Shivaas Gulati’s Best Practices for a Succesful GTM Strategy

You’re a founder.
You’ve researched the problem you want to solve.
You have a clear vision.

But, when it comes to figuring out how exactly to distribute that solution to the market—you feel lost. 

What are the best practices for startups looking to develop a successful go-to-market strategy?

Conscience asked this at our AMA with Shivaas Gulati, unicorn co-founder of Remitly (IPO’d 2021, $6.9B valuation).

His biggest GTM tips:

⭐Develop hypotheses about distribution, even before building a product. Then, work to validate those hypotheses with multiple customer audiences. 

Why is this so critical to figure out early on? 

By validating that your GTM strategy has legs, you’ll avoid competing in a market that entails high customer acquisition costs. This will enable you to capture high margins for your future product.

👉What does it even mean to develop a hypothesis around product distribution?

Hypotheses should be straightforward and testable.

If the wording of the hypothesis outlines a situation that involves a life or death decision for your business, it’s likely that your hypothesis is too conflated. 

Instead, break it down.

Be biased towards specificity, and run hypotheses for one small change at a time.

For example, take a Facebook ad—a small change could be to alter the tagline for the image, but keep the image and all other ad features consistent.

Regardless of this experiment’s results, you’re now able to attribute that success or failure to your tiny tweak. 

👉Okay, now I have my hypotheses. What is one non-obvious signal I should look for when testing them?

Look for differences in engagement across acquisition channels.

Let’s say you’ve set up a high-fidelity website landing page that allows customers to learn about the basics of your product and sign up.

You’re also running social media ads at the same time.

Comparing audience engagement between your ads and your landing page will give intel into where you’re hooking (or losing) customers on their way to buy your product. 

Picture the situation where social media users are viewing your ad, but not clicking to see your landing page. From this observation, you can determine what the issue is: whether it be captions that are unappealing to your audience or less obvious links to your website. 

The reverse scenario is where your ads are encountering low viewership, but your landing page is attracting a high volume of online traffic.

If you’re seeing this, one possibility is that the audience you’re targeting with your ads is not the same as the audience that actually wants to buy your product.  

👉Lastly, don’t be afraid to draw conclusions from small datasets. Testing hypotheses is a best practice any founder can do, even on a small marketing budget.

Thank you Shivaas for these insights!

Stay tuned for more AMA recaps—in coming weeks, Conscience will be open sourcing key learnings from our in-house portfolio education modules.