May 2025 – COMBOVAR

Hello and welcome to The GTM Newsletter by GTMnow – read by 50,000+ to scale their companies and careers. GTMnow shares insight around the go-to-market strategies responsible for explosive company growth. GTMnow highlights the strategies, along with the stories from the top 1% of GTM executives, VCs, and founders behind these strategies and companies.

Most startups die not because they move too slow. Rather, because they build the wrong thing, for the wrong customer, with the wrong team.

That’s why these frameworks from Oji Udezue, former Chief Product Officer at Calendly and Typeform, are so valuable. He’s also held product leadership roles at Twitter, Atlassian, and Microsoft, and recently co-authored a book on scaling high-growth product teams: Building Rocket Ships.

Here are five tactical, high-leverage lessons for early-stage B2B founders and operators:

1. Where to Fish: A framework for targeting the right workflow

“You can predict the terminal value of your startup by mapping the frequency and breadth of your workflow.”

This is a simple framework to assess if you’re building in the right zone. It’s a powerful filter to assess the strategic potential of the workflow your product targets. Oji maps them by two traits:

1. Frequency: How often the workflow is performed

2. Breadth: How many people across the company perform it

This creates four categories:

Look for workflows that are used daily, across teams.
Avoid building for low-frequency, narrow personas unless your wedge is razor-sharp.

So if you’re in a LiEv or LiNi zone, chart a clear roadmap toward HiNi or HiEv territory to increase market pull and enterprise value.

2. Ditch the EPD trio and build a 6-person “shipyard” team

Engineering, product, and design is a 1999 idea.”

Today’s most effective teams include six functions from day one:

Product
Engineering
Design
Product Marketing
User Research
Data

This prevents the old waterfall trap of “build → throw over the fence → launch.” Instead, you get faster iteration, tighter GTM integration, and fewer missed signals.

How these functions are built is continuously evolving with AI.

3. You need a 3x+ value delta to overcome switching costs

“People won’t switch unless your product is 3x better – faster, cheaper, or both.”

This one’s easy to overlook. If your tool is only 20% better than the incumbent, it won’t matter. Switching is painful, even if the new thing is technically superior.

You need to be:

5x cheaper, or
3x faster, or
Undeniably simpler

For example, despite building a better internal Slack competitor at Atlassian, they couldn’t win because Teams was bundled for free and Slack was good enough.

4. AI is creating a tempo mismatch between product and GTM

“We’re building faster, but customers aren’t absorbing faster.”

AI tools have radically sped up development. But GTM motions – onboarding, enablement, comms – haven’t kept pace. This causes friction, feature fatigue, and missed adoption moments. GTM and product need to operate on the same cadence.

Teams are adjusting by:

Rethinking what “version” means (rolling vs. batch releases)
Slowing down outbound marketing to give customers time to catch up
Building internal GTM muscle as fast as they build product

5. Don’t stack risk in your infrastructure

“Take only one unproven layer at a time.”

This is a mistake even seasoned founders make: layering a new market, new tech, new GTM motion, and unproven infrastructure… all at once.

Instead:

New product → proven market
New market → proven tech
New everything → high failure rate

Recommendations

Watch the AI SDR Summit (it’s on-demand and free!)

Stream Qualified’s first annual AI SDR Summit on-demand and hear how leaders from companies like G2, 6sense, Salesforce, and so many more are leveraging the power of AI SDR agents to scale their inbound and outbound pipe gen motions.

Check out candid conversations about the state of the AI SDR agent landscape, inbound and outbound playbooks, and real results from marketers at the forefront of the agentic marketing era.

More for your eardrums

147: RevOps Is a Hidden Growth Engine with Navin Persaud, VP of RevOps at 1Password

This episode explores how AI is transforming the world of revenue operations.

Navin Persaud, VP of Revenue Operations at 1Password, unpacks the evolving intersection—how AI is impacting ops, team structures, tech stacks, and execution strategies. With over 20 years of experience leading ops, Navin has seen firsthand how operational strategy went from backend support to mission-critical.

Listen on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts by searching “The GTM Podcast.”

Startup to watch

Zoca – announced their $6M Seed round. Salons, spas, and wellness other local business entrepreneurs are expected to post daily, run ads, and learn SEO – while juggling clients, staff, and operations. Zoca solves for that. Its AI engine drives demand, boosts visibility across Google and GPT, follows up with leads, and rebooks past clients. Already, it’s powering over 1,000+ small businesses.

Owner – closed a $120M Series C and now sits at a $1B valuation. An inside look to their latest funding co-led by Alex Kurland of Meritech and Shalini Rao of Headline.

More for your eyeballs

By helping customers achieve their key outcomes, your team can establish strong relationships and trust with your customers which is crucial for growth. Kim Peretti (Chief Customer Officer – Klaviyo, Restaurant365) explains how connecting the dots between marketing promises, sales deliverables, and customer success is crucial for success.

Google is quietly baking Gemini into every corner of its ecosystem—from Workspace to Android. This is a demonstration of true distribution strategy, rather than a simple AI rollout.

Hottest GTM jobs of the week

Growth Engineer at Tavus (Hybrid – San Francisco)
Strategic Customer Success Manager at Noibu (Hybrid – Ottawa, ON)
Customer Operations Lead at BlueCargo (Los Angeles/New York)
Director, Solutions Engineering – MM & Enterprise at Vanta (Remote – US)
Mid-market AE (Central) at Writer (Hybrid – New York)

See more top GTM jobs on the GTMfund Job Board.

If you’re looking to scale your sales and marketing teams with top talent, we couldn’t recommend our partner Pursuit more. We work closely together to be able to provide the top go-to-market talent for companies on a non-retainer basis.

GTM industry events

Upcoming go-to-market events you won’t want to miss:

Web Summit: May 27-30, 2025 (Vancouver, CAN)
GTM 25 Roadshow Boston: June 3, 2025 (Boston, MA)
Pavilion CRO Summit: June 3, 2025 (Denver, CO)
GTMfund AGM: June 5-6, 2025 (NYC, NY)
GTMfund Dinner: June 11, 2025 (London, UK)
GTM 25 Roadshow San Francisco: June 12, 2025 (San Franciso, CA)
GTM 25 Roadshow London: June 19, 2025 (London, UK)
Pavilion GTM Summit: September 23-25, 2025 (Washington, DC)

Subscribe now

This newsletter was written and edited by Sophie Buonassisi, Max Altschuler, Paul Irving and the GTMnow team (not AI!).

The post How to build the right thing (before you scale the wrong one) appeared first on GTMnow.

In 2023, we saw a surge of SaaS brands adding anything “AI-powered” or “AI-driven” into their website headlines. A quick use of Wayback Machine for the top 100 SaaS brands will show you just how pervasive it was.

The optics were that if AI wasn’t integral to your roadmap and marketing, you were losing relevance.

Many venture capital firms shifted their investments almost entirely into AI startups.

As this flood of AI messaging hit, a lot of people quickly became numb to it.

Now in 2025, AI promises have simply become baseline expectations. Describing your product as “AI-powered” is like saying it’s internet-connected in 2005. It’s expected, not a value add.

With this expectation, we’re now seeing companies ditching AI messaging in their website headers.

Companies are testing, and the results are showing. We see brands, such as Notion, testing the impact of:

AI in the hero headline
AI in the hero headline and hero sub-header
AI just in the hero sub-header

In the test example below, AI messaging in the sub-header won out over having it in the header.

They kept the focus on the core value proposition of helping teams write, plan and collaborate to create better workspaces, while still having the AI inclusion.

This trend of AI reinforcing and amplifying the core UVP (unique value proposition) is gaining momentum.

We see this shift towards having no AI in the hero header (but including it in the sub-header) across dozens of top SaaS brands: Klaviyo, Monday, Freshworks, MongoDB, Snowflake, Braze, Cloudflare, GitLab, ActiveCampaign and countless others.

For example, here is how Freshworks positions it:

3-step AI messaging differentiation framework

In a market where almost every product claims to have AI, differentiation can’t come from the tech itself. It has to come from the outcome, the problem you solve, and the clarity of your message.

If you’re building or marketing an AI product, use this simple 3-step framework to test and refine your positioning:

1. Start with the pain (what’s broken?)
Don’t lead with tech. Lead with the real problem your buyer is facing. Make it visceral, specific, and urgent.

For example: “Sellers spend 40% of their time manually triaging email.”

2. Move to the outcome (what improves?)
Next, show what your product actually helps people achieve.

For example: “Our users reclaim 4+ hours per week and use it to close deals.”

3. Then show how AI enables the outcome
Now that the user cares, you can explain how AI helps make that happen. But avoid buzzwords, make it visual and concrete.

Bad: “We use AI to streamline sales workflows.”

Better: “Our AI automatically categorizes, prioritizes, and drafts replies – so reps can focus on revenue.”

A quick cheatsheet for better AI messaging:

Replace “AI-powered” with outcomes – what does it enable?
Use your customer’s language – not your internal jargon.
Get specific – “launch campaigns 2x faster” beats “transform workflows.”
Anchor with proof – even directional data builds credibility.
Show, don’t tell – demos and workflows > buzzwords.

Leading with “AI-powered” used to signal innovation. Now, it risks blending you into the noise. Companies are putting product value back at the center and letting AI show up only when it adds clarity to that story.