (San Francisco, CA)
Spryng (for marketers): March 24-26, 2026 (Austin, TX)
SaaStock USA: April 15-16, 2026 (Austin, TX)
SaaStr Annual: May 12-14, 2026 (San Francisco, CA)
GTMfund AGM + Retreat: May 14-16, 2026 (San Francisco, CA)
INBOUND: September 16-18, 2026 (Boston, MA)
Pavilion GTM2026: September 28-October 1, 2026 (NYC, NY)
TechCrunch DISRUPT: October 13-15, 2025 (San Francisco, CA)
GTMfund dinner schedule coming soon!
Some GTMnow community (founder, operator, investor) love to close it out - we appreciate you.
"They start with the user". Rule 1 for a reason.
I would add that they build the whole GTM around the customer - specifically the results that matter most to them.
Excellent analysis, the insight that building a product is no longer the hardest part of the founder journey really encapsulates the current paradigm shift, where distribution becomes the paramont challenge.