The Goto Market Plan
Very often in the fundraising process, after say two meetings, an investor will want to dig deeper, often focusing on two areas: roadmap and goto market plan. When it comes to goto market, you need to be ready with clear, tactical level thoughts on how you will take your product or service to market.
It’s not about having a business plan or big document. But, you should know by quarter:
- What programs you will run
- What resources (people, $) you need for these programs
- What results you can expect from each program
- User acquisition costs per channel / program
- What milestones you need to achieve before greenlighting the next level of goto market investment
This last point is important. If you get funded, you don’t just throw caution to the wind and spend according to plan. You should have success / validation metrics at every stage. If its working, you invest more, push more. If its not you scale back and fix, then try again.
If you cannot communicate clearly how you will execute your goto market plan, what that tells investors is that you are not clear on what you will do with their money – and will burn money and time figuring it out. That is a big red flag!
I often ask my startups to prepare the goto market plan before they do the 1st pitch. This way they are ready when it comes up, and we have reflected the costs for our tactical programs in the budget.
Thanks for breaking it down to the basics. There are a lot of good resources out there on go-to-market planning these days, but the process can be overwhelming unless you know what kind of dashboard it should boil down to. The other thing to keep in mind is that nothing will actually go according to the plan. Some channels will work better than expected, some will work worse. So while the customer acquisition costs by program are something of an educated guess, they at least give you signposts for how to adjust once the real results come in. At that point, you have to be ruthless about ignoring sunk costs and cutting or killing your pet programs if they're not working.
Good points Greg. For sure the plan will change. And your point about sunk costs is bang on. One of the keys to building user bases is to continually evaluate the effectiveness of each tactic / program.