🚦 3-2-1 Traction — taking the “how” shovel to your go-to-market
Thanksgiving; the depth of your go-to-market strategy; what you need vs what you think you need; finding new opportunities; how to spend your time; customer discovery 101; and making smart bets.
Hey friend 👋
This week, I give thanks.
I’ve always thought it fitting that Global Entrepreneurship Week immediately precedes Thanksgiving: we celebrate the people who bring more good to the world before we celebrate the good in the world.
But… I better pause here. It’s late at night, and I’ll wax philosophical — without brevity.
So without further ado, this is 3-2-1 Traction: 3 ideas, 2 quotes, and 1 question to help you focus in your journey to find traction.
Lastly, I’m thankful for this time you give me each week. Enjoy your celebratory feast, my friend.
the 3 ideas
one: go-to-market strategy requires depth
Go to market is the intersection of three things:
An early adopter that gets you into the market;
An efficient means of getting a message to them;
A business model that makes it pencil out.
The biggest mistake founders make is to keep this high level: we’ll run Instagram ads; we’ll use influencers; we’ll do network outreach; etc.
It’s a magic wand. Investors don’t want that, and neither should you.
Use the “how” shovel — dig deeper by asking how. Don’t stop until you get mired in detail only the experts care about.
And if you can’t get to that level, how can you execute on it?
two: customer discovery isn’t complicated
We often overcomplicate it, though.
In a startup, the customer, market, & business model are unknown, so the product concept must co-evolve with them. The mission of customer discovery is therefore to get our concepts in front of customers as early as possible.
Customer discovery is the process of
systematic, qualitative research
to understand customer problems
in order to ideate & test solution hypotheses.
That’s it.
Don’t get lost in the tools. Find people easy to find with big problems you can solve.
three: proportion your effort to the evidence
I often talk about the credible theory of hugeness as the best way to think about your startup, but it has a hidden benefit:
It tells you if you’re making good bets.
The credibility if your startup gets more robust over time: better defensibility; more evidence of timing; a growing team; increasing traction; etc.
Not coincidentally, your effort increases over time, too: more features; better user experience; more employees; greater spend; etc.
The greater the gap between credibility and effort, the greater the risk you’re assuming.
the 2 quotes
Yasmine Khosrowshahi, distilling 4 years of marketing lessons:
Paul Graham on how to get new ideas:
The way to get new ideas is to notice anomalies: what seems strange, or missing, or broken? You can see anomalies in everyday life (much of standup comedy is based on this), but the best place to look for them is at the frontiers of knowledge.
Knowledge grows fractally. From a distance its edges look smooth, but when you learn enough to get close to one, you'll notice it's full of gaps. These gaps will seem obvious; it will seem inexplicable that no one has tried x or wondered about y. In the best case, exploring such gaps yields whole new fractal buds.
the 1 question
Startup life is filled with distractions, nonsense, and “procrastivity”.
So, what is getting too much of your time right now? And what is getting too little?
Happy Thanksgiving!
—jdm
PS… If you’re enjoying 3-2-1 Traction, will you take 6 seconds and forward this issue to a friend? It goes a long way in helping me grow the newsletter (and helping more founders find traction).