Your Marketing Isn’t Working Because You Skipped This Critical Step
Before you blame your intern, your freelancer, or your agency — check your go-to-market strategy. Oh wait... you don’t have one?
Every week, a startup founder shows up in my inbox saying some version of:
“We’ve tried everything—ads, content, social, a freelancer, an agency... nothing’s working.”
Cool.
My first questions are always: What’s your go-to-market strategy? Who is your ideal customer?
And 9 times out of 10, the answer is silence. Or a pitch deck. Or an answer that’s complete BS because they don’t want to accept that this is their fault.
Let me be clear: If you don’t have a research-based and documented go-to-market strategy, you don’t have marketing — you have a to-do list of random acts of marketing that will take you nowhere.
Here’s how it usually goes:
You launch your product.
You get a few early wins from referrals, hustle, or your network.
You think: “Let’s turn on marketing so we can scale.”
You hire a freelancer, agency, or junior marketer.
You post on LinkedIn. Run a few ads. Maybe send a newsletter.
…And, crickets. Not because your team sucks. Not because your product or service isn’t good. But because you skipped the part where you figure out who you're selling to, what they actually care about, and how to move them from stranger to sales call.
That’s your GTM strategy.
A real GTM strategy covers 3 core things:
Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) – Not “anyone in our industry”. This is the person most likely to purchase because you do the BEST job of solving their unique needs AND it is actually profitable to acquire them as a customer. You must have both.
Your Messaging – What pain are you solving? Why should they care now? Your messaging should be value-first. If you’re explaining what you do and how you do it before you appeal to their pain points and describe the transformation they’ll experience by working with you, then you’re doing it wrong.
Your Funnel – How do people find you, engage, and convert? What’s the actual journey? What is the specific action someone needs to take to go from one part of the funnel to the next? You need to have this mapped out in a very clear and concise manner. And if you have more than 3 channels and more than 1 trigger for each part of the funnel, you need to chill out and rethink your strategy.
So before you fire your agency...
Well, first — I want you to fire your agency. If you’ve come to the conclusion that you don’t have a real GTM strategy, then you absolutely need to fire them and start over from scratch.
But, I also want you to ask yourself these three things…
Am I 100% sure that I know the right person to market to in the right way with the right messaging at the right time in the right place?
Have I built a MARKETING funnel (****NOT A SALES FUNNEL****) that supports each stage of the buyer journey?
Am I trying to scale tactics that were never grounded in strategy in the first place? (Hint: Just because your competitors are doing it doesn’t mean it works for them, either)
If you answered “no” (or “uhhh... kinda?”), good news: you're not broken. You’ve just gotten waaaay too far ahead of yourself and you need to stop, back up, and build the foundation.
This is exactly what we fix inside the GTM Accelerator.
It’s a high-touch program for early-age startups who are done guessing and are ready to get traction. You’ll walk away with…
A laser-focused ICP
Messaging and positioning that actually converts
A full-funnel GTM strategy built for your buyer journey
The clarity to finally make your marketing work
Marketing isn’t magic, and it isn’t hard, either. But it is strategy, structure, and the right execution in the right order.
Ready to stop flailing and start growing? 👉 Check out the GTM Accelerator
