How to build your first go-to-market strategy

You might not realise it, but your go-to-market strategy starts long before your first sale. For most, it begins when your startup is still just an idea, long before you incorporate.

With this in mind, it’s better to think of your go-to-market motion as a system that sits at the centre of your business, determining how your startup takes shape.

We started building our GTM strategy long before Seapoint launched, running it as a live experiment while building the product. As a result, every decision we’ve made as a business has been driven by data points and feedback pulled from early-stage testing.

Here’s how we built a go-to-market motion that decided how we sold, who we sold to, and how we could start to scale.

Pressed for time? Here are the highlights:

• Validate your problem first. Talk to as many people as you can before you write a line of code.
• Launch a private beta. Start simple and figure out what customers actually want.
• Retain now, grow later. Figure out what’s making your customers stay, and only scale when you’ve nailed it.
• Build an exceptional GTM team. Hire for agency, not for a résumé that matches the job title.
• Treat GTM like an engineering system. Run go-to-market in two-week sprints, like an engineering team ships code.
• Pin down your data points. Get every system into one data warehouse, then automate what you learn.

If that list is all you take away, it's enough to change how you build a company. The detail is below.

Validate your problem first

Before I’d even thought about building a product, I first needed to know if my idea had legs.

When Seapoint was still in its conception stage, I approached Jeremy, who I’d worked with previously at Stripe, to first figure out what Seapoint was going to be. Together, we interviewed 50 founders on how they ran their company’s finances, recording every call so I could go back and compare notes afterwards. From these calls, I discovered founders were relying on fragmented finance stacks – neobanks, Stripe, Wise, payroll tools – tenuously held together by manual work and accountants.

From these conversations, I was able to narrow down the ICP: the real pain was concentrated in founders who had just raised VC money and were scaling financial operations for the first time, not pre-seed teams with simple needs. The interview quotes (emboldened by plenty of frustrated swearing) later helped convince early investors the pain was real.

Launch a private beta

After narrowing an ICP, the next step was to nail cohort retention. There’s no point putting in the work to get hundreds of customers if only ten percent stay.

To do this, we launched a private beta in May 2025, with a deliberately simple product. Back then, Seapoint only offered automated reporting, bank connections and a basic account – embarrassingly simple, compared to what we offer now.

The first three to six months were about fast weekly iterations based on brutal but fair feedback from a small beta cohort. Design partners were sourced through warm relationships from the original interviews and, notably, a strategically built angel network. We were taking small checks of around $1,000 from well-connected angel investors, giving them enough skin in the game to incentivise them to introduce us to customers, effectively acting as an early-stage sales force.

Retain now, grow later

With our private beta underway, we could now track whether our customers were staying, and start building a product based on their feedback. At that point, the goal wasn’t to grow – it was to bring customers on board, and then figuring out how to scale from there.

For every batch of customers onboarded in a given month, we would record how many were still using the product and how many would recommend Seapoint to a friend, while constantly adjusting the product in line with user feedback.

While the product was still very minimal, retention rates were small, and for the first few months we’d only retain around two out of every ten customers onboarded in a month. We’d then work on the product, making changes based on user feedback, and repeat the cycle by onboarding ten more customers in the following month.

As the product improved over time, we found we were retaining around four or five customers per ten person cohort. Only when we reached these retention metrics did we consider scaling up.

Even now Seapoint has publicly launched, we’re still basing decisions on retention rates. We launched our pricing models roughly three months after public launch, once customer love and product maturity were clear. Charging is a natural next step when it’s a product worth paying for, but is a risky barrier when the product it’s still rough.

Build an exceptional GTM team

By the end of the private beta, Jeremy and I had built a product we were happy to go live with. The next step was to build a go-to-market team. At this stage, we’d gotten good at onboarding customers from investor referrals and personal networks, and were now ready to start onboarding customers from more scalable channels.

When I was looking at hiring my founding team, the level of adaptability and high agency in candidates was super important. I’d worked with Jeremy previously and knew he already had those characteristics, but finding someone new would take some work.

After around 80 interviews, we hired our first GTM hire, Lauren, to handle acquisition and customer success. As outlined above, customer success sits at the core of retention, and retention has to be solid before a company can scale. After Lauren, we hired Gamal for GTM engineering and automation tooling, Marcela for community building and events, and Harry for sales and partnerships. It’s worth noting that Harry doesn’t have a traditional sales background, but is a former founder and VC, so knows where customer pain points lie.

Treat GTM like an engineering system

From July onwards, the team started running go-to-market in two-week sprints. We treated these sprints as experiments: new ideas were tested cheaply and expected to fail often, and only proven wins would get scaled and measured for ROI.

Now once a week, the team gets together to review metrics across the whole funnel and identify any bottlenecks that need their immediate attention.

Pin down your data points

Two internally built tools underpin all of our data. The first is a BigQuery data warehouse, where we store all the data we collect internally, such as LinkedIn metrics, Slack messages and Mixpanel in-product observations. We then used Claude to go in and build dashboards based on the data.

The second internally built tool that’s been incredibly helpful is Harbor. Harbor is our own internal agent platform that sits on top of our BigQuery data warehouse, and it enables everyone on the team to build the agents they need to automate workflows without engineering support.

Together, these tools give the team the depth to understand customer activity and lead data, and the capacity to act quickly.

Lean into your GTM

Trying to design and build a go-to-market system is one of the most challenging, yet rewarding parts of building a business. It’s extremely hard to build something that scales as you grow, and is often the crux where most startups end up failing.

With this in mind, my advice is to really lean into your go-to-market strategy. Get as much data as you can, build an exceptional team and get to grips with how your customers are using your product, and what it is that’s making them stay.

We’re still early-stage and learning as we go, and will continue to share our insights in webinars and blog posts to come. If you’re building out your go-to-market strategy and want to know if you’re on the right track, you can book a free 1:1 office hour with a member of our GTM team.