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.
