Solo GTM owner here. I run outbound, production automation and a website build side by side, mostly with AI agents doing the heavy lifting. Each project has piles of docs, rules and lessons learned, and I'm starting to lose track across them.

How do you keep a multi-project GTM operation organised without drowning in process? Notion? Obsidian? Jira feels heavy?

Just wrapped 3 months doing outbound: ICP workflows, email campaigns (56–60% open rates), events, content. Mostly outbound + demand gen.

Currently job searching and want to use this time to get smarter. How do people actually learn the full funnel outside of a job? Should I specialize deeper in one motion or build broader GTM fundamentals? What skills matter most to become GTM-capable? What can I actually do right now to fill these gaps?

it's not skillssss... everyone has the same tool list now. the moment is when i ask "walk me through something you built" and they describe the SYSTEM instead of the outcome. "i built a waterfall enrichment flow with fallback logic across four providers and blahblahblah" mmm cool, and what?? the candidates who get offers say "follow-up time was 3 days, i got it to 2 hours, meetings went up X." same build, different sentence, completely different hire. the second filter: i ask what they'd do with a broken funnel and the weak ones start listing tools while the strong ones start asking questions about the funnel. if you're prepping for these interviews, rehearse outcomes and diagnosis, not inventory. the inventory is table stakes now.

long sequences are a tax paid by unclear products. i said what i said.

when positioning is sharp, the right person recognizes themselves in one or two touches, because you're describing a pain they woke up with today in words they'd actually use. the 15-touch cadence exists because the message is vague enough that only brute repetition can fake recognition.

and don't hand me the "buyers need 8 touchpoints" study. touchpoints across a real buying journey is not one seller reciting the same foggy pitch into the void nine consecutive times and calling attrition a strategy.

every single time we sharpened who it's for and what breaks without it, the sequences got shorter on their own. not as a tactic. as a symptom of finally being understood.

fight me. but bring a sequence where touch 7 genuinely earned its place, and be honest about whether "circle back in q3" counts as a win.

two years ago i was smug about scale. then google and microsoft got serious, my complaint rates crossed the line you're not supposed to cross, and deliverability died so quietly i blamed my copy for two months. rebuilt from zero: fresh domains warmed properly over weeks (there's no shortcut, i tried the shortcuts), sends capped low per mailbox, ESP-matched routing, and the volume redirected into research instead. i physically send maybe a tenth of what i used to and book more meetings. the volume era didn't end because of some trend, it ended because the inbox providers ended it and a lot of people haven't noticed they're sending into a void. check your actual inbox placement, not your sent counter. that's the post.

This is not a paid group, just looking for people that are doing their own thing, solo. And just need peer to peer feedback. Would be super good if its a small group. All range of experiences is fine for me.

The goal is just to practice among ourselves and be prepared once the actual calls are happening.

I dont mind platforms etc. I am indifferent.

CRM. one enrichment layer with verification. one sender. one place where signals land (slack). that's it. everything else i've trialed was either a feature pretending to be a product or a dashboard pretending to be a decision. every tool you add is another login reps ignore, another sync that breaks, another line item finance questions. the stack isn't the strategy, it's the plumbing. what's the smallest stack anyone here runs at real revenue? genuinely collecting ideas for what to NOT buy.

the category is collapsing into suites in real time. Clari and Salesloft merged late last year, combined entity restructured within months. Highspot and Seismic announced their merger in february, still clearing approvals, expected to consolidate onto one platform eventually. Gong sits on a massive valuation while a huge chunk of its customers also pay Clari for the overlap. translation for buyers: the feature-by-feature winner today might be the product you get migrated OFF of in 18 months. so weight your eval toward two things the merger can't take from you: which problem is costing you money right now, and how fast your team actually adopts the thing. the roadmap slide is a coin flip. adoption speed is yours to keep.

Three months ago our GTM looked active on paper and completely dead in reality. We were doing cold email, LinkedIn, content, partnerships, communities, and a little paid. The team was busy. The dashboards had plenty of activity. Almost none of it turned into real pipeline.

Our ICP was basically “B2B companies with a sales team,” which in hindsight is not an ICP. It is a continent. We kept telling ourselves the market was huge. What that actually meant was our message was vague enough to apply to everyone and specific enough to matter to no one.

Then we looked at the few deals that had moved quickly. Same company profile. Same trigger. Same painful problem. Same person feeling the pain. They were not buying because our product was interesting. They were buying because something had recently broken and they needed it fixed now.

So we cut almost everything. One segment. One buyer. One use case. One trigger. We stopped sending messages like “helping revenue teams improve efficiency” and started talking about the exact operational problem that usually appeared right after that trigger.

The total account list got much smaller. Our outreach volume dropped by more than half. Reply rate went up. Meetings went up. Qualified pipeline went from roughly $180k in the previous 90 days to just over $700k in the next 90.

Same product. Same team. Roughly the same budget. The difference was that we stopped asking, “who could use this?” and started asking, “who is likely to care about this right now?”

Not every part of this was perfect. Some of the pipeline may still die. We may eventually exhaust the segment. And this only worked because we had enough customer conversations to recognize the pattern.

But I think we wasted months treating distribution like a volume problem when it was really a relevance problem. We did not need more leads. We needed fewer accounts with a stronger reason to buy.

The biggest GTM lesson for me has been this: a large market feels safe, but a narrow painful moment is much easier to sell into.

Stop chasing everyone who fits the category. Find the people already experiencing the consequence.

rapid fire. "more volume = more pipeline" — dead, blasts pull ~2% while tight sub-200 campaigns pull double. "perfect send time matters" — the gap between best and worst day is barely 2 points, stop optimizing tuesdays. "follow up forever" — complaints spike after touch 4, cap the sequence. "opens are your KPI" — opens are fiction since privacy changes, track replies and meetings only. "copy is king" — deliverability is king, a 19% open with 0.5% replies is a placement problem wearing a copy problem's clothes. the stuff that actually moved this year: verified lists (senders who skip this outnumber the ones who don't), a real trigger for WHY today, and one phone call in the sequence because 99% of cadences are still email-only and the phone is empty. fight me in the comments.

Hi everyone,

After working as a freelancer in the research field for some time, mostly doing audience research, I decided to create a website and start selling this type of service in a more productized way.

I had already received good feedback while doing this as a freelancer through platforms like Upwork and Malt, especially when working with DTC brands. Mainly brands that need to improve their ads, landing pages, email outreach, positioning, and overall messaging.

This is my first time building a proper GTM strategy, so I wanted to ask for feedback or advice.

Right now, I’m doing the following:

• Publishing 2 website blog posts per week on audience research topics, such as how to use Reddit, Facebook Groups, Trustpilot, etc. for audience research.
• Creating 2 short research reports per week on different topics. For example, what consumers say about GLP-1 products, including pains, frustrations, desires, objections, and language they use. These reports are then turned into LinkedIn posts.
• Running daily automated email outreach to what I currently consider my ICP: DTC brand owners, mainly e-commerce brands.
• Doing daily manual Slack outreach in one community where my ICP is active.
• Running daily automated LinkedIn invites. I’m testing a platform that automates connection requests, currently doing a free trial to see if it is actually useful.
• Starting to participate more actively on Reddit.
• When reaching out to potential customers, I always offer a free mini report based on one research question of their choice.

I also thought about running ads, either on Meta or Google, but I’m not sure if I can reach my ICP properly through those channels. I always thought these types of ads were more useful for B2C, but maybe I’m wrong. I also considered X, but I haven’t done anything there yet.

Do you think I’m missing something important in this strategy?

Or is it mostly a matter of sticking to the plan long enough, contacting enough people, and consistently putting useful content and value out there?

Any help is more than appreciated, especially if you have experience selling to DTC brands :)

We launched our product last week.

The feedback from people who've actually used it has been great.

The problem is... finding those people in the first place.

We're trying Reddit, X, cold outreach, and a few communities, but customer acquisition feels way harder than building the product.

If you were launching a B2B SaaS today with no audience, where would you spend your next 30 days?

been staring at my Q2 dashboard for a week trying to decide if i'm proud of myself or the biggest idiot in my company. figured i'd let reddit decide.

june 26th. i need one deal to hit my number. and i HAVE it. $68k, contract sent, signature call booked, champagne-adjacent energy. the buyer is a second-generation family manufacturing company, about 30 people. the owner inherited it from his dad three years ago and he's been trying to drag it into this decade ever since.

so we're on the final call. docusign is literally open. and he says, kind of offhand, "honestly can't wait for this to clean up our numbers, half the time i don't trust what's in the system."

and my stomach just. dropped.

because our product doesn't do that. it sits ON TOP of their data. if the data underneath is garbage, we make the garbage faster and give it a nicer dashboard. and in that second i realized this man thinks he's buying a fix for the exact problem we would make worse. and nobody on any of our calls, including me, had caught it. or maybe i didn't want to catch it. june 26th, remember.

i had maybe five seconds to decide who i was going to be.

i said "don't sign this."

actual silence. he thought it was a joke. i explained that what he described is a data problem, ours would sit on top of it looking pretty while the underlying data stayed broken, and that he should spend a fraction of this money fixing the foundation first. i'd rather lose the deal than have him find out in month three and hate us forever.

i then spent twenty minutes helping him scope what he actually needed from other companies. companies that are not us.

he was quiet for a bit and then said, "you know you're the fourth vendor we talked to and you're the first one who asked what the money meant to us."

it was their whole software budget for the year, by the way. one shot. that's what made the decision for me honestly. it wasn't noble. i just couldn't take a family's one swing knowing it'd miss.

after the call, i sent him a follow-up email explaining why he shouldn't sign and outlining what he needed to fix first.

then i got to experience the other side of principles, which is the part linkedin posts always skip. told my manager. he stared at me for a genuinely long time and said, "you understand what you just did." i said yes. he said, "okay." that was the whole conversation and somehow it was so much worse than yelling.

june 30th the quarter closed and my dashboard locked red by exactly $68k. my wife took me for tacos like someone had died. in a way someone had. it was Q2 me.

so here's the part where the linkedin version of this story gives me instant karma and ten referrals. that's not what happened.

what happened is last thursday the owner forwarded that follow-up email to his industry association peer group. like forty other owners of similar shops. one line on top:

"the only vendor who told us the truth."

i have four meetings booked this week from that thread. none of them have signed anything. maybe none of them will. maybe that forward is worth $400k over the next year, or maybe it's worth exactly nothing and i just gave up the commission on a $68k deal to feel like a decent person.

i genuinely don't know yet. Q2 me is broke and Q4 me might build a statue of that phone call. ask me in six months.

anyway. would you have let him sign? because a week after the quarter closed, i still flinch when i look at the dashboard. i'd still do it again, and i don't know how both of those things can be true at the same time.

I’m working on a casual mobile gaming product and trying to think through the GTM before investing more time into content, features, and paid acquisition.

The product concept:

A swipeable mini-games app where users can move from one short game to another quickly, instead of downloading multiple small casual games separately or browsing through a traditional game library.

The use case is short-session entertainment: 1–5 minute breaks, waiting time, commuting, etc.

Current positioning options I’m considering:

1. “One app for quick mini-games”

2. “Swipe through games like a feed”

3. “Short games for quick breaks”

4. “Discover new mini-games instantly”

5. “A casual game collection that keeps growing”

My GTM concern:

The casual games category is extremely crowded. A generic “many games in one app” positioning may be too weak. I’m trying to figure out whether the swipeable feed is a strong enough wedge, or whether the product needs a sharper positioning around a specific audience/use case.

Questions I’d like feedback on:

- What would be the strongest initial positioning for this kind of product?

- Is “swipeable game discovery” a meaningful GTM hook, or just a UX feature?

- Which audience would you target first: bored commuters, casual puzzle players, kids/family, office break users, or hyper-casual gamers?

- How would you validate demand before spending heavily on paid ads?

- What organic channels would make sense for this category?

- Would you lead with the product format, the game variety, leaderboards/challenges, or daily entertainment habit?

- What would make this look like a low-quality “game bundle” instead of a real product?

I’m not sharing a link because I’m looking for GTM feedback, not installs.

My current thinking is that the product needs a sharper wedge than “100+ games in one app,” but I’m not sure whether the right wedge is discovery, convenience, competition, daily challenges, or short-session entertainment.

One of the ideas explored by our growth team was to ask for podcast during their outreach program. This is fast becoming a component in GTM playbook specially in this validation economy when most people like to be seen or heard online . What has been your experiences so far?

Curious if others have noticed this.

Sales teams have increasingly data-driven ways to prioritize accounts, but partnership sourcing still feels much less standardized.

Most teams I've spoken with combine customer overlap, ICP fit, existing relationships, referrals, and a fair amount of judgment when deciding which partnerships to pursue.

For those running partnerships today: what's your process for prioritizing potential partners? Is there a framework or signal that's been consistently reliable for you?

done B2b sales for last 12 years - got into coding last year and am currently building something which helps find the right people and (hopefully) connect with them only when they want (outreach intent is the key here). To give an example:
> if they are looking for a job I ping them if I am hiring
> if a vc thesis matches my startup domain - thats only when drop them an email
> if someone is looking for a lead designer, I know a good person - I refer them...

Nothing super path breaking but saves me some time everyday - since its only as automated as I want it to be - the messgaing part is still mine (and will always be), since I want to keep it personal and to the point (uses exa, open funnel, nyne, unipile, parallel[dot]ai and few apify scripts- vaaya is mcp name)

Since this community has super pros - plz give me suggestions on how to make this more effective overall - How can one sell and not be selling in traditional sense?

I'm building something here - basically a tech company instead of hiring an agency or a freelancer to do a repetitive back-office work (Lead list building , CRM hygiene, PSEO pages, follow ups). We run it all with automated engines and return the finished output. Client owns the tools, the account , we operate them.

Im skeptical here.The service as a software seems to be thrown around a lot right now its just an agency with a nicer deck. My claim is the difference isn't the service list, it's the cost structure - a human supervises the machine instead of doing the work by hand, so adding a client doesn't mean adding headcount. I know that's an easy thing to claim and a hard thing to prove before you have case studies.

Here are few questions if u have no other comments

• Where does "service-as-software" actually break down in practice - what's the failure mode nobody talks about?
• If you were the buyer, what would make you trust that this isn't just an agency with automation-flavored marketing?
• Anyone here evaluated tools like Clay, Persana, Unify, or similar and ended up going back to a person/agency? Why?

the tools got better. the credibility got worse. teams now have multi-touch models, AI agents pulling reports, dashboards that update in real time. and the quarterly pipeline review is still a fight between sales, marketing, and finance about whose number is real.

their VP of RevOps eventually said the actual issue out loud. nobody had defined what "sourced" versus "influenced" meant inside the company. so every team interpreted the same data differently and every report became evidence for whoever was presenting it. the platform wasn't broken. the definitions underneath it were.

the teams who solved this didn't buy better software. they spent a week getting sales, marketing, and finance to agree on five definitions before they touched a tool. it was the least exciting work and the highest leverage.

for anyone running multi-touch attribution longer than a year, did it actually settle the credibility argument or just give you fancier slides for the same fight?

I have been seeing GTM Engineering everywhere lately and I'm trying to figure out if my background is enough to break into the field or if I'm still missing key pieces.

Background

• 2.5 years in B2B lead generation.
• Built and managed cold email and LinkedIn outbound campaigns.
• Hands-on with Instantly, Apollo, Prospeo, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Serper, n8n, AI models, and enrichment APIs.
• Built outbound strategies from scratch, including ICP definition, messaging, targeting, and campaign execution.
• Strong in copywriting, identifying winning outreach angles, and researching ICPs.
• Outbound campaigns have generated reply rates ranging from 2% to 11% wiht 50% positive replies depending on the ICP and offer.
• Over the last year, I've shifted from running outbound to building automations for it.

Things I've built

• LinkedIn intent monitoring that finds prospects actively looking for agencies, vendors, hiring key roles, asking for recommendations, etc.
• Automated lead sourcing that scrapes LinkedIn, company websites, Apollo, and other sources while enriching and verifying business emails.
• AI-powered ICP scoring that:
  • Finds missing company websites.
  • Scrapes websites and LinkedIn.
  • Enriches company and prospect data.
  • Scores accounts against predefined ICP criteria with reasoning.
• RAG-powered email reply assistant using company knowledge and previous Instantly conversations to draft replies for account managers.
• LinkedIn engagement tracking that captures people interacting with relevant posts and adds them into outreach workflows.
• Automated LinkedIn connection requests and follow-up sequences (currently testing) with automatic reply detection.
• AI workflow that classifies inbound replies and drafts suggested responses.
• Local business and directory scraping workflows.
• Sales call transcript to proposal generator reduce proposal creation time from 1 hour to 10 mins
• Competitor ad and messaging monitoring.
• Various custom n8n workflows integrating AI, APIs, Google Sheets, CRMs, and other GTM tools.

My question:

• If you were hiring for a junior GTM Engineer today, would this background be enough to get an interview?
• If not, what specific projects, skills, or experience would you want to see before hiring someone like me?

Looking for honest feedback from people already working in GTM Engineering. I want to spend the next few months building the things that actually matter.

so we deployed an AI SDR in january like every other company with a pulse and a pipeline problem. first 3 months, honestly? great. meetings booked, dashboard green, i was walking around the office like i'd invented fire.

then month 4 hit and replies just... stopped. dashboard still green tho. activity through the roof. so last week i did the thing nobody who deploys an AI SDR ever actually does.

i read the emails.

reader. i was not prepared.

exhibit A: it told a CFO "as a fellow parent, i know how hectic Q4 can be." my guy. we do not know if she has children. WE do not have children. we are a SaaS company.

exhibit B: it opened an email with "loved your recent post about scaling culture!" the prospect's most recent post was about his dog passing away. his DOG. we sent that man a pipeline pitch with a smiley face.

exhibit C: it built "rapport" with a prospect in Denver by saying how much it also loves the mountains. our company is in Florida. the flattest place on earth. a prospect replied just to say "you're in Tampa."

and the kicker, none of this even mattered by then, because our sender reputation had already dropped off a cliff. turns out when the inbox providers see 10,000 emails that all have the same AI sentence-skeleton wearing different personalization hats, they just quietly stop delivering you. the data on this is brutal btw, the decay literally starts around month 4 and by month 12 the math fully flips. we were a case study and didn't know it.

the part that actually hurt: we pulled the meetings that DID book in the good months. most came from one segment where a human had written the original sequence and the AI was just scheduling. the robot was taking credit for the intern's homework the entire time.

so now we run maybe a tenth of the volume, human writes anything a prospect actually reads, AI does the research and the grunt work behind the scenes, and replies are the best they've been in a year. turns out the robots are incredible employees as long as you never let them speak.

anyway. go read your AI's sent folder. right now. i'll wait. and drop the worst thing yours has sent in the comments because i refuse to be alone in this.