Go-to-market story

~8 min read

Interview occasional

Why it matters

“How do you get customers?” is usually one question inside a longer interview, unless the channel is the whole risk. Founders answer with a list: content, partnerships, virality, paid, sales. Partners want the motion you have already run, with a count, and the one motion you think repeats. A channel you have not tried is a hypothesis. Label it that way.

Core concepts

Lead with the manual thing that already happened. How you found the first users, how many conversations, how many turned into usage or payment. Founder-led sales and unscalable outreach are the correct early motion, not an embarrassment. Paul Graham’s “Do Things that Don’t Scale” is the essay. Gustaf Alströmer’s lecture is the warning on the other side: don’t pour paid acquisition on a product that doesn’t retain.
One channel, not a portfolio. Say the channel, the person you reach, the trigger, and what it costs in founder time. “I email office managers the week their incumbent contract is up. About 30 emails a week, 8 replies, 2 calls.” A second channel can be a sentence you are testing. Five channels means you haven’t chosen.
B2B: name the title and the path. Who you contact, why they answer, how long it has actually taken to go from first email to paid or pilot, and who else has to say yes. If you have only done two of these, the cycle time is “we’ve seen two,” not an industry average you read.
Consumer: say how the first hundred arrived, and whether they returned without you poking them. A launch spike is a channel test. Retention is the product. See Traction.
Paid is an amplifier. If ads are the only way a user shows up, you are renting growth. That can be fine later, with a payback you have measured. Early, it is a way to buy a chart. Say “we haven’t turned on paid because retention isn’t there yet” if that’s the truth. It is a stronger sentence than a CAC you invented.
Room difference. YC wants the manual motion and the learning. A seed investor wants to hear that it is starting to repeat without heroic founder effort — or a clear reason the round is what makes a repeatable motion possible (one hire, one integration, one city). Don’t claim a sales machine you don’t have.

Mental model

flowchart TD
  R[Who we can reach this month] --> D["what we already did (counts)"]
  D --> C[what converted]
  C --> M[the one motion we think repeats]
  M --> N[what we are explicitly not spending on yet]

The interview version is that sequence. The strategy slide with five logos is the thing you skip.

Interview questions

How do you get customers? Answer: The motion, the count, the conversion. “Founder outbound to clinic managers. 60 emails, 15 replies, 6 calls, 2 pilots, 1 paid. The email is a specific prior-auth example, not a product blast.” Then one sentence on what you think scales, marked as a belief if you haven’t proven it.
What’s your CAC? Answer: Only if you have a real denominator. “We haven’t paid for a channel. Founder time is the cost, and I won’t pretend that’s a CAC.” If you have spent: “We spent $1,200 on a newsletter and got 3 trials, 0 paid. That’s a failed test, not a CAC to extrapolate.” Fake LTV/CAC ratios are a trap. See Common traps.
Why won’t you just run ads? Answer: Because ads scale whatever the product already does, including “people don’t come back.” Alströmer’s point. Say what has to be true first (a repeating action, a payback you believe), and what you are doing instead this month.
A partner says founder-led sales doesn’t scale. Answer: Agree, and locate where you are. “It doesn’t scale, and it’s how we learn the pitch and the buyer. The repeatable piece we’re watching is whether a second clinic says yes to the same email without me on the call. The round hires one person to run that email, not a marketing team.” Scaling is a later problem you should name, not a problem you should fake having solved.

Watch

Gustaf Alstromer - How to Get Users and Grow — Y Combinator. Growth work before retention, including why paid comes after something already works.
How To Get Your First Users — Y Combinator, Ankit Gupta. Finding people with a burning need, and the unscalable outreach that reaches them.