Author: Bridget Willard

I remember the first time I saw “GTM.” It reminded me of the Pontiac GTO. What the heck is GTM. If you’re new to this marketing term like I was, it means “Go To Market” and it usually means your marketing strategy for your SaaS Product. To explain, let me tell you a story.

In 2003, everybody wanted Nemo. Finding Nemo came out, saltwater aquariums were suddenly even cooler, and I happened to be working at Evans Roofing Company where we had an empty aquarium sitting in our conference room.

One of our employees was a microbiologist. She asked if she could turn it into a saltwater aquarium.Of course Mark Evans said yes. How fun, we were going to have fish!

Except we didn’t. Every week we’d come into that conference room for our staff meeting and I’d look at the aquarium.

“Where are the fish?”

First, the tank had to be cleaned and tested. Then came the sand and rocks. The water had to be prepared. The tank had to cycle. Eventually there were shrimp and snails and other creatures in there.

Okay. Great.

But where are the fish?

It turns out you can’t set up a saltwater aquarium by buying an aquarium and throwing Nemo into it. You have to build an entire ecosystem capable of supporting Nemo first.

Yesterday, I was thinking about SaaS founders tweeting, “My product is live! Go to my GitHub.” Sometimes they post in a subreddit. Sometimes they share their Product Hunt launch through DMs asking me to vote on their product. 

I felt like I’ve run out of ways to explain that there is so much infrastructure you need to build first. Then I remembered the salt water tank and it hit me. The long, (boring) process of setting up a salt water reef tank is the perfect analogy for go-to-market strategy.

Watch the Video

(more…)

One of the questions I was asked during my recent appearance on Elevate & Examine was about reactive marketing. Why do companies abandon their strategy the moment a competitor launches something new? 

My answer was simple: fear.

Why did the Board of Apple want Steve Jobs to just ship it incomplete? Because IBM already made a personal computer. What was the board afraid of? Losing money.

Fear convinces us that someone else’s success automatically means our failure. It encourages us to copy tactics we don’t understand, chase trends we didn’t choose, and compare our business to someone else’s highlight reel.

The problem is that none of those things build a stronger brand.

(more…)

Founders, are you creating a library of objections for your SaaS product?

You should be.

Every objection your sales team hears is really just a question your potential customers are asking. And every one of those questions can become a blog post. Actually, they should become a blog post. 

If you want your sales, marketing, and product teams on the same page, turning objections into content is one of the smartest strategies you can implement.

Watch The Video

(more…)

How founders can stop guessing personas and start listening to real conversations.

TL;DR: Twitter Lists aren’t just organization tools — they’re powerful market research signals. Instead of guessing buyer personas, learn how to listen to real conversations, spot patterns, and inform your SaaS/B2B strategy.

Coding Versus Marketing

If you’ve ever written a piece of code that magically worked and didn’t fully understand why it worked, you’re probably a SaaS founder.

Meaning, you’ve built something that works, but you’re not going to stop until you understand the full process and mechanisms of why it works. This is the edge you have as a programmer and a founder.

Software you get. Code you understand. ProductHunt is your jam. You’ve got so many shades of green in your GitHub profile it could be your holiday card this year (hey! that’s an idea!).

But marketing. This is where you need a bit of guidance.

(more…)