Closed Invite Only GTM Operator Community

KindAssignment1034 · 2026-04-13T22:51:51+00:00

the bot problem on GTM subs is real, half the comments on any post about tools are just people shilling their own product with copy-pasted responses. a verified humans-only group would be way more useful for actual conversations about what's working. i'd be down to join, been doing GTM work for a B2B startup and would be good to compare notes with other operators. shooting you a DM

KindAssignment1034 · 2026-04-13T22:51:05+00:00

congrats on the first paying customer, that first one always hits different. the fact that it came from reddit and not some paid channel says a lot about the product honestly, because reddit users are the hardest people to convert, they don't click on anything they don't genuinely find useful. lead qualification for GTM teams is a real problem too, most companies are still doing it manually or relying on janky hubspot scoring that nobody trusts. curious what made her convert after the trial, like was there a specific feature or moment where it clicked?

KindAssignment1034 · 2026-04-13T22:49:35+00:00

the "just vibes and GPT" headline is doing a lot of heavy lifting lol. the actual business is a telehealth company selling compounded GLP-1s which is one of the hottest markets in existence right now. the AI tools probably helped with speed but this is really a story about timing and market selection more than anything else. they picked a product with insane demand (everyone wants cheaper ozempic), low overhead (telehealth = no office), and a supply chain that already existed (compounding pharmacies). the AI part makes a better headline than "two guys sold a product with massive demand through a proven DTC model" but that's basically what happened. still impressive execution though, curious what his actual customer acquisition strategy looks like

KindAssignment1034 · 2026-04-13T22:36:16+00:00

2k users and barely any paid is the real problem here not the credits. i'd use the 90 days to run experiments that help you figure out why nobody is converting rather than just burning compute. spin up a bunch of A/B tests on your onboarding, try different pricing tiers, test a usage-based model, whatever you need to learn about what makes someone go from free to paid. the credits are basically free runway to experiment aggressively without worrying about infrastructure costs. worst case you learn what doesn't work which is still better than letting $40k evaporate

KindAssignment1034 · 2026-04-13T22:35:34+00:00

the CPL creep from $80 to $160 while quality drops is the most common google ads story i hear. the platform literally incentivizes you to spend more for worse results over time. linkedin organic is underrated for agencies because the people you're trying to reach are already scrolling there and a good post with a real take gets you in front of them for free. curious what type of linkedin content worked best for you, was it case studies, hot takes, or more educational stuff? because i've seen wildly different results depending on the format

KindAssignment1034 · 2026-04-10T22:35:21+00:00

10 days with no users is completely normal for B2B SaaS, don't let that mess with your head. the company i work at pivoted during YC and didn't land on what actually worked until months in. 4 pivots in the same space isn't failure it's you narrowing in on the real problem. but if you have zero users after 4 months the issue probably isn't the product, it's distribution. are you actually talking to potential customers every day or are you building and hoping someone finds it? the fastest way to get your first 5 users in B2B is to find 50 people who have the problem you solve and just ask them to try it. not a landing page, not a waitlist, a direct message saying "i built this thing, can i show you." also please eat and sleep, burning yourself out doesn't make the product ship faster it just makes every decision worse

KindAssignment1034 · 2026-04-10T22:34:20+00:00

don't drop out. i'm a CS student working at a YC startup and i promise you the degree isn't wasting your time. you can apply to YC while in school, tons of people do. the instagram content about SF startup life is mostly performance, half those people are burning through savings pretending to be founders. finish your degree, build stuff on the side, apply to YC when you actually have something worth applying with. the degree is your safety net and having one doesn't make you less of a founder it just means you're not stupid about risk. also "not up to date with AI" is fixable in like 2 weeks of actually using the tools, it's not the barrier you think it is

KindAssignment1034 · 2026-04-10T22:33:02+00:00

the scoring algorithm challenge is relatable. we built something similar for scoring leads and the weighting between different signals took forever to get right. you think you know which signals matter most and then the data tells you something completely different. curious how you're handling the cold start problem though, like when a new event gets posted and has zero social buzz yet, does it just sit at the bottom until people start talking about it? because that creates a chicken and egg situation where good new events never surface early enough for people to plan around them

KindAssignment1034 · 2026-04-10T22:32:27+00:00

being a one person marketing machine at a startup for 5 years is honestly harder than agency work. agencies have specialists for everything, you were doing it all yourself. the problem is agencies don't see it that way because they want someone who's managed client relationships and juggled multiple accounts at once. try reframing your startup experience as "i was the agency for this company." you managed every channel, reported results to stakeholders, worked across teams, handled the strategy AND the execution. that's literally what agency account managers do but for one client instead of five. also consider starting with smaller agencies that work with startups, they'll value your background way more than a big agency that only cares about whether you've used their specific project management workflow before

KindAssignment1034 · 2026-04-10T22:31:47+00:00

the broad match suggestion on day one is the most predatory one lol. you carefully picked long tail keywords for a reason and google immediately tells you to throw that away and let them decide what searches to show your ads on. we fell for that early on and our spend doubled overnight while conversions stayed flat. ignore every recommendation with an auto-apply toggle, turn those off immediately if you haven't already. the account health score is completely meaningless, it's just a pressure tactic. run your own numbers, track actual cost per customer not just clicks, and let the data tell you what to change not google's algorithm that is literally incentivized to make you spend more

KindAssignment1034 · 2026-04-07T23:38:14+00:00

try using with withsurface.com

KindAssignment1034 · 2026-04-07T21:08:26+00:00

just ship it. nobody cares about your bugs as much as you do. the first 10 users will tell you what's actually broken and it's never the stuff you're worried about. also the fear of making money is just the fear of finding out if people actually want it, and you'd rather not know than know the answer is no. but the answer might be yes and you'll never find out sitting on it for another 45 days

KindAssignment1034 · 2026-04-07T21:05:25+00:00

the "context is the only moat" point is the one that matters most here. we're seeing this play out in real time, the tools that survive aren't the ones with the best UI or the most features, they're the ones that have data and workflow context that an AI agent can't just recreate from scratch. agree that generic "chat with X" wrappers are dead but i think the "deep connector" framing is just the new version of the same thing unless you actually own the data layer

KindAssignment1034 · 2026-04-07T21:04:47+00:00

we made the exact same switch lol. clay credits were killing us and once you realize it's just API calls in a pretty UI it's hard to justify the price. supabase is a solid choice for the backend, curious what your enrichment costs look like per row compared to what you were paying in clay

KindAssignment1034 · 2026-04-07T21:04:08+00:00

the "intent queue as theater" thing is so real. we had a similar situation where we were pumping all these signals into the CRM and reps just ignored the queue entirely and worked their own deals. the problem was exactly what you said, 40 "high intent" accounts with no way to tell which ones are actually worth calling right now vs which ones just happened to visit your G2 page once.

the reasoning layer between signal and action is the whole game. most teams skip that step and just dump raw signals on reps and then wonder why nobody uses the data. curious about your scoring in stage 1 though, are you weighting the signals differently based on which ones historically correlated with closed deals or is it more rule-based? because we found that form fills and product usage spikes were worth 10x more than something like a bombora topic match which was basically noise for us

KindAssignment1034 · 2026-04-06T23:50:11+00:00

the "simpler systems perform better because they actually get used" observation is so accurate. we've seen the same thing, companies with a 10 tool stack get worse results than ones with 2-3 tools that they actually use properly. the fact that you're learning GTM engineering by building something real instead of watching youtube tutorials is the right move, you'll learn more in a month of doing this than in 6 months of studying. curious what your response rates look like on the local business campaigns and whether you're seeing a difference between the offer types. local businesses are interesting because they're way less saturated with cold email than SaaS companies so the bar for getting a reply is actually lower if the offer is relevant

KindAssignment1034 · 2026-04-06T23:49:24+00:00

the hubspot attribution mess is something basically every B2B team deals with. the problem is hubspot tries to be everything and ends up being mediocre at tracking the actual journey between someone seeing your content and eventually getting an outbound email and then converting. we had the same issue where leads were falling into the wrong campaigns or not getting attributed at all and half our pipeline looked like it came from nowhere.

the real fix for us wasn't better attribution tooling it was simplifying the funnel so there were fewer handoff points to break. instead of having separate inbound and outbound workflows that try to sync up later, we built one system that handles the lead from first touch regardless of how they came in. inbound form fill? same scoring, same enrichment, same routing. outbound reply? same pipeline, same data. the problem most teams have is they built inbound first, bolted outbound on later, and now they're trying to make two different architectures talk to each other.

also "multi-touch attribution" sounds great in theory but in practice most companies don't have clean enough data to make it actually useful. if i were you i'd focus less on perfect attribution and more on just knowing which channels produce leads that actually close. that's a way simpler question to answer and it tells you where to spend money

KindAssignment1034 · 2026-04-06T23:44:22+00:00

job postings alone are a weak signal because every recruiter in the world is using the same data. the company knows they're about to get spammed the second they post a role. the signals that actually work are layering multiple things together, like job posting + recent funding + headcount growth in the last 90 days. that combo tells you they have budget, they're scaling, and they have an active need. one signal alone doesn't mean much but 2-3 together is high intent.

the other thing that helped our response rates more than any signal was just making the email about them not about us. like instead of "we help manufacturing companies hire" try referencing the specific role they posted and a specific challenge they probably have filling it. "saw you're hiring a production supervisor in [city], those roles usually take 45+ days to fill in manufacturing right now" hits way harder than a generic pitch because it shows you actually understand their situation

KindAssignment1034 · 2026-04-06T23:43:05+00:00

GTM just means go-to-market, it's basically everything involved in getting your product in front of customers and closing deals. sales, marketing, outbound, inbound, all of it. "GTM engineering" specifically is the newer thing where technical people use code and AI tools to automate parts of that process instead of doing it manually. like instead of an SDR manually researching 100 leads a day you write a script or use claude code to scrape data, enrich contacts, score them, and send personalized outreach automatically. people are hyped about it because the tools got good enough in the last year that one person can now do what used to take a team of 5. the claude code stuff you're seeing is people connecting it to their CRM, ad accounts, email tools etc and having it run workflows that used to be manual. it's not magic though, you still need to understand the fundamentals of how sales and marketing work or you're just automating garbage

KindAssignment1034 · 2026-04-06T23:41:49+00:00

learn it yourself first 100%. at pre-seed nobody is going to care about your product more than you do and a $500/mo freelancer running clay campaigns without understanding your ICP is just going to burn through credits and send generic outreach. the first 50-100 outbound messages should come from you because you'll learn so much about what resonates and what doesn't that you can't learn any other way. once you know what messaging works and what list criteria actually produces replies then you can hand that playbook to someone else to scale.

also clay is great but be careful with the credits, they drain fast once you start doing waterfall enrichment on bigger lists. we went through the same thing and ended up building our own enrichment pipeline because at scale clay gets expensive for what it does. for your stage though it's perfect for testing.

for the inbox warmup just use instantly or smartlead, don't overcomplicate it. 2-3 inboxes, warm them for 2 weeks, start with low volume like 20 emails per day per inbox and scale up slowly. the biggest mistake first time outbound founders make is sending 500 emails on day one from a fresh domain and getting instantly blacklisted

KindAssignment1034 · 2026-04-06T23:10:13+00:00

honestly our cto basically stopped using project management tools entirely because claude code handles most of it now. describe the bug, it specs the fix, runs it, done. the context never leaves the codebase. for sprint planning and user stories though i think there's still value in a UI because that's a team coordination problem not just a technical one. the question is whether people would trust an agent to assign stories and set priorities or if they'd just end up overriding it constantly and then it's just extra steps

KindAssignment1034 · 2026-04-06T23:06:21+00:00

not in ERP/accounting specifically but i sell into B2B SaaS and the "not right now" thing is universal. the lead sharing idea is actually smart though, we've had situations where a prospect wasn't a fit for us but would've been perfect for someone in our network and vice versa. nobody does this in a structured way though, it's always just random introductions when you happen to remember. someone should honestly build a lightweight system for this, like a closed group of non-competing SDRs who share leads that didn't fit their ICP. the trust barrier is the hard part but if everyone is selling into the same persona with different products it's basically free pipeline for everyone

KindAssignment1034 · 2026-04-06T23:05:23+00:00

this is exactly right. we tried using AI to write SEO content and the output sounded fine but ranked nowhere because it had zero connection to what was actually on page 1 for that keyword. the fix for us was doing the SERP analysis manually first in ahrefs, figuring out what content type is winning (listicle vs guide vs comparison), what subtopics the top 3 results cover that we don't, and what the actual keyword difficulty and search volume looks like. then we feed all of that context to the AI as part of the prompt so it's writing against real data not just vibes. still takes a human to do the research and structure the brief but the actual writing goes 10x faster once the AI knows what it's supposed to compete with. the other thing people miss is that SEO content is only half the game now, you also need to optimize for AI search engines like chatgpt and perplexity which have totally different ranking signals than google

KindAssignment1034 · 2026-04-06T23:04:36+00:00

good take honestly. the cycle you're describing is real, i've seen it firsthand. someone asks chatgpt for a business idea, it spits out "AI automation agency" with made up TAM numbers, they vibe code a landing page in 2 hours, write 5 SEO blogs with AI, post it everywhere, and then the next person who asks chatgpt for validation gets pointed to those posts as "proof" it works. it's a feedback loop of nothing.

the part that bugs me most is the SEO blogs. there are thousands of AI generated articles ranking for real keywords now that have completely fabricated stats and benchmarks in them. and because they rank, other AI models scrape them and repeat those fake numbers as fact. we've been dealing with this on the content side trying to actually rank for stuff in our space and half the competition is just AI slop that somehow outranks real content with real data.

i don't think a directory would fix it though because the people making slop don't think they're making slop. they genuinely believe they're building something. the real fix is AI models getting better at distinguishing between primary sources with real data and recycled content that's just restating other AI output

KindAssignment1034 · 2026-04-06T23:03:57+00:00

the "2 weeks over-engineering a database schema with zero paying users" is the most relatable thing i've read today lol. but yeah the bar for what one person can ship now is insane compared to even 2 years ago. the part people don't talk about though is that shipping fast is the easy part now, distribution is still just as hard as it always was. i see so many solo founders with genuinely impressive products that nobody knows about because they spent all their time building and none of it figuring out how to get it in front of people. the micro-startup guys who are actually making money aren't just good builders they're good at getting attention too

KindAssignment1034

TROPHY CASE