How to Build an Effective Go-to-Market Strategy, with Eva Dimitrova

Hello everyone, welcome to our webinar tonight. I'm very excited to have you here. We're just gonna wait a couple of seconds until everyone joins, and let me stop sharing my screen so you can guys see me. Um, yeah, I'm very excited for the webinar tonight because it's on a topic that's very dear to my heart. Something I've been working on quite some time. And yeah, I hope to give you some practical tips. So actually, I'd be super curious to know where you're joining from because I know that we have more than 800 people who registered for that event. That's like the biggest event I've ever done. Luckily, it's online, so I'm not, I'm not going to be seeing you to get stressed, but super interested. Wow. I see a lot of replies. Indonesia, Switzerland, Berlin, Chicago, Stockholm. Crazy. Awesome. It's so nice to have you. So by all means, make sure you ask questions throughout our webinar today. I'm going to try to answer as many questions as I can after the call or after the presentation. You can use the chat or you can even better use the Q&A tool for that. I already see one question. Yes, the presentation will be available as well as the video. All right, so without further ado, let's kick it off. I'm going to share my screen now, and let me tell you a little bit about the topic tonight, and first of all, of course, who I am. All right, so who am I? I'm a consultant and I'm a coach, and The topics I'm working with are product marketing and go-to-market. I've been working already for more than 6 years as a consultant. I worked with big companies like Vodafone, Google, Microsoft. Usually the topics or the verticals that I work in are software, consumer, education, marketplaces. Since this year, I'm teaching a course in entrepreneurship at a university, which is super cool. I'm mentoring different accelerators. You can check my website. So this is kind of like my main job, but my, my side job and really my passion is related to the Foundry Institute. So actually I'm a director there. And if you don't know what the Foundry Institute is, this is the largest pre-seed startup accelerator in the world. We have more than 200 chapters. A couple of them are in Germany. I am director in the chapter in Cologne. I graduated the program myself back in 2016. I'm a huge fan and you can reach me by email at eva.dimitrova@fimail.co. And so let's go directly to the topic, go-to-market. I'm gonna share with you my go-to-market canvas the way I came up with it and give you some really practical tips about how to put your strategy basically in one sheet of paper so that it's super easy to refer to it and to use it. But before that, why did I even have to create such a thing? Why do you need such a go-to-market canvas? I'm going to check now the chat and see, let me know if that's the case for you. I've been working in marketing since, as I said, many years. And even until today, when I looked, when I look into marketing terms or marketing strategies, I totally feel lost. It's like super confusing. There's so many terms. Everything is, you know, there's social media marketing, there's product marketing, there's brand marketing, there's search engine marketing, there's, I don't know, blockchain marketing, all kinds. And then on the other hand, there's also all of those visuals and all of those funnels with their own definitions. And so people really start to be confused. And because they don't know what to do, they just quickly start doing things. And they very often end up, you know, doing A/B tests on everything and confirming that everything is working. And how do we progress 5% better? And the problem for all of this confusion is that you haven't answered the question, you know, how did you make the decision? Why did you decide to pursue a certain marketing strategy? Why did you decide to pursue a certain channel? How did you get to that decision? Is this something that's going to move the needle for you with 20% or is it going to move it 80%? Right? Because in our work, in our time, we want to focus on things that are effective and efficient. If we can move the needle by 80%, it's better that we choose that one, right? And so how do you know? Right? How do you, how do you actually come up with your most creative and impactful idea? How do you think outside of the box if you don't know where the box is? Right? In order to be able to think outside of the box, you need to know where the box is first. And so all of this confusion and all of this unclarity about how decisions are made pushed me to come up with one day with this canvas. With a simplified model where you can view your entire strategy about how you approach a certain market. So you can find it on my website. It's totally for free. You can go on the link, and I'm gonna proceed and explain all the different aspects of this canvas. So the first one, and I think it's obvious, is research, right? Because all of our decisions, they need to come from research. So there are two things we need to research. First is the market. How big is the market? How mature is it? Is it a growing market or is it a declining market? Is it a brand new market? What is, what is the differentiation between the companies in that market? What risks are there that someone needs to foresee? Are there any barriers to entry? What I mean by that is, are there some regulations from the government? Do you need a lot of cash in order to succeed in that market? For example, telecommunications, you need a lot of cash. Can you easily get access to distribution, or are those channels of distribution already taken by the companies that are operating on that market? So all of those questions, they need to be answered. And so this is why we need to do this market research. The second part we need to research is the customer. And this is often called customer development. And so obviously we need to know who the customer is, where they're based, how are they solving their problem right now, what is their problem at all, you know, why are they interested in solving that problem. We want to know as much as we can for that customer in order to then basically decide how to solve the problem, right? So those are the two aspects we need to research and that are going to inform our entire business and strategy from there on. The next point is our competitors, and there are really two types of competitors. The first one is called direct, and these, these are all the companies under the same category. And so when we're thinking about cars, these are all the cars like Volvo, Volkswagen, Tesla, right, direct competitors, cars. But then you have the alternatives. And so alternatives are solutions that may not be a company of its own or like in the same industry, but they help get to the same end result. And so I may be able to go with a bike from point A to B, and I may be able to go with my car from point A to B. Or with a scooter, right? So this is alternative. And just to give you an example, this idea comes from something called Blue Ocean Strategy, if you ever heard about it. And in the book Blue Ocean Strategy, they're talking about Cirque du Soleil. And so Cirque du Soleil is a company that basically combined two markets together and they created the blue ocean market. And so Cirque du Soleil basically has two types of competitors, right? They have direct competitors that are live performances like circuses, theaters, variétés, concerts. So if someone wants to go to a live performance, they can choose either Cirque du Soleil or go to a circus or go to a concert. But the alternative, and this is the view from the customer perspective, The alternative is, how am I going to spend my leisure time, right? Whether I watch Netflix or cinema or go to Cirque du Soleil or have a barbecue with my friends or play computer games, maybe I'm going to have just as nice time as any of those. So the question for me as a customer is, how do I spend my leisure time? I don't necessarily judge, you know, companies within the same industry. I just, I just see it from a different lens. And so when you're judging your own competitors, when you're thinking about them, think about the direct ones, but also think about the alternatives that people are already using right now to solve their needs. And so then we move to the customers, right? We already spoke about them. And there are a couple of things you should know when you're defining the customer. First of all, obviously, The industry, you know, which industry are they working, which geography. Many people try to target everyone who speaks English, for example, you know, everyone is my customer as long as they speak English. This is not a good strategy. This is actually probably gonna be very unsuccessful and very expensive. So try to narrow your geography, try to understand in what department are those people working, you know, You know, if you're— this is especially relevant for B2B companies, but try to understand, you know, when you look at a company, let's say a telecommunications company, you know, which department are you targeting? Are you targeting the sales department or are you targeting the customer support department or the innovation department? Which department is your solution going to be most useful? And then within that department, which person? What is he doing? What is his role? So which role within that department, right? I recently had a conversation with a founder and they're developing a solution for the music world. And so obviously they don't have departments there, but they have different music genres. So they have jazz and they have metal and rock. And so, you know, within this genre, metal and rock, you know, there are also people. Maybe they're playing different instruments within that genre. Maybe they take different roles, like maybe they're a manager, maybe they're the musician. Maybe they're the songwriter, right? And so we're trying to distill the qualities of the customer going from the top down. And then the second column is the motivation. So what is the motivation of the customer? Why would they buy such a solution? Why would they want to solve their problem? What context are they coming from? This is very important. And exactly this point of the motivation is going to be one of the key elements to know whether once we fill the entire go-to-market canvas, things are actually fitting together. I'll show you later. But let's move forward. So after, yeah, an example for the customer, why the context is important, right? We have Queen Elizabeth here and we have the Iron Throne. So what do you think? Do you think Queen Elizabeth would like to rule the Iron Throne just because she's a queen? I don't think so. I think the context here makes a huge difference, right? It's just because we have a throne for kings and queens and the queen, it doesn't mean that this is a nice fit. And same when you're trying to target your customers based on some characteristics like young mothers or women between 25 and 30. Yes, there are going to be similarities between them, but their context is going to be totally different. Their problems that they're faced with every day, they're going to be different. They're going to struggle about different things. They're going to have different problems they want to solve. They're going to look to— their day is going to be different. So when you're thinking about your customer, trying to define it, also think that there will be certain contextual differences that are very important to address. Right, so let's then see about positioning. April Dunford famously says that positioning has its own positioning problem. And kind of like, why is positioning important? Positioning is helping you basically qualify your company so that the customers can recognize it easier. And so there are 3 aspects to it. The first one is you need to define the category. Second one, you need to define the subcategory. And so if you're a music company, you may be in the— yeah, your category is music and then your subcategories, maybe you're doing instruments, you know, jazz instruments or I don't know, something. So this is the subcategory. And then we have the one-line description, which is usually the USP. So the unique selling proposition. So this is our key value proposition that we're bringing to the customer. This is a little bit dry, so let me give you an example. It's a movie that recently came out and I watched it, I really liked it, and I think it's a great parallel to what I mean by positioning. So positioning is like the superhero glasses that when the customer puts them on, it's like they see the world in a totally different way. Your solution suddenly appears on the radar. You know, without glasses, they don't see it. With glasses, they see it. And so another example for how positioning works is Joshua Bell, a few years ago. He's a famous violinist a player, he decided to do this really interesting experiment. So usually he's selling tickets for his concerts, like, I don't know, $200, $300, and his concert halls are entirely full, entirely booked out. But he decided to try and play for free. So he said, why don't I go and play on the entrance of the metro station and let's see how many people are gonna notice that I'm playing for free for them instead of them paying €200. So he dressed up normally, he went there with his violin that cost $3 million, and he played for a couple of hours. What do you think? How many people stopped to listen to him? How many people recognized that this is Joshua Bell? How many people recognized the quality? Let me tell you, it was less than 10 people for the couple of hours that he spent there, which only means that, you know, the same person with this skill set, with the quality of his playing, people were not able to recognize it. They were not able to identify him. He was not on their radar, right? They didn't— there was no way for them to know that, to recognize the quality of his playing. And so he was not positioned for success, even if this very same person with the same qualities in different circumstances or context, he's selling out concert halls. So this is the power of positioning. You may have the best product, but if it's not positioned well, chances are that it's not really gonna sell well. So very important. The next point from the Canvas. Are channels. And by the way, I'm looking at the chat and I see so many people are writing. I don't know, I'm very happy about that. I hope that I can answer as many questions as I can towards the end. Channels. So when it comes to channels, there's like huge tons of content online, right? I like to divide channels into two types: free channels and paid channels. And the reason is simple. It's because you commit to different type of work when, when you decide to use a free channel versus a paid channel. So for me, a free channel is a channel that you're using your work to get to the customer. So you, you reach them by working, you reach them by your own effort, and they're organic. So inbound type of channels like content, SEO, community building, you know, social media, PR. This is all organic. You're writing text, you're writing blogs, and people come and they read, and this is how they come to you. Sales is another free channel where your sales team is actually reaching to people and trying to do a sell, sell, right? Yes, of course, the people doing that are paid, but they're part of your company. And then on the other side is the paid channel. So this is when you're using money to get to the user. When you post, the most obvious is when you put ads, right? But you can also pay for affiliate links, for sponsorships, you may pay influencers. So anything that you use the money to skip the queue to kind of get in front of the customer, this is a paid channel. And so the big question that you should be asking is Can you be profitable without a paid channel? There's a lot of startups right now in the growth stage especially that they're raising money so they can do more advertising and they can finance more of their growth through paid channels. The big question is, can you be profitable without that? Because if you cannot be profitable without paying for those channels, without paying for those customers, that's a big problem. That means that as soon as the money stops, your business stops existing. It's not going to be a successful one. So your core motivation here and task should be to figure out how do you make the free channels work at their best, right? How can you be profitable only with your free channels, whatever they are, before moving to the paid one? It's also a matter of efficiency. You don't want really to spend millions of dollars for something that is not really optimized and that is wasting your money fuel, so to say, right? So figure out your free channels first and only then move to the paid ones. Then we have sales strategy. So sales strategy is obviously more relevant to B2B models because obviously only they require sales. But there are two points to it. You can have inbound sales strategy, and this means marketing, right? Inbound means people are coming to you, they're inbounding to you. And you have outbound, which is when you're outreaching to customers. And so this could be cold outreach, when with people you don't know, and this could be warm outreach from the people that came through your marketing. Maybe someone signed up for your newsletter, maybe, maybe someone joined such an event, right? You get their contact and then you reach out to them by having already some information. And so simple, but we still need to consider what works for us. We then move to pricing strategy. And so this is a topic that's not very popular, I think, among startups, but there are two types of way to price. How do you price your product or your service? The first one is cost-based. So you determine what your cost is to produce the service or to produce the product. And then you put a certain margin on it, you know, 10%, 20%, however you decide. Obviously, you have to align that with what the other prices of the competitors are, right? Because if your competitor is selling something so similar to you, but yours costs like double, this is not gonna work. The second pricing strategy is called value-based, where you're trying to determine what value people put on your product. And so this is a more difficult one, but it's also one that is more profitable, all right? Because then you actually have bigger margins. As a business, you're making more money when you sell a single item. And so which one shall you take? How should you decide? It depends on your objective. If your objective is to get market share first, This means you need to move fast, and this means the cheaper your product is, the faster you're going to move. And so maybe in the beginning of your product, of your company, you might decide to opt for cost-based pricing strategy. But if you're— if you want to be profitable company and you don't really care whether you're gonna move quickly to get market share, then the way to go is to have value-based pricing because this is going to increase your profit. Good. Make sure you ask questions. I see here people writing. I'm going to check that later in more details and get to you guys. All right, let's move to metrics. That's another super popular topic where you have a lot of advice and a lot of ideas. Again, I like things simple. I like to look at the forest and not really get lost in the trees. So for me, there are two types of metrics. First, you have a North Star, and the North Star is really like the North Star that is guiding your company to success. So it should be something measurable that tells you what success looks like. It should be your vision. Maybe, maybe you're trying to build Tesla, right? So your, your North Star is going to be everyone is going to have half of the population of the Earth in 5 years are going to have electric cars. Maybe you're building, I don't know, sustainable food source for people in Africa, and your North Star is going to be to make sure that every family buys this product once a week. This is your North Star. This is what tells you that you're successful. And then the KPIs are the underlying signs of your success. And so they are the metrics that are gonna guide you towards the north star, that are gonna tell you whether you are reaching your north star or not. And you can divide those into pre-revenue. So before you start making money, things like how many users you have on the platform, how long are they staying on the platform, How many subscribers? How long is your list? There are different types of pre-revenue metrics. And you have post-revenue metrics, which are usually related to how many repetitive purchases you have, what is your annual run rate, and those kind of monetary metrics. And so when you define your metrics, think about first what is your north star and then define 2 or 3 KPIs that are going to help you track it. Then we go to messaging or copywriting. And this is actually one of my favorite parts because it's so juicy. Like you can approach it from so many different ways. And all the things that we spoke so far, if you fill them up correctly, they're going to inform your messaging. And so there are 3 things you need to consider when you're doing your messaging. First of all, Obviously, what features are you going to talk about? What are the key features of your product or your service? Then what benefits are those features unlocking? What are they enabling? And finally, the outcomes. What is going to— how is going to— how is the state of the customer going to be changed once they use this product or service? And this is where I told you in the beginning that we're going to touch on the customer motivation, right? Because whatever you write as outcome, needs to fit the customer motivation that you wrote in the beginning in the information about your customer. And so just to give you an example, let's imagine we are looking at the iPhone. The iPhone has features, right? It has 40, 64 megapixel wide camera or 24 megapixel 5x zoom camera or LiDAR or I don't know what. These are the features. Those features enable benefits. So what, what are the benefits of having a 64-megapixel wide camera? You're gonna— you can make high-quality photos. What is the benefit of having a 24-megapixel 5x zoom camera? Well, the benefit is that you can zoom on details, right? What is the benefit of having LiDAR scanner? The benefit is that you can focus your pictures better, easier, faster. All right, so then what are the outcomes of those benefits? Well, here you go. The outcome of having high-quality photos is that you can be, you can make professional-looking pictures. You can be like a professional photographer, although you're not, although you don't have the money to buy a professional camera. What is the outcome of being able to zoom in on details? Well, you can effortlessly shoot pictures. You can effortlessly capture every detail without trying to rearrange the distance and everything. What is the better— what is the outcome of having better focus? Well, no more photo editing, right? You no longer need to Photoshop the things that didn't come out well on the picture. And so when you're doing your messaging, when you're writing about your product or your service, you need to address all of those points. The features, the benefits, and the outcomes. And if you did your canvas correctly, the outcomes that you write here that your product or service enables, those outcomes are going to be the same like the motivation of the customer to use your product that you wrote in the beginning. Good. Another example for messaging is that Message needs to be transmitted, right? That's the whole point. That's why we want to write it, because we want other people to understand it. And so the thing about transmitting a message is that you probably are not going to transmit the message to everyone, but that's okay. I don't like Picasso's pictures. I don't like the paintings that he's doing. So his message that he's transmitting is not for me. That's okay, he's still successful. He still knows who that message is for, and that message is reaching those people, and so he is successful. And so think about how to transmit a message. Think about what language are those people talking. Are you talking in the same language, or are you talking in different language? Because maybe, maybe the, the content of the message is the same, but if you're saying it in the wrong language, It's not going to be understood. So think about that as well. Example, you're talking about your product, right? And you talk to investors and you talk to customers. Your message needs to change, right? Because investors, they care about investing, they care about making money out of their investment. So they're asking themselves the question, is this a money-making machine? Am I gonna make money with by investing in that company. So this is the message that they want to hear. While customers for the very same product, for the very same company are asking, how are you better? How is your product better? And why should I switch from whatever I'm doing right now? Right? So you need to also align your message based on who that message is for. And finally, and this might be actually the most important part, because it gets overlooked so often is that every successful go-to-market strategy is specific. They're never generic. They're never something that you set once in stone and then you just run with it for 5 years or even for 1 year, right? They're always specific to a product. They're always specific to a goal that you're trying to reach, to a KPI. You have a certain KPI. And this is how you're going to reach it. They're always specific to a time frame. Imagine an e-commerce company. Do you think their strategy is going to be the same just before Christmas as it is in summertime? You know, before Christmas when everyone is shopping, maybe they're going to have different strategy. Maybe they're going to do things differently, right? So the time frame matters. And also the budget. So you cannot, for example, plan on things that maybe Microsoft would do because they have millions of dollars of budget and that you are gonna do the same thing 'cause you don't have that budget. So your budget is very defining. And at the very least, if you don't have a lot of budget, you should focus on figuring out your free channels, right? How to excel there versus your paid channels. And so when we think about our go-to-market, Always think about the context. Always think about how are we going to specifically create it for this campaign, right? Because there are hundreds of companies that are doing very similar things like you are doing, but their approaches are going to be different because they're going to have a different goal. They're going to have a different time frame. They're going to have a different budget. And so the execution changes, right? That's very, very, very important to remember. And so this is the canvas. I went through it quite quickly. I know it's a lot of information, but you can download it. You can ask me questions also after the event. I'll be super happy to answer. In my experience, it's very quickly to fill this canvas, but then when you start actually talking with people about it, if you have someone to talk to, when you start looking into the specifics, why did we select this? Why did we write this? Why not this way? Why not that way? This is taking a couple of more hours of work. And so easy to start, but it's important to keep on working, keep on iterating, keep on collecting feedback. So this is it, guys. This is my go-to-market canvas. I hope it's useful for you. I'd be interested to hear if someone actually has results with it. I know the people I work with do, but I'm curious about you. And so that's it for me. I'm now going to stop sharing and look into some of the questions. My colleague here has collected some of them. Okay, seems like I've been going a bit too fast. Well, It's too late for that, but I guess I can answer any questions that you guys have. So let's see. We have Pierre here. He's asking, of all the elements in your go-to-market canvas, which 2-3 elements would be critical to incorporate into a 5-minute hot seat pitch? All right. Well, let's start with who is this for, right? It's for the investor. And so what would an investor want to know about most? My guess would be they definitely want to know about some of your KPIs. This is like the basic, you know, what are the KPIs? What is the result of your research? Like, can you show me why you have a successful company? Why this company is going to be successful? And then Showing understanding about your customer. So, you know, why would they be really motivated to buy your product? I think those are the 3 most important elements that an investor wants to know about. Then we have Roni. What do you think about partner management? Maybe my go-to-market includes partners that use and sell my products to the customer. Should we include partners as well? Partners. All right. So this is more like B2B2C model maybe. And so, but your customer, so in this case, you have two types of customers. You have your partners as customers and you have their customers as customers. And so their customers is simply the problem that they want to solve. So you're helping them solve that problem. But the true customer for you is the partner. So if that would have been me, I would have put partners as a customer. And then when it comes to the, the solution and how you talk about it, the messaging, you know, the features, I would address that there, I guess. But I guess I would need more information in order to answer a bit more specifically this question. Okay, another question here. Praise: I have a product idea, but at this stage, I have no idea how to build a startup. Can you please help me with how and what I need to do to get this idea to product and funding? I have a very simple answer. You can either try on your own, and it's going to be difficult, and you're not going to have the framework, and you're not going to have the network. Or the know-how, or you can join the Foundry Institute because this is exactly what we are helping founders do. We have this program, it's for people with ideas and with early-stage startups, and this is what we help them with. We give them the local network and we give them the program that they can work on their idea. So that's my answer. I've tried both ways and I can tell you the Foundry Institute is a better one. All right, then we have another question. I have listened to some entrepreneurial speakers say the— say there is not such thing as a high price, but there is not such thing as a high price. When someone says that, it just means you haven't found the right customer. How true is that? Well, it's true, and the closest example I have is the luxury goods, right? If people weren't willing to spend a lot of money on luxury goods, there wouldn't be no luxury goods. All of the goods would have cost the same. But there are those people, and so they're spending more. The question is, how big is that pool of people? Is it big enough for you to fund your business? Do you have access to that pool of people? These are the questions you should be asking. There are people. Question is, do you have access to them and are they enough? All right, we have something about inbound marketing here from Julia. What metrics you think are most important and helpful in inbound marketing? That's a very generic question. It depends on the business. Right? There could be so many. Maybe for those specifics, you know, for how do you execute this or that, there's a lot of information online. You can just Google. So I wouldn't know what to tell you if I don't know your business. Okay. We have a question from Maher. When it comes to platforms, there is no direct customer because it's not a pipeline model. How do I manage which parts to attract and how to attract them? How should I think about it? When it comes to platforms, there is no direct customer. So if your platform is like platform for developers, you know, like Windows used to be, and then you give that for free to developers to develop, but you still have customers, right? People were buying Windows as a software solution. So this is a distinguishing factor between a customer and a user. Sometimes they are the same person, sometimes they're different people. And, and for platforms, again, when we're looking at Uber, for example, who is, who is paying to use the Uber platform? Or how is Uber making their money? They're making their money both ways. They're making their money from the driver, I think, and they're making their money from the end user who is paying for the drive. So it depends on the type of platform and how you form it, but you need to differentiate between the user and the customer. Yeah. And you attract them in different ways, right? Because they want different things. Joy is asking, how do we figure out the free channels? Well, as I said, there are plenty of free channels and you need to define them by— you're gonna know what a free channel is if you know that you're not paying. You know, if you're not giving $5 to put your ad there, if you're not paying someone to display something for you, then this is a free channel. Writing, whether it's a blog, whether it's on social media, it's a free channel, right? So all of the things that you're using your work, your time to call people or to write or to reach them, it's a free channel. So Baraidzo is asking, how useful is blogging for B2B marketing in your opinion? Again, this depends on the industry. If the people in the B2B space are reading, Many companies actually rather have more like white papers and more long-term, not long-term, more longer documents with more specific information like case studies as well. And so blogging is useful in the long term because it still creates a presence for you online. But you need to figure out based on your type of customer and industry if blogging, if you should start with blogging or if you should start with a higher quality text document. Something that is more interesting to them. Which paid channel is most effective when budget is limited? Facebook, Google Ads, TikTok, Thanks. As I said, when budget is limited, I wouldn't go to ads because it's like— I read this really good comparison idea that, you know, startups are like cars who don't have a lot of gas in their tank. And so you don't want to push on the pedal and burn all your gas and just travel 500 meters. You want to use all the acceleration that comes naturally, you know, in the curves, or if you have a downhill, and not press the pedal in those cases. So you want to coast a lot with your car. And so it's the same with your startup. You want to save your fuel, you want to use as much as you can of the things that come organically, and even develop on them. So if you have small budget, I wouldn't go into ads. Yeah, I would do things that don't scale, which is free stuff. Ah, then we have a question for affiliate marketing by Heidi. I was approached by affiliate competitor to get referrals from their product. Then they have the customer relation, or we make a deal to be able to serve that customer both. Is that a good way to skip the queue? To be honest, I'm not, I'm not sure I understand the question. Okay, so very often in those cases with, with referral marketing It's about who owns the customer relationship, who owns the contact, and it's always best if you are the one who's owning it. And it's the same case for platforms like Facebook, where you don't really have the contact of your customer, right? You may advertise, you may be in contact with them, but you don't have the direct connection with them. And so That's why I also think that, you know, Facebook is great for short-term revenue and getting people onboarded, but ideally you should try to develop your own relationship with the customer. Then we have a question from Claire. What's the best go-to-market strategy for a startup that is pre-revenue and just about to launch? Um, yeah, again, we need to be more specific here. Um, different startups in different industries are gonna have different strategies. Um, depends on what you're trying to achieve. So I'm not sure I can, I can give a good answer here that is not simply generic. Because the best is always tailored to the specifics, otherwise it cannot be the best. Sarah, how will you get traction for— from large number of users at the same time? Like if you're trying to get 3,000 people to download your app in one month? Yes, good question. Anyone in the chat has ideas about that? You obviously want to create some virality, right? So how do you create virality? That's the million-dollar question. And there are some ways, you know, if you look into companies that succeeded, you can look into how they did it. One of the best ways is if you involve the customer, right? If if in order to participate they need to share something, right? So for example, um, on, on Instagram, in order to like someone's photo, you first need to make an account, or in order to kind of use the filter, you need to share your photo. So this is how it started. On Instagram, you know, in order to use the filter, you had to share a photo, and this created content, and this created— this meant that more people were learning about Instagram, were learning about those filters, getting on the platform. And so you need to think about how to create this loop, this viral loop, that is very often connected to content from the user. Another way is to introduce incentive and to say Instead of paying for advertising, you know, you're gonna spend the same money paying the users actually. Get €5 if you invite 5 of your friends, and they're gonna get €5 too. And so there are some ways, but you have to be creative. Chino is asking, what is the first step going from an idea, novel tech-based, to setting up your company? Good question. So I recently read an interview by Udemy's co-founder. Did you know that Udemy is actually a graduate from the Foundry Institute? They were in the very first batch in Silicon Valley. And so he said something that really stuck with me. And this was, before you build an MVP for your product, you should try to test the assumptions. So the minimum viable assumptions, I think this was the phrase, where before building anything, not only you're trying to minimize the building effort by building an MVP, you're trying to entirely remove this building effort by actually first testing your hypothesis. And so This should be the first thing you do. You should do research and you should test your hypothesis. Is this really a problem that my customers want to solve? Is this really the solution that is going to solve it? Is this really something they want? And so do your, do your research, do your hypothesis testing. This is going to be the first step. And then join the Foundry Institute because we also help you with that. Alright, then we have Samuel. How do you train our marketing team so they learn almost all what they know, what you know? Can you share some links or books which you were using or can recommend? That's a good question. I actually have a Goodreads account where I track all the books that I've read and it's on my website. If you go there, evadimitrova.com, you can see the books I've read. Can I transfer all of my know-how to you? Yes. How long is it going to take? Some time. Are you going to accept it? Are you going to really accept and implement everything, everything I tell you? I don't think so. And so there is certain certain positive coming from doing your own mistakes and trying to figure out things on your own versus being told what to do. It's important, right, not to try to rediscover the wheel every time, but it's also important that you try stuff. So yeah, check out the books and you can start reading them, and then for the rest, I don't know, you have to do your own mistakes. Or at least some mistakes before you can learn. Okay, we have Zoaip. I don't know if this is the same person I know, but how can we set up go-to-market strategy when you are low on cash and are early startup? So once again, just because you don't have cash or you're early, it doesn't mean you can't have a go-to-market strategy. It just means you're not gonna have paid channels. You're not going to use paid channels. That's fine because there are all other sorts of doing stuff, right? So fill it up and see, you know, what kind of free channels you can use based on everything else that's on the canvas. We have a question from Lulu. How do I book time with you to review and get feedback on my go-to-market canvas? The best way is to send me an email and ask for that. I do have calls on a weekly basis with people for free to give them some feedback. So feel free to send me an email and I'll be happy to help you out. We have 10 minutes before we close the event. And let me go back to the chat. Wow, so many comments. Um, crazy. So I, I heard that. Yeah, what do we have here? Monica is asking if it's an IT service company solving customized technical problems, how do you know the specific client company has a technical issue and how do you approach them? So this is where it helps if you actually worked in the industry before and if you're not an outsider, because you already know about all those problems that are— that companies are facing, the solutions that they're using, you know, how easy it is to switch, because often that's also a problem in B2B. It's like there is a solution, but it's so difficult to switch because of all the processes that need to change within a company. That it's easier just to keep doing the things the old way, even if they're not so productive. And so how do you learn if you're an outsider? Well, you start talking to people, you start going to meetups, you start reading what's, you know, what are those companies posting online, you start reading in forums, you build your network, and this is how you gather the information. Or you find someone who already works there and get him as a co-founder. We have some questions about the Foundry Institute, so let me just summarize that all for everyone. So Foundry Institute, it's a 3.5-month program and it's run all around the world. As I said, there are 200 chapters. The fees are different depending on where you're based. right? Because if you're, if you're in Silicon Valley, you know, the fee is one, and if you're in Africa, obviously people there cannot afford to pay that, the fee of Silicon Valley. So it's kind of like regulated based on your location. Um, you can easily find where, if there's a chapter next to you, if you just write Foundry Institute and then the name of your, of the city where you are. And it's going to pop up. We're running everything virtual now, or most of the sessions, so you can act— this is probably now the best time to, to join because especially if there is no chapter in your city specifically, because it's virtual, you don't have to travel. And so there's a huge FAQ page on, on the website you can check and have all your answers there. Yeah. Okay, let's see what other questions we have here. Okay, so in that case, I can see that there's still some incoming, but a lot of them are actually— I've answered already, or they're kind of similar to the ones that I answered. So I hope this was useful. I'm sorry if I spoke a bit too quickly in the beginning. There was so much information I wanted to give and also answer your questions, so maybe I overdid it, but luckily there will be a recording so you can review it. And again, if you have any other questions, happy to send me an email and I'll get to you.