AI JUST CHANGED YOUR GO-TO-MARKET STRATEGY

How to take a product to market, and then 10x the results using AI.

- by JEFF BUSSGANG

Going to market used to be simple: Buy ads, hire a team of sales reps, and spend thousands of dollars on a PR stunt. Hell, just give away money if it means you'll sign up more users.

Today, all that has changed. Interest rates are no longer zero, and the cost of capital is much higher. Investors are more concerned about customer acquisition costs and unit economics. Startups need to stay lean, and founders need to be creative in how they reach, activate, and convert customers.

Incredibly, just as startups around the world were being forced to tighten their belts, they were given a magical new technology that stretches their go-to-market (GTM) dollars further than ever: generative AI.

Everyone knows about AI’s ability to create text and images, but we’re just starting to discover how transformative that can be for launching a business. I'm a Harvard Business School professor and cofounder of Flybridge Capital, an early stage venture capital fund with over $1 billion in assets under management, and I'm seeing it all the time now: Startups are using AI to completely rethink their GTM strategy—helping them reach more customers more efficiently, and quickly scale in ways that were nearly impossible before.

To be clear, the fundamentals of a GTM strategy are still the same—and will likely always be the same. It’s a mix of positioning and messaging, market selection, demand generation, distribution channels, sales funnels, and strategic partnerships, all working together to turn cold prospects into loyal, evangelical customers in the most cost-effective way possible. But these activities fall right into the sweet spot of generative AI as we know it today: It’s a matter of content creation, lead nurturing and engagement, personalization, and data analysis.

In this article, I'll walk through the principles of a GTM strategy, and how to use AI to multiply your growth potential tenfold.

Let’s start with a case study.