I've been doing GTM for I dunno... 20+ years now, I'm told I'm excellent at it. Never liked outbound, I've never found it's a good part of a GTM, and tbh it's always something I've considered mostly belongs with the folks who think "growth hacking" is a thing...I strongly believe in the pillars of traditional, early 1900s GTM... that is, build real trust, have a credible brand story, get word of mouth going by consistently exceeding expectations, and let your delighted customers become your most effective marketing channel. If you're going to do outbound, go to events or find places real customers might be hanging out and not annoyed by you talking to them. Inbound marketing and community-driven growth strategies have always seemed significantly more durable to me. When people genuinely need and seek out your product, when the recommendation comes from trusted peers rather than relentless cold emails or hyper personalized spam, your sales become robust, resilient, and scalable in a sustainable way, the problems with sales is they're always chasing the next lead. Maybe outbound might yield short term wins...but personally I've always thought... if you want lasting competitive advantage, invest your energy in creating a brand people truly want to share, that's how I've always thought about it anyway, and people have always seemed to enjoy my brands.
Outbound will never die, but fingers crossed lazy-ass sales and marketing does!
Thanks, I looked it up and all the results were for Google Tag Manager. That's just close enough to make me shrug and accept it but also be very confused.
Just to share a counterpoint: I think it’s impossible to get a product market fit without active outbound verification. If it’s a brand new project, balancing development commitment and GTM hours is crucial. If I understand your comment correctly, the brand marketing approach you are talking about works for products that verified their need, but if this is a brand new idea/demos committing to GTM instead of active outbound/ emails/ calls/ in person sales may be too costly.
Did you have a chance working on small / startup projects; how you balance development commitment?
I'd seperate PMF hunting and go to market just in case that's not what you're doing. I've done tons of small/startup GTM projects, most notabily I was on the deviantart zero to 1 and the digitalocean zero to 1. I wasn't clear enough. I'm not advocating that you should skip validation or assume a PMF, rather, you shouldn't even be thinking about a full, formal GTM until you've proven repeatable product market fit.
You're right that active, direct customer outreach in early stages, talking to real people at events, user interviews, forcing them to talk to you etc is the only way to validate and refine PMF. But to me, this isn't really "outbound" in the spammy, growth hacky sense that I critiqued above. It's thoughtful customer development: qualitative, deliberate, personal, strategic, and hopefully founder lead.
The real outbound I'm against is that lazy "spray-and-pray" approach, or the obsession with hyper personalized yet fundamentally shallow cold outreach that's mistaken for scalable growth. Real GTM, once you truly have PMF, is actually pretty mechanical and clinical. That said, personally, I've always treated early GTM as inseparable from product refinement. Every interaction early on is about learning and adjusting, (sorry Arch, you just had to go!) not aggressively scaling. "Rapid growth" is alluring, sure, but if it isn't anchored in real market validation, as you're pointing to: it ends up as expensive noise.
Am I correct in that much of the 0 to 1 is just like, getting some interactible artifact in front of potential customers, getting them to kick the shit out of it, identifying which of those people liked the artifact best, refining the artifact for THOSE types of people, then repeating the cycle? Like, there's no "market" yet, only your buddy Joe and some guys he knows.
Not really, well kinda, although lots of people skip the first step (well, most people try to skip a lot of steps sadly). You're describing something closer to early stage customer validation (ux/ui or otherwise) imo, (although experienced folks will tell you the playbooks and motions matter a lot, I agree, but that would be too much to get into), and while that iterative process is crucial, there's a key difference: real zero to 1 requires that you've also done a broader market analysis to understand where you're headed in a strategic sense, your "vision". That is not just about refining an artifact based on Joe and a few friends, it’s about deeply understanding the context your artifact fits into, including the broader market dynamics, existing customer pain points, competitive landscape, and whether this thing has legs to actually scale beyond those first friendly testers. (In business the answer is the answer, not what you want the answer to be: 5 customers, 500 customers, 5 million customers, there is an answer.)
Early feedback loops from Joe & friends can be misleading without also stepping back to ask strategic questions like: “How big is this pain?”, “Is this pain widespread or niche?”, and “What are the economic dynamics around solving it?” You’re not truly going from zero to 1 until you’ve mapped those answers and built a clear hypothesis around repeatable product market fit, which involves deliberate strategic judgment calls beyond just refining based on individual user reactions. When we launched DigitalOcean, several major tailwinds aligned perfectly, fueling rapid adoption. Chief among these was the dramatic, yet largely unnoticed, decline in SSD pricing, which Ben and Moisey Uretsky recognized early. Once they explain that change was happening in the world, I was able to understand and explain the whole business: SSD prices dropping allowing us to offer faster infrastructure at price parity (and eventually even lower than traditional providers). The Comp Sci degree was outpacing the MBA handily as an area of study, coupled with the explosive growth in developer focused startups (and startups generally), dissatisfaction with AWS complexity, and a rising wave of DevOps and containerization practices, we positioned ourselves perfectly for the incoming generation of developers. We came to a market with a genuine commitment to simplicity, love, community driven marketing, and API-first infrastructure resonated deeply, creating genuine trust and loyalty that became the foundation for rapid, sustainable growth. I was literally online 24/7365 making sure everyone was happy with everything (except that one time: sorry about that!!!!), just ask anyone here, I was on it.
tl;dr yes, iterate closely with early users, but pair that tight iteration with rigorous market understanding and strategy, if you're unaware of the broder market dynamics, you're at risk of solving only for a handful of early adopters and missing the real market entirely. (I don't like to mention my blog on HN, but I have a most you might enjoy: https://b.h4x.zip/founders/)
By definition, the Digital Ocean Zero to 1 can't have been a thing.
Providing services like virtual machines, managed databases, and Kubernetes clusters wasn't a groundbreaking innovation by the time DO came out in 2011. Even Heroku had been around for four years by then.
This. I actually already internalized fatigue and annoyance about being cold contacted starting at LEAST 15 years ago. If you reach out to me to try to sell me your product, my gut reaction is to block you and never buy.
I've been reading up on 70s and 80s technology firm histories (including game consoles) and it strikes me that marketing back then was much more strategic, much more about understanding the market, the value customers seek and how to deliver it.
For those rare companies that are trying to create a market out of nothing for a truly innovative product where there are no competitors or self identified customers, I can sympathize with the hollow allure of firehose marketing - but not only is this kind of startup vanishingly rare (and extremely risky), it’s also the wrong approach even for them.
If you are trying to build stairs into thin air, you need to have a constantly evolving “customer hypothesis” until you can nail down who your customer is. The only way to do that is with founder-led personal marketing, preferably F2F and on-premises. You must meet your customers at the place and time of need. If you are truly solving an unsolved problem, literally no one will know how to solve that problem with your product except you, or maybe even why the problem needs to be solved.
This is more market research than business development.
Depending on your market, moat, and vertical alignment with your customers, it -may- also be important to build brand awareness or “buzz” aside from customer contact, and this often will be non-personalized. For this, as well, firehose approaches like email are ineffective or even counterproductive. Keep in mind, this is marketing adjacent PR, not marketing. Don’t get carried away.
If you just need validation to feel “real”, stick to cheap office swag. It makes great memorabilia for the inevitable swag graveyard that successful founders usually create on their way to becoming successful founders. It also helps to combat hubris if you keep the graveyard on subtle display in your office.
Outbound will never die, but fingers crossed lazy-ass sales and marketing does!