What is GTM?

When you talk about go to market, what exactly do you mean?

When you say you want to talk to a go to market specialist, what does that mean?

I personally think of go to market as the process of getting people to know about, use and pay for the products that a company sells. This includes:

  • Deciding what features are in the product and what the product looks like

  • Telling people that the product exists (as well as the project, if you’re in the open source world)

  • Getting people to part with their $$$ in exchange for using the product

In other words, GTM is a dance that includes product management, marketing and sales. It is categorically not just marketing, and it is not just marketing and sales, either. In fact, if you’re talking about open source projects, the decisions made by your engineering team (including things like which programming language to use) have an impact on the desire of people to use the project.

GTM includes your product team. If open source is a big part of your strategy, it includes your engineering team — because open source is the only context in which your users care not just what features you’ve implemented, but also how you have implemented them.

Who cares? Because if you want to get GTM right, you should make sure you’re including product and engineering in the conversation, and quite frankly most companies don’t do so.

PS — do you know an open source founder who’d like to talk specifically about what GTM means for open source companies, with other founders? Tell them to come to Open Source Founders Summit on May 27th and 28th in Paris.

Also PS - I have been struggling to keep up my usual rhythm of writing because it turns out organizing a conference is a ton of work 😂!

Emily Omier