06: The GTM Trap: Why Early-Stage Founders Blow It

👋 Hey, welcome back to Pipeline Pursuits - the weekly dispatch for founders, marketers, and operators building GTM systems that don’t break under pressure. If you're piecing together outbound, content, and ops without a clear strategy, this is your cheat code.

Each issue, I share one system, teardown, or workflow designed to help you

• Start better conversations

• Capture more intent

• Build a pipeline that compounds over time

📋 In the next 2 minutes, you’ll get:

• Breakdown of the #1 GTM mistake seed-stage founders make

• How to approach early GTM without burning budget on the wrong hires

• My personal GTM “starter checklist” for founders with zero sales experience

• Free Clay resource that’ll 10x your outbound motion if you’re ready to go there

• 100 GPT Prompts used by the HubSpot team.

  Read online

Most seed-stage founders walk straight into the GTM trap.

They raise a round, build a product, and immediately hire a sales team. Because "we need revenue now," right? But here's the reality check:

→ Sales reps, founding sales heads, or AEs jump in with zero context.
→ Nobody has nailed the positioning or ICP yet.
→ Founders haven't mapped out key trends, competitors, or use cases, pushing all that groundwork onto salespeople.

As a result, demos flop. Pipelines stall, and everyone panics.

Founders blame the reps. Reps blame the product. 6 months later, you're back at square one, burning cash with nothing tangible to show for it.

This isn't a sales problem, but rather a sequencing problem. Most early-stage founders don't need a sales team right out of the gate. They need experiments to quickly validate (or invalidate) hypotheses and open initial accounts themselves. Goals change as you scale, but your first steps must be strategic.

🚨 The #1 Mistake Seed-Stage Founders Make

When you’re early, your startup is your life.

You’re pitching in DMs, shipping features at night, and waking up thinking about pricing pages. At some point, most founders decide that growth is synonymous with hiring a sales rep.

But here’s what I see again and again as a GTM advisor at VC.

They hire too early.

Wrong role.
Wrong time.
Zero clarity on who they're selling to or why the product wins.

Before recommending any hire, we go back to basics:

1. The founder runs the first conversations through the network.
   

2. We gather all the intel on pilot setups, competitor mapping, product prioritization, and pricing strategy from the market. This doesn’t mean we will implement all the feedback, but it gives us a strong foundation to eliminate things that don’t move the needle.
   

3. Next, we read case studies from similar tools. Look at triggers, buyer roles, and proof of urgency.
   

   • Case studies often share surface-level intel.

   • For example, if I am selling a passwordless authentication tool, and I go through the case studies, major intel will be that “X needed ABC competitor because they wanted a more secure system”.

   • Reading between the lines plays a major role here. In this context, “more secure system” often hints back to the fact that there might have been a security breach or a lawsuit that is not public yet.

   • In such cases, I generally map out the competitor’s ICP and customers, run it through Clay to find as many signals as we can.
     

4. We talk to buyers directly and run deeper discovery calls. And we never pitch on the call.
   

5. We audit “competitors”- half of them aren’t actually solving the same problem. This is a new finding for me. Most early-stage founders mention a bunch of competitors, and it turns out, none of those are actually competitors. Rather, enablers of their tool, where they will probably build integrations. 😂
   

6. We rethink verticals. Just because you built it for X industry doesn’t mean X cares.

🧠 And 9 out of 10 times, we skip the sales hire. Instead, the founder picks up the phone and cold calls.

Because if you don’t know who you’re for and why, they’ll buy - you’re setting that AE up to fail.

In a nutshell:

→ Start founder-led
→ Gather signals
→ Reposition based on real buyer feedback
→ Delay hiring until patterns emerge - super important

🥇 My GTM Starter Checklist for Founders

If you’ve got this, you’re ready to scale.

If not, keep it scrappy and founder-led. That’s where the real clarity comes from.

⟳ How to Find ICP, Triggers, and Intel

If you’ve been following along, you know I run most of my GTM research and foundation work - enrichment, cleaning, intel, straight out of Clay.

It’s how I validate ICPs, spot deal triggers, and build outbound that leads to real conversations, not ghosted emails.

But Clay’s power depends on how you use it. Most people barely scratch the surface.

Thibault (founder of Reachly + Clay Club Bangkok lead) just released the most complete Clay resource I’ve seen, built from 1000+ hours of hands-on work.

This guide breaks down how to:

✓ Combine AI research tools like Claygent, Claude, and GPT for intel
✓ Pick the right native integrations to map out your TAM
✓ Build smart tables that surface high-intent accounts
✓ Automate your prospecting to build a 0 to 1 playbook

🧠 He has added a detailed guide here. Feel free to grab it for yourself.

🛠 And at last!

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Learn to automate tasks, enhance decision-making, and foster innovation with the power of AI.

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✉️ Until next time

Always down to jam on systems, workflows, and what’s working in the field, lmk.

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See you next week ❤️‍🔥
Siya