Have you ever seen something and thought, “That doesn’t make any sense”? For me, it’s a QR code on a flyer posted to Facebook or Instagram.The instruction says, “Scan the QR code to register.” Okay. I’m looking at it on my phone.

How am I supposed to scan the QR code when it is already on the device I would use to scan it?

A QR code makes sense on direct mail, a poster, a menu, or a printed flyer. On a social media graphic, the customer usually needs a clickable link in the post.

The person who made the graphic probably created it on a desktop. They know where the QR code goes. They know what it opens. They may even have another phone nearby to test it.

The user experiences it differently.

That’s the point: You are not your audience. Think like the user.

This isn’t only a marketing problem. SaaS founders make the same mistake in product design, documentation, onboarding, customer support, sales, and founder-led marketing.

Watch “You Are Not Your Audience” on YouTube.

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While reading tweets and doing my normal BizDev/Curation thing, I saw a question on X from The MVP Guy:

“Founders, what’s the hardest part of shipping a SaaS that nobody warns you about?”

Aryan Labde answered: “Distribution bro.”

And, of course, I replied: “Everyone discounts Twitter until it’s too late.”

Because here’s what happens. You spend a weekend vibe coding your SaaS. Maybe you spend months building it. You obsess over features, fix bugs, tweak the interface, connect Stripe, and finally get everything ready.

Then launch day arrives. You built the product first and the distribution later. That’s backwards.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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