Cracking Product-Market Fit and GTM in the AI Era: Insights from Maja Voje by Kazuki Nakayashiki

Cracking Product-Market Fit and GTM in the AI Era: Insights from Maja Voje

Kazuki Nakayashiki

Sep 19, 2025 9:44 AM

Summary

Introduction of Maja Voje (00:04-01:00): Maja Voje, a leading go-to-market strategist and best-selling author, emphasizes the rapidly changing landscape of AI and outlines her mission to help the next generation of entrepreneurs adapt their strategies.
Stages of Startup Development (01:30-03:00): Maja discusses key stages for startups, including problem-solution fit, product-market fit, and scaling, highlighting the importance of each stage in achieving sustainable business success.
Importance of Product-Market Fit (03:02-06:00): Maja explains product-market fit through various components, such as retention, effective positioning, pricing models, and building sales channels, noting that pivots are common during this search.
Go-to-Market Strategies and AI Integration (08:24-12:48): The conversation transitions to modern go-to-market motions, detailing inbound and outbound strategies, the role of AI in optimizing these approaches, and the importance of community engagement.
Human vs AI in Marketing (21:18-24:00): Maja discusses the irreplaceable roles humans play in strategic thinking, stakeholder management, and emotional connections in marketing, though recognizing AI's growing capabilities in generating content.
Challenges and Opportunities in a Saturated Market (50:50-52:15): Maja suggests exploring new channels, business models, or product improvements when existing channels become saturated, emphasizing the significance of early monetization.
Legacy and Simplification of Go-to-Market Strategies (54:40-55:03): Maja aims to demystify go-to-market strategies for future generations, making them accessible to technical founders and easing the path for entrepreneurs.

Transcript

Things are changing so much with AI that this is the best time to be alive, like literally the playbooks that we were using before for go-to-market are from like the previous era, from SaaS era, and things are not working anymore. So we are here together on a mission to just like find something that is working and will enable the next generation of entrepreneurs. Taste-making remains a frontier where humans definitely triumphant AI.

Hi everyone, welcome back to another episode of Glasp Talk. Today we are very excited to have Maja Voje with us. Maja is a best-selling author and one of the world's leading go-to-market strategists. She has helped over like around 10,000 companies develop repeatable systems to bring B2B products to market. She's the author of Amazon best-selling book Go-To-Market (GTM) Strategist, which has become a global standard in go-to-market strategy.

With over 15 years of experience and collaborations with industry giants like Tesla, IBM, and Microsoft, Maja has led go-to-market initiatives from startup to enterprise level. She's also the founder of Growth Lab, where she helps companies build AI-powered go-to-market systems that has taught over 8,500 professionals through her programs. And today we will dive into Maja's remarkable journey, her insights into AI-driven marketing, and how she empowers teams to turn strategy into

action. Thank you for joining us, Maja, today. Thank you for having me. Every time somebody like introduces me, I would like to hide under a table because here is what I think about myself, right? I'm not taking life too seriously, so for me like everything has been just like a fun journey, right? I'm very passionate about this science. I think that things are changing so much with AI that this is the best time to be alive.

Like literally the playbooks that we were using before for go-to-market are from like the previous era, from SaaS era, and things are not working anymore. So we are here together on a mission to just like find something that is working and will enable the next generation of entrepreneurs. And I'm just like so excited to hear and learn from you as well because you guys have grown your sub-stack, your media channels to half a million people.

And I just mentioned that in my country there are only two million people. So you could have a country in Europe. Thank you so much. Yes. So first of all, you mentioned like there are three stages that startups need to go through. Like, technically for problem solution fit, product market fit, go-to-market fit, and scaling, like expansion and more. And let's begin with product market fit because that's the most important topic for many startups. Right.

So problem solution fit is just like to make something work for you, right? This is just like we lead work stage. And this is more of a technical and product challenge than anything like go-to-market related. Cool. So after we established the fact that our product should be working, at least to some extent, it's time to just like see if we can make them predictably work for the right type of people and get money for that. That's the whole point of product market fit.

So typically we measure it with retention, right? Not only will people come to the product once, but they will be so happy, so satisfied that they will return to the product again. This is what we would like to achieve. But the journey to there is very interesting because there are a couple of other milestones that you need to take. The first one is just like your ability to present the product in a way that customer will understand and care about, right? So that's a little bit of positioning and messaging.

Am I saying that this is like AI generated text writer or am I saying this is your future knowledge management system? This is something that I would like to test. The second one is just like we should figure it out, the pricing for it, right? The business model. And I think this is so important for like B2B companies in AI space, because we actually have to pay for credits that our free users are using, right? So whereas we can get like these awesome pounds from big AI model

providers, there is just like a need for speed in order to validate that not only will people use the product, but they will also pay for it. So we know how to make money in this value exchange system. And last but not least, we have to just like start thinking how to get other people to use this product apart from my mother and my cousin and my neighbours. So how can I reach people that I don't know, right? We have to build sales and marketing channels that

will help us promote this product. And these are like the components of product market fit that have to work together. Now, this is fun to test. Because when you fix something, when you like say, okay, now I will try if for example, professional content creators are going to use my AI for knowledge management. This is one value equation. But if I said, okay, now I will test if the teachers will be using my solution, then I would have to change all the other elements.

So willingness to pay budget will be different, how I describe the product will be different, and channels where teacher hangouts hangout would be different, right? So because of that complexity, in my 15 years of career, I never ever, ever seen a company that would not pivot at least one of those elements, where they are searching for product market fit. So it's okay to change.

Most people would change it five or seven times before kind of aligning those elements to something that is working. Any questions about product market fits, guys, but I would love to ask you, how did you know that you have product market fit? When did you know? Our product? Yeah. Yeah, for your product. Did you even think about this? I think yeah, yeah, because you will have maybe different question. But when we launched YouTube summary, which is our main product now.

So it's kind of like, you know, extension that summarizes YouTube content with AI tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini. And yeah, when we launched, so it went viral on social media. And so our traffic was kind of like literally hockey stick J-curve. And when we had a bug, so your travel in the product, so we got so many inquiries from users. So we couldn't address at that time. Then we noticed, oh, yeah, people are like really using our product.

And if the product is missing, they are kind of like, you know, this one point eight, maybe it's kind of showing it is this, right. So that's what, yeah, that's when we feel the product market fit. I love this story. So we established something and super congratulations, like this is a dream of every entrepreneur that you would launch, go viral, and then figure it out how to do the support and all the other stuff. It is a very good scenario.

However, for the majority of entrepreneurs, as you know, like traditionally, 95% of businesses fail, not because they would have product issues, the majority of them, like 80% of those who fail have business issues, they have the wrong pricing, the right ICP, the wrong way how to do marketing and sales. So what I'm saying here is literally that with product market fit, you sooner know that you don't have it, then when you have it, because when you have it, you are worrying about other things in business,

and you're just trying to make it work the best you can, you're not thinking a lot about product market fit, as consumers are returning into the product again, cool. So next stage is super interesting as well. Because at that stage, we have to build sustainable marketing and sales systems, we call them go to market motions. So these are predictable and reputable ways how to get customers into our products again, and again, and again.

And by now, like the majority of companies that I work with have AI assisted go to market motions, right. So last year, everybody started to prototype to test like either different purposely built solutions or tweaking their own stuff. So there is a lot of AI assisting us on that journey as well. But typically, how I define those go to market motions in my book is inbound, meaning you create content, and then like you create so good content that people discover your product as

well, for example. So it's you communicating with an audience, and then audience based on the quality of this content gets attracted to the product. The second one is outbound. This is what I love. Most people absolutely hate it. But if I had to like literally get five customers tomorrow for my business, I would be doing outbound. Okay, maybe now I would send out a LinkedIn post, but that requires like an audience.

But yeah, for most people outbound warm, so to the people that you know, for either recommend introductions, or if they would like to work together or cold. So based on your knowledge, who could be benefiting from your product, who should be buying, you send them invites to discover your product. This is something that most people hate doing, but I love it. And we can talk about this a little bit more further on. The next one is paid.

Now paid is getting increasingly interesting, because right now the velocity of ads, given like all the in AI, everything is like AI-generated. And one of my projects or one of my partners literally outperformed on LinkedIn ads, human-generated creatives performed worse than AI-generated creatives, but like twice as worse. So I really think that just like in terms of ad making, we are there at least for the design and copywriting part. For the setups, we can still discuss this a little bit,

but yeah, this is to largely extend automated right now. Cool. Next, we have something which is very difficult to automate. These are communities. Communities are especially important for tech products and for products that have, let's say, customers that are early adopters because we cannot shut up about the latest and greatest tools that we have discovered. It's our pride and joy. So yeah, communities are super important,

especially in the tech world. And then we have something which is very much like outbound, but a little bit more complex. This is where the sales kicks in. We call it account-based marketing and then account-based sales when you are doing the selling. And unlike outbound, when I don't know exactly to whom I should be selling this to, and I'm still sending this email out to 300 or 1,000 people with different domains that

have been warmed up before, not from my prime email, with ABS and ABM, so with bigger sales systems, we have a very clear definition who our ideal customer profile is. We have a list of companies that we would like to work with. It's a shorter list, usually like around the smallest one that I have seen was 10 companies, but usually it's around 100-something. And then we are creating these multiple touch points ways

how to first attract their attention, how to get them on the meeting, and how to sell them something, surprise, that should be expensive so that we are literally covering the costs of everything what we are doing before. And last but not least, there is like favorite kid on the block. This is like the new go-to taste. So that's PLG. That's product-led growth. And just like this notion, try it before you buy it.

And then when people are happy with the product, they would be inclined towards committing to higher packages or even recommended it to others. And here is where we have a little bit of an issue, like we talked about before with AI products, because you don't want to cover these credits yourself for infinite amount of time. You need to start monetizing immediately, and especially if you are a bootstrap company.

And in the event that this technology is hard to implement, it's better to first start with controlled pilot to earn the right to automate and then expand into the account. OK, guys, did I geek out too much here? Because this is literally such a broad topic. But if you have any questions, any thoughts, any your experience, let's just break it down a little bit more if we have to. Yeah, I love that, yeah. And also, I follow you on Substack and on social media,

and you share the image of go-to-market emotions. And you mentioned also you miss the partners, I think, partners? I miss the partners! Oh my god, how could I? Because I cannot automate them with AI yet. This has been like a pain in the ass for me to just do a little bit more AI-assisted partnership programs. There are purposefully developed solutions for that. But you're so right. Big companies such as Clay that recently got 1 million

investment, and HeyReach. HeyReach is a really cool company here from Europe. They do email marketing on LinkedIn, so they are a tool for sending out LinkedIn DMs. They have created 7 million yearly revenue in just like 14 months or something like that. It was insane, right? And they were both using agencies as levers of their growth. So agencies brought their customers and helped them with these setups. So that is brilliant.

Because look, I think that you need like a certificate or a medal for correcting me. That was great. Yeah, I'm honored. Should we edit that? Should we edit that? No! OK. I love it! OK. I forgot one! Excellent! Why? Because I cannot AI it. Thank you. Yes. So you already mentioned about AI, the impact of AI. But nowadays, over, it's been two to three years that people use ChatGPT and less Google and less click on Google results, Google search.

And how do you see the impact of AI in, let's say, you mentioned a go-to-market motion, so go-to-market strategy. How has it changed? And how should we prepare for? Some people say AI engine, like a GEO, like a generative engine optimization, matters more in the future. And yeah, could you tell us a little bit about the impact of AI? Yes. Whereas I'm not an expert in that specific subject, I have seen like huge results from just like my AI first

companies that I work with. So a lot of them are discovered for just like AI engines instead of Google, right? And they have been like doing very interesting experiments how to get even more of this traffic. One of the companies that I work with, they produce like over 100 articles for indexing in just like June. And after like everything was deployed and they tweaked like keywords a little bit, they jumped into like top five in their category

suggested by the AIs. So right now, I really think that it's a fun time to explore like mentions on Reddit, being referenced by other creators, making sure that you are just like multi-channel and that you are paying attention to what's going on there. And one of the best tools that I recommend how to check that is with Brand Trader from Ahrefs. I have been using this one. I will soon publish like a list of B2B companies

that are best indexed from my vertical. And yeah, that has been like super fun for me. I have been working with experts who have been having great results with it. And I have been experiments, have done experiments for my business myself, but I don't consider myself as an expert on this subject. So okay, Kazuki, if you have some good practices here to learn as well, do you do some geo-experimentation what is working for you guys?

Yeah. Yes. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, yeah. First of all, so yeah, we did like AI-generated content. So yeah, based on YouTube content, then yeah, we tested it out. And so since YouTube transcript is not on Google, it's not on Google search engine. So we didn't copy all the transcript, but based on the YouTube transcript we make article, then it's gonna be indexed on Google. And yeah, we see a lot of traffic from Google

as well as, you know, ChatGPT or Gemini. And I'm not sure if it's directly related to, like, you know, user acquisition, but so we see traffic. So that's one thing. Yeah. And one of the shortcomings for like, at least what is working for my clients is to create these comparison articles, right? So it's like your tool versus competitor versus competitor versus competitor. These are very popular for quick indexing as well.

Yeah, people who are like solution aware usually think like these are the queries that they would be using. So yeah, let's link a couple of like excellent geo articles in the comments so that the audience can learn more about this. But I hope that we just like get people thinking that this is important and this is getting increasingly important. And once like ChatGPT will launch their proper shopping, I think that like even ads are going to be broken in Google.

So yeah, ChatGPT could be changing in a mega platform. They are playing the cards really, really, really nicely. Brian Balfour said that first to give like full reference, but I'm waiting for agents so hard because the only thing that is missing for me, like when ChatGPT are MCPs and just like agents, I would love to have like a mega platform where I could do everything so I don't have to go and like have a cluster of seven different tools

that I'm using. Oh my God. Sorry, that was a little bit hardcore in terms of like making out about stuff. You can cut it if not necessary. Oh yeah, yeah. Gregor Oystershek, you're okay with this type of subjects? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. As I mentioned, so yeah, it's unscripted. So yeah, we're happy to learn. And also, yeah, we check Ahref almost every day. And so we see a lot of like backlinks from SaaSHub which generate like comparison articles

or yeah, blah, blah, blah. I think they automatically generate content. So just by comparing similar products, but so we see a lot of traffic and links from them. Yeah. I love like AI generated content. I have been using it a lot myself because I'm not native and wherever like I have to produce like high quality output, of course, I will hire an editor but for majority of my LinkedIn posts, formatting and just like stuff that is derived

from like webinar transcripts or something like that. I think it would be a waste of time and just like a huge bottleneck in velocity if I wouldn't be using this type. tools. So the way how I usually like start with the implementation of these tools is I start to think about the workflow, right? So what is like my workflow looking like? Where am I wasting the most time? What do I hate most? And then I start to build a knowledge base so that I don't leave

things, you know, to the garbage in garbage out system. But I know that the system is like taking information intelligence from the carefully curated knowledge base, then it's just like prompt engineering and fine tuning it and making sure that we have frequent feedback loops with it so that it hopefully gets better and better and better the more we are using it. And this is exactly my love relationship with ChatGPT.

The problem is that I'm using it for so long that if I started with clothes right now, which is objectively according to like my colleagues much better in content creation, I couldn't because by now I'm completely like stuck there like it's so well trained. It's working amazingly well for me and I feel that I'm locked in. See, so related to AI. So what is so do we need for like human marketer human growth manager, you know, products marketing manager in the future, because in terms of marketing or

growth marketing strategy, so for example, Google can do everything. So they have Chrome, they have Google Analytics, they have V or they can make you know, advertisement. So eventually, so all of the marketing activities can be on Google. So one platform and so, you know, machine learning also generated content. So in that sense, so what is so where we need human marketer? Okay, whereas I love AI, I get pissed off on a daily basis when I get like ChatGPT

generated briefings, ChatGPT generated blog posts and cold emails that were not read by a single human being to review. And my usual response is just like, have you read it? Like, seriously, have you read what you have just like said to me, just like this taste making remains a frontier where humans definitely try on AI. The second thing is stakeholder management, management, especially when you are working with larger orgs, and you have to coordinate like gazillion of

stakeholders right there. Okay, I have a terrible joke, no AI is stupid enough to handle us. But people like to communicate with people, and there is emotional component to it. And just like this sense of proximity, developing the relationships, we have emotional needs as well. So as long as people are transacting with people, I think people are needed. But important question is where right? So where humans, our human intelligence outperforms artificial intelligence.

Some people would say like in strategic thinking, but I have seen like better go to market strategies generated ChatGPT than like I have seen slides before, I have seen like huge improvement and advancement. I do believe in the art of creation, though, because at the end of the day, it's all about trust, and proprietary intelligence, even if the model was trained on all the data that you can glasp on the internet, you as a human still have like proprietary taste, proprietary experience,

what my weird people in marketing would describe the vibe, the energy, right? So I do think that I like to chat with ChatGPT, but also I get very mad because he is reinforcing me for things that I should not be praised for, such as great job, you completed one exercise in August. I think you should be like exercise more and stuff like that. So yeah, at this like interaction level, it's just not there yet, as we are comparing it with humans.

But a lot of technical founders, such you guys must be like product people. All right, more technical people are marketers. Me technical, more like product technical. You too. I'm more like a business side, I would say. Cool. And I would love to hear it from you. How do you see because I'm probably like 10 years older than you are. And I think that like management is very important. Creation is very important. I am trusting AI that much.

I would love to see just like hear how you think about this. Where do we need humans in marketing and sales? If it's B2B sales, so humans are needed for sure. So it's like, as you mentioned, stakeholder management for sure. But so we are working on B2C, then, yeah, as long as the AI can understand the whole concept of our product. And so it doesn't hurt our brand or marketing, you know, people. So not sure if people are needed. So, yeah, in marketing. Yeah.

That's a good one. My brother is with Ecom and he has like, I think that they are making like 10 million a month right now. I don't know, I would have to check with him exactly. So they're selling like menswear. And he AI generates everything. Before he had like a very big creative team for doing the ads. Now, like every creative that they are testing out is like AI generated.

However, he said influencers when I asked this question, right? But influencers, like organically, the communities that they have built, the trust that they have built. So this is what he's still paying for, for having content creators creating like the creatives as well as doing marketing and sales. Sorry that I interrupted you. It's just like this example. Yeah, I agree with this community. Yeah, content creator, like influencers are important. I would say, yeah, community should be human, but not sure like content creator or influencers,

because there will be VTubers or like AI, yeah, digital clone. So, you know, influencers in the future. Not sure if people would like to see so those kinds of content, but eventually, technically they can do it. Yeah, I can be replaced by a digital clone. So yeah, I am talking like, you know, this class talk and I can be digital clone, right? Right. Yeah. Yeah, it's the intimacy.

It's something else that we need, right? How about you, Kazuki? Are you firing? How are you thinking about this? Yeah, I think in the future, as Kei mentioned, I think AI can take care of more like a marketing part and like content generation as, you know, as many startups already do. And so and then see the results and run the experiment and do another test, like kind of iterating the process. I think AI and AI agents can do most of the parts.

And regarding the AI clone, I love the Reid AI, Reid Hoffman's AI. And we talked to the creator behind Reid Hoffman AI and that's like Reid Hoffman himself interviews with the Reid AI and AI clone of himself. So that's a really interesting concept. And so that it's, I think, the new way to spread knowledge and insights and with more people, because let's say if I want to reach out and talk to Reid Hoffman, like a famous figure, and I think he doesn't, he, maybe I don't have access to him and

he won't make time for me. But if I can talk to Reid AI, maybe I can ask many questions to him and his AI clone. And so that I can, you know, learn from him. In that sense, it's a new way to distribute shared knowledge. To scale your brain, right. This is super interesting. Thank you so much for highlighting this, really got me thinking. However, then I would like to think that for every trend, if we can like AI everything, there is also an anti-trend, right? And it was so funny because I

have a cousin who's much younger than I am. He just celebrated his like 17th birthday. And we were figuring out like really hard, it was a hard question for us as a family to decide what he will study for high school, right? So the boy didn't care. He was like, I don't like school. And we had to present him a couple of options, like how this world will evolve, how he, where he can have the best chance to succeed, right? And we were like literally in the dilemma, the adults in the

family, between like him becoming a developer and him becoming like a carpenter. So somebody who's making stuff from wood, right? And he then decided that he wants to work with wood. I think it was a very smart decision. Because these guys, like at least here in Europe, they are making some serious cash. Are they building the next unicorns? No. But lifestyle based on ambitions that he has displayed so far, these jobs are going to be like super AI safe.

And I just think that like, as we are optimizing everything with AI, we have this need as humans to connect with other humans somehow. And maybe intimacy, and maybe like this labor that is not appreciated right now will become important. Because I love to think that for every trend, there is an anti-trend. Maybe then I can have like a bunch of grammar mistakes and my post will look human and people will be yeah, you're human posted. Probably not. But it could be.

Yeah. And I recently saw an interesting post on X or LinkedIn. I forgot where, but like now AI generate content and now goes to someone's inbox and AI reads the content, generates a summary and no one reads it. And what's the point of the process and yeah, something like that. Yeah. And also LinkedIn, to be honest, like I'm really in a dilemma. Like, should I comment later generated comments? And then like other creators say to me, yes, a comment is a comment.

It still counts. So sometimes I just have a little bit of fun with it. And regarding back to the topic about product market fit and ICP or finding like an ECP in your boss, you know, early customer profile. And as you mentioned, like if let's say we assume more companies or startups use AI or AI agent to reach out to like a clients or negotiate in the, you know, like business situations. In that sense, the, the concept of early customer provide ECP changes

because of AI, because if we reach out to client, if clients use AI, it's not we talking to humans, we are talking to AI and AI decides if they should pass it on to human or not. So in that sense, I'm curious about how ECP, the concept changes over time. Okay. Uh, I think that you are like one step ahead of me in this thinking. Here is where I am at the moment. So beforehand, how we were building these like outreach

lists or a lead list, right? We said, hi, I want these companies from the US that got 10 million founding in the last three months. And then like the system speed up a couple of like email addresses. And that was pretty much it. Then we were like emailing them. Hi, I'm Maja. I'm really good at making GTM. You surely need GTM because now you have founding. Let's talk better, but you know the logic, right? We were doing it like based on their firmographics.

So this is an AI company based on signals they recently got funding. And then like, let's hope for the best and let's account that I can personalize and do outbound copywriting really well. The problem is that everybody has the access to these signals, right? So like as company gets founding, it will get 200 of these emails because this signal could be bought by anybody. What is really interesting now to explore is where can we find proprietary signals?

So instead of me saying, okay, I sell to like car repair shops in the US with at least 50 locations. I would be thinking who, and I don't care about the profile right now. I just care about the idea of them being interested of them displaying the behavior that my AI will recognize as purchasing behavior based on previous patterns, this is how I could start creating my proprietary predictive intelligence in who would be interested in my products, but we are not there yet.

I mean, we are in some installations with some like bigger implementations, but for majority of folks, especially like pre-product market fit, the safest ways, how to do this is a, you just like develop a case study, and then you say to people who are in that vertical high, I saved this energy company $600,000. Would you like to see how you can implement AI agents to your support systems? That would be one way.

And the second way is to just like, forget this prime idea of segmentations and go broader and reverse engineer what was actually going on. But based on the parameters that are more behavior based than this, like typical, Ooh, product managers liked it. Let's make sure that the next iteration of my marketing and sales is all about product management. Because from people who like it, I don't have to force this label to them.

I could be like treating them as separate units. So this is where I am in my thinking at the moment. I have no idea how this will transact as our like agents will be interacting with each other. But since they will be trained on our knowledge assets from our best core recordings and stuff like that. I think we can figure it out. Definitely. Yes. Yes. But it's fun time to work. It's really fun. Yeah, definitely.

Yes. Thanks. And yeah, so I was going to ask something regarding the bonding needs. So in the B2B space, so the startup needs to find the bonding needs so that users have a huge problem. They want to like immediate solution so that we can sell the product to them. Right. But in the, in the AI, AI era, I think it can be really sorry. So I was going to ask something, but yeah, I forgot, but yeah. Okay. Then have you ever had a case of a clue, Eddie?

So I was curious, kind of like, you know, GTM go to market also distribution because, you know, yeah, usually people start making product with their founder mission or, you know, bonding needs or like, you know, after like user interview, then make a product. So find a product market theme, then move on to like go to market strategies. But, you know, if like, like go to market or distribution are more important,

then why don't we focus on making like viral content on TikTok on YouTube? Then sort of launch a product related to intensity metrics. Then, oh yeah, this is a use case where people use that. Why don't we adjust it? So it's kind of like, you know, go to market strategy or distribution product, like how to say hierarchy are different or changing recently. How do you see the market? I love it. Like seriously, this is how we were doing testing back in my hardware days.

So we didn't create products hardcore because that was too expensive. Just like the tooling costs like 50K to even like, before you started to like even think about having this product for the prototype. So, yeah, we did a lot of those like fake gateways when we just like did a render of a prototype of prototype of the product, and then we attracted a bunch of traffic there. So we bought like mid-tiers, that was pretty much it.

And then we were just like measuring conversions, cost per conversions, and then saying, oopsie, this is not like available. Or we like gave the refunds to people to just like demonstrate that there could be a sustainable, what we call back then funnel before we got to the decision, if we will invest into making this or not. Now, as you mentioned, and I think this is genius, distribution is the queen. I am approached by, and probably you are as well, by probably like five or 10

makers per month that they would like to just like piggyback on my distribution channel, which is insane in terms of opportunity, but also in terms of like the business models that we are developing, right, as content creators. So the reason why I started to build my audience, it's not like that I don't have anything else to do and I would love to spend 20 hours a week creating content, it was to do the main generation for the book, right?

Because I have put a lot of love, a lot of like thought into the book and I wanted to succeed and I saw LinkedIn as audience building as a nice way, how we can create like a sales channel from this. The rest is history, but this was the beginning. So I literally had to build my own distribution channel for my products as well, and now as it is evolving, it's just like a business decision. How do I want to like proceed with this business, right?

There are a lot of opportunities. There is advertising, there is sponsorships. These are my products. These are like consulting businesses. I could be building like my products as well or co-branding them. I'm sure that it's the same for you. So just like building the audience first and then launching the product is already in use in many different places and forums. What is super interesting is that not as much with tech products as, for example,

in e-com or even like, as I explained in the hardware space. So it's completely legitimate way how to think about this, as long as you are connecting this with a business model, which is a strategic decision that you must take as a founder. And when it comes to visions, I mean, I always admired people who knew what they will do in their lives. I still don't, like seriously, for me, everything is like a really fun journey

and it's just like this wild exploration thing, but some of the people are just like wired differently. Like when they are 18, they know this is exactly what I want to build. This is my vision. I want a factory that will produce chairs or something like that. I never had that. So in a way, I was kind of forced to just like think, OK, how to do marketing before ever building a product practically all my career.

I see. Yeah, interesting and insightful. Actually, I was asking, like, what is your GTM strategy? for your media. So I should prepare that question. But so I think you are building audio audience first and try to find a product, probably. Oh, no. Yeah, because you are doing a sub stack, you know, YouTube publishing a book. So what is a GTM strategy? So in just first, you have to understand my business.

I will explain it to you anyways, if you are interested. I have three business units. The first one is media. So the metrics there, of course, is the side of the audience. But more importantly, in my case, the quality of the audience, you will not believe how many times do I get like, do people get into my DMS and actually ask about these implementations that we are doing? Have I really tested this? What were the results that

they tested it and they were a bit disappointing by this one, right? So like the intimacy of me and what I'm how I'm connected with my audience is much larger than just like, oh, I will send you this like we need to enter once a week and you have fun with it or not. So yeah, this is like not the size game. This is the quality game if you ask me by now. The second thing that I'm doing very passionately is consulting

workshops just like the standard service business, right? I never wanted to call it an agency because I do have like a little bit of issue with how big the teams should be. And what now we'd say I changing and stuff like that. So yeah, I never wanted that. But for the consulting, and we have been working a lot with corporate ventures, for example, lately, and releases.

This is super, super, super interesting, because you learn new stuff, and you meet a lot of people. So that's, again, feeding the content engines. And then we have like the digital products business unit. This is like the funnel. These are the online products. So there is a book, there is a checklist, and there is a masterclass at the moment. But I'm thinking really hard how to transform these to just like something that is going to be subscription based, but I don't

want to be built like community or paid sub stack, because I don't think that this is like proper. And it's a proper way to monetize. Like I know people that are making 200k, but just like, it's a proper way to monetize, but it's not my preferred way of doing the business, right. So as a founder, this is not something that I would very much want to have in my business.

It takes like a certain work that it's not very near and dear to me. So yeah, I was thinking a lot how we could do the productization more aligned to just like what is going on on the market right now. And I'm sure I have said this publicly before, if I hadn't added prompts into the checklist, in February, I think that I would be having huge issue with digital funnel monetization right now, because the way how we do go to market even in early stages, everybody

is prompting, I cannot say to you now we will fill in the spreadsheet together. We will spend four hours filling it a dock, people will go nuts, like seriously, the way how we expect to work change so much that we have to, but it is really important for my generation remain relevant, remain relevant, are we still relevant? This is the question that we should be asking ourselves, not every single day, because that

would be depressing, but at least once a quarter, right? To really ask yourself is what I'm doing still relevant to the reality that I'm in right now? What makes sense? That's a super interesting discussion with other creators as well. Yeah, the monetization one idea is already you're already doing it. But you know, so since you're, you have a framework, you wrote a book about GTM go to market, and you have framework

and you categorize startups to each category, right? So you interview founders as you do, then share the podcast and also newsletter, kind of use case kind of newsletter, then having the sponsorship, that's I think, the really repeatable, I think monetization system, I think you can do, I think already you're doing, but you know, that's what I'm one thing I thought. And if you ever want to interview a guy who sold like a

newsletter to HubSpot, I have some very good context. Very, very great exit strategies for like niche, subtext and newsletters. It's really interesting because for companies, I'm just doing a newsletter projects with one of my clients, right? And we have been creating this mood board, what are our people reading, what is relevant to them, and we actually find way more creatives that come than company newsletters.

Why? Because like company newsletters are usually just like got them boring promosheet. They are not really great at knowledge distribution, and most of them some are, but the majority of them are struggling to keep things interesting. So yeah, there is like also opportunity to exit your newsletter if you want to, I don't want to have the capacity mental bandwidth to deal with this right now. But it's a fun, fun thing to think about. Yeah, yeah. And sorry, now I remember my question.

So I was all great. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Burning knees, because now thanks to AI, many companies can build I mean, especially startups can build, you know, tools by themselves using AI. So meaning if they have a burning knees, they can build the tool and solution by themselves using AI coding tools, and so on, not using, they don't need to, actually, they don't necessarily buy the tools from others, they can build it by them.

So in that sense, I think the threshold or cutoff for the burning knees is getting lower. And meaning, isn't it how to say, are we having a hard time in B2B SaaS space? Because if if anyone can build a solution by themselves, thanks to AI? That's my question. I love this question. And let me walk you through a couple of examples in which cases I would definitely love to buy a tool over building my own tool. First out one course. So I definitely cannot buy as much data and like train my own signals, it

wouldn't make sense for me business wise, and I will happily pay for the access to curated databases and just like trained on the best examples in order to do my outbound so that I'm not messing things up. The second thing is just like, and this is a brilliant example, all of my examples are B2B though, because in B2C, I do imagine that things are differently, but you will be the experts in this one.

Okay, so the second example in B2B is actually the call intelligence. And this is the question that you will have to answer as a founder, how is your solution better than ChatGPT? And if you say something unconvincingly, if people will have like the slightest idea that this is something that they can DIY that you don't have like any differentiators, this is problem. So where to get these differentiators.

And here, I would just like state a company momentum. So they are a cool recorder in a normal category wise, but they are like actually GTM intelligence, right? So they are connected with your CRM, they are like training their own models with their own agents, it is so much more. And I actually asked Jonathan, because you know, I'm a very bold person. And I asked him like, Okay, I can upload my recordings to my GPT. And I can ask it questions too.

Like, right, I was completely ignoring the concept of knowledge base of how like agentic and like how artificial create intelligence is created, how important pre training is, how important post training is in this type of questions. So I love this definition, it comes from open AI that ultimately, there are three differentiators of AI products. The first is model itself, do you have like proprietary data, or synthetic data, or your like user data or

something like that, that would give you like another output. The second one is close integrations in workflows. Because if I have a CRM, it's very much more likely that I will use a call recorder from that specific CRM, then if I would have to like pay for another thing, or something would not be compatible, right? So close and frequent interaction, interaction in workflows.

And there is the third one, which are feedback loops. Imagine when I am like, have I mentioned that I'm using changing PT for content writing instead of jab cloth, which is legitimately better? Okay, I'm hooked. Because I have been spending so much time with it. I have been fighting with it. I have been voicing it, I have been prompting it, I have like, make it work so hard, that now I created so many feedback loops that for me, it's the ultimate best tool to create AI generated

content in my specific use case. And these are like the differentiators that we could be considering. So built versus buy. These are the differentiators. Okay, that makes sense. Is that an asset that we can create? And on the other hand, is it cheaper to just like buy it and pay 10 bucks per month for it? What is my building cost? How frequent the usage is, right? Because potentially, yes, I could be building my own, what could I build? Okay, extractors for

leads from LinkedIn. I could be doing that. But then like, if I have to go back and fix it, everything that something is changed on LinkedIn algorithm, that would create a lot of like overhead for me and my team. So this is not my core business expertise. It's not what I want to do in my life. It's much easier and better for me to just have somebody else changing this lead extractor whenever LinkedIn changes its algo.

But in the future, will it change? Do you think it will be a big change? Yes, yes. Is your time okay? So just a second. Yeah, sure. We should be wrapping up. If you give me like a two minute breather, I would very much appreciate it to just like, read what they have written to me. Okay, then, yeah. Before wrapping up, I have one more question. So you are mentioning a product market fit to go to market, then so scaling.

So, but eventually, so if the channel is saturated, so we need to think something so differently. So is that something like, you know, we need to expand to different channel or do you recommend so product company to like, do upsell or like increase lifetime value? Do you have any framework? Yeah, the quickest and easiest way for me is usually an upsell. Can I change my business model? Can I like change my packaging

to charge existing buyers differently or more? That would be the first thing, the easiest thing to test. Then like opening new markets, either geographically or like demographically in B2C stuff. This is interesting to explore. You can always be doing testing with me diets and with Google ads. I don't know what works for you better and on social media. So that's something. And then like the third thing that we usually consider

our new product launches or massive like product improvements. So it's either like channel, it is business model. It is like a new market. So a new ICP or what else? What else could we do if things are not working well? There's a ton, but yeah. But we're running out of time, right? Yeah, but this is how I would be thinking. So like when you have a channel which is saturated, of course, you should always be testing

like at least 20% of your time, new channels. If you see like diminishing returns and something declining so you should be prepared for this. It doesn't happen like in a day. And then not consider entering new markets, new endeavors, new product launches. It's always fun in GTM. It's never boring. Yeah, thanks. I remember that's what Sean (Ellis) also mentioned. 80% put your effort on existing channels 20% explore new channels always.

Totally makes sense. Yeah, the number is nice. So we remembered it. Oh yeah. Do you have any, you already shared many advice, do you have any, like what's one piece of advice that you give repeatedly to founders or what most people still underestimate? Do you have any? Yeah, think about early monetization because if you let a bunch of people free into your product you could be optimizing it based on the feedback of people

that will never pay for it. And that could be potentially problematic. And the second one that I usually, just like this is a little bit of a more intimate one is take your time to worry. So there are so many things that will be grown every single day and you don't have to be reactive. It's actually the worst thing to be reactive. You as a founder needs to be like firm as a personality. You are a leader of your team.

You should not, I mean, fragile. You should be honest or something like that. But just like work on your personal stamina and make sure that you are separating like whatever is wrong in business not to mess up with your performance right here, right now. Make sure that you are super present, that you are focused and that you can say no whenever you discover that you don't have the resources to do it today or tomorrow because it's very unlikely

that next week is gonna be any different than even more busy. So learn the self mastery of just like handling yourself as a decision maker in charge of many humans and AIs. Yeah. Priority and focus always. Yeah, that totally makes sense. Yeah. And this is the last question. So since Glasp is a platform where people share what they're reading, learning as a digital legacy we wanna ask this question. What legacy or impact do you hope to leave behind

for future generations? Okay. So I would just like to make this go-to-market less mysterious, right? I don't think it's a rocket science. I think technical founders can totally DIY this. I don't think that marketers should be like as concerned as just like, well, will we be replaced by AI or something like that? I would just like to talk real and make this journey a little bit less difficult for future generation.

And it was for me, I was afraid of developers for 14 years in my careers. Now they are reading my newsletters, ha. So yeah, just like to make this work a little bit more manageable and comprehensible for folks. Yeah, I think that's a great go-to-market strategy. I think, yeah. Yeah, thank you. Thank you so much for joining today. We learned a lot. Thank you for taking your time. It's very late when you are and I'm so impressed by your story.

It was great talking to you. I think that, hope that we can create some awesome value added for your audience together. Yeah, definitely. Yes, yes. Thank you. Thanks so much. Cool. Take care guys. Good luck with everything.

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Cracking Product-Market Fit and GTM in the AI Era: Insights from Maja Voje

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