Jason M. LemkinCEO, SaaStr · Co-Founder of SaaStr AI, SaaStr Fund, Adobe Sign

Go-To-Market Lessons: OpenAI's Rapid Growth Strategies #shorts

7 Aug 2025 · 2 min

Watch on YouTube

1:59

In a concise, rapid‑fire segment, the speaker shares the most common go‑to‑market (GTM) mistakes founders make and frames them as a practical checklist. Drawing from personal experience at OpenAI in early 2023, they describe how they built a dedicated ChatGPT Enterprise GTM organization from the ground up—starting with fewer than ten people, no SDRs, SCs, CSMs, sales or rev‑ops, and no functional Salesforce instance. The team focused on selling the API while hypothesizing that ChatGPT would require a distinct sales motion. By creating a separate GTM org, they achieved speed, clarity, and deep customer focus, launching what they claim was the fastest‑growing enterprise app in history. Later, to push growth further, OpenAI merged the consumer and enterprise GTM orgs into a single unified organization of 500 people, forcing role changes, new workflows, and cross‑product learning. Despite the difficulty, the consolidation reduced duplication, accelerated execution, and reinforced the company’s growth trajectory. The segment ends with a punchy checklist of GTM pitfalls to avoid.

So this next and last section is intentionally punchy. It's a rapid fire set of the most common go to market mistakes that I see founders make or ask us about. Think of it as a practical checklist to help you avoid missteps and accelerate what's working. It was early 2023. OpenAI had hired me in to help build our ChatGPT enterprise go to market team from scratch. Our early team at OpenAI of our sales and go to market team was less than 10 people. No SDRs, no SCs, no CSMs, no sales ops, rev ops, marketing enablement, and not even a working Salesforce instance. We had about six account directors and one technical success partner who they were all on FHIR, but they were focused on selling the API. And we had the hypothesis that ChatGPT would have a distinct fire and and a distinct sales motion different from our API. So we made a deliberate choice to build a dedicated go to market Org from scratch. That approach gave us speed, clarity, and deep customer focus during a critical window. And it worked. OpenAI already had the fastest growing consumer application in history. And then this brand new team that we built, we believe launched the fastest growing enterprise app application in history. But despite this success, we saw an opportunity to go even further by evolving our structure. So earlier this year, we basically collapsed both of these orgs. We took 500 people, most people who had only been at the company for a few months, and we brought them into one single, unified go to market Org. Everyone had new roles, new workflows, new managers, and every single person had to learn a new product. They had to learn the opposite product they weren't selling. This was a hard change, but ultimately it drove faster execution, less duplication, and most importantly.