GTM is one of the most fundamental building block of your soon-to-be-launched SaaS.

For a B2B SaaS founder, GTM matters because it decides whether your launch gets ignored or whether the right people actually pay attention. You can build a solid product, ship it on time, and still get zero traction simply because nobody understands who it is for, why it matters, or where to even find it.

In my experience, 50% of the marketing battle is before launch. This includes planning, positioning, picking your channels, deciding what type of messaging to use, and figuring out what sort of market you are entering. All of this collectively makes up GTM.

The good news is that a SaaS tool usually does not need 10 marketing channels to succeed. Most products get 90% of their sales from 2 or 3 marketing strategies at most.

The hard part is not "doing more marketing". The hard part is figuring out which exact 2 or 3 strategies fit your product, market, and personality as a founder.

For one founder, this could be SEO plus social listening. For another, it could be LinkedIn content plus outbound. For yet another, it could be communities plus a niche newsletter.

If you skip this part, you end up with a generic landing page, a vague pitch, and random marketing activities that don't really compound.

Another thing worth pointing out is that you do not need industry-leading tools to make GTM work.

Founders often assume they need the most expensive stack from day one. That's usually overkill.

For example, if you're doing SEO, you don't need to jump straight into Ahrefs if the price is too high for where your business is at. You can use a cheaper tool like KWFinder from Mangools, or even Google's own Adwords keyword data, and still get plenty of useful direction.

The same principle applies across GTM in general. Expensive tools can make things easier, but they are not what creates traction. Clear positioning, consistency, and decent execution matter far more.

Positioning comes first

Before thinking about SEO, content, or social media, you need to think about positioning.

Let's say you want to build a CRM.

That is a brutally crowded market. Launching another generic CRM won't help much because your buyer has already seen HubSpot, Pipedrive, Close, Salesforce, and 500 other tools. You are not just competing on features. You are competing on familiarity.

So instead of "CRM for everyone", you need something more specific.

For example:

• CRM for co-working spaces in Vietnam
• CRM for boutique law firms
• CRM for freight brokers

The more specific your positioning, the easier it becomes to write copy, create features, find communities, and explain why your product deserves attention.

Positioning is honestly a whole article in itself, and I'll write another article covering this in more detail.

Beginner GTM strategies

If you're a beginner founder, I recommend keeping your GTM simple.

You don't need 9 channels. You need 2 or 3 channels you can stick with for months.

The three easiest starting points are:

• social listening
• build-in-public
• SEO

Social listening

Social listening is one of the fastest ways to understand your market and do lead-gen at a smaller scale.

Instead of guessing what people want, you watch what they are already complaining about.

This is especially useful for beginner founders because it helps with:

• validating pain points
• finding language for your copy
• spotting buying intent
• finding communities where your ICP hangs out

For example, if you're building a CRM for co-working spaces, you should be monitoring Reddit threads, LinkedIn posts, niche Facebook groups, and even founder communities for phrases like:

• "manage leads in spreadsheets"
• "sales process is messy"
• "HubSpot sucks"

Also track your competitors through your social listening tool.

I recommend Mentionkit.com for this. It's the only AI-first social listening tool at a founder-friendly price, which makes it great for founders starting out.

Build-in-public

Build-in-public is useful because it lets people follow your progress before the product is big.

This matters because early-stage SaaS products do not have much trust. When you share the process openly, people start understanding the problem you're solving, the audience you're serving, and the tradeoffs you're making.

You also get content for free. Product updates become posts. Lessons become threads. Small wins become social proof.

Examples:

• sharing screenshots of a new onboarding flow and asking for feedback
• posting a lesson about a failed launch, bad churn issue, or pricing experiment

What I like about build-in-public is that it creates familiarity. When you finally launch, you are not showing up as a random stranger.

There are some downsides too.

First, oversharing can absolutely lead to copycats. If you're too open about your roadmap, experiments, positioning angles, and customer feedback, you might end up handing your research to someone faster or better funded than you.

This does not mean you should stop sharing entirely. It just means you should be selective. Share enough to build trust and attract the right people, but don't publish your entire playbook in real time.

The other issue is that a lot of the build-in-public crowd ends up making products for other founders. This creates a bit of a blind-leading-the-blind problem.

You get founders watching other founders, selling to other founders, and taking feedback from other founders. That can work sometimes, but it can also trap you in a bubble where you get applause instead of actual demand.

So if you do build-in-public, make sure it connects back to real buyers. If your audience is accountants, clinic owners, co-working operators, or logistics teams, your content needs to eventually reach them too, not just other SaaS founders on X.

SEO

Out of all the beginner channels, SEO is the one that compounds the hardest.

The downside is that it is slower.

You usually won't publish 3 posts and magically get customers. But if you keep publishing useful content and make sure your pages are actually good, SEO can become a durable growth channel.

A good beginner SEO process looks like this:

1. Pick a narrow niche and write obvious problem-solving content.
2. Create pages around comparison terms, workflows, and pain points.
3. Keep internal linking clean.
4. Get a few relevant backlinks.
5. Expand into tool pages and high-intent landing pages.

For example:

• "best CRM for co-working spaces"
• "how to manage memberships and sales for a co-working space"
• "HubSpot alternative for shared office operators"

Google's own guidance is still fairly sane here. Create people-first content, write for a real audience, and don't mass-produce junk. SEO works best when the content is actually useful and based on first-hand knowledge.

SEO sub-strategies

In the beginning, nail technical SEO. This is the most basic bit you should cover.

After the initial groundwork, there are a few different sub-strategies you can lean into:

Educational blog content

Write practical articles around your niche, problems, workflows, comparisons, and implementation guides.

Examples:

• If you sell observability software, write about webhook failures, cronjob monitoring, and alert fatigue.
• If you sell a niche CRM, write about lead tracking workflows for that exact industry.

Bonus - you can repurpose these and post on socials too.

Backlink building

Once your site has a few useful pages, start getting backlinks from relevant places.

This can mean:

• getting listed on partner pages
• writing guest posts
• getting featured on founder podcasts
• asking integration partners to link back

Sidenote - feel free to ignore product listing pages. They are the ones that charge to place your product on their site for a small fee, or wait for 1-2 weeks for your tool to show up on their site.

These websites advertise high DR but that DR doesn't translate to backlink authority for your site.

AIO specific strategies

AI Overviews and LLM based search are changing how people discover products.

That means your articles need to be:

• specific
• easy to scan
• based on real experience
• written in a way that answers narrow questions clearly

You want pages that answer things like:

• "how to setup audit logs for a small saas"
• "best crm for co-working space"
• "how to monitor failed webhooks"

Layer this with backlink building. Get featured in listicles on 3rd party websites, eg best CRM for founders, etc.

Tool pages

Tool pages are underrated.

Simple free tools can rank well, get backlinks naturally, and introduce people to your product.

Examples:

• keyword extractor
• ROI calculator
• CSV formatter
• invoice template tool

These pages often do better than generic "what is X" content because they solve a specific problem immediately. And if you're looking for inspo, ask ChatGPT recommendations for tool pages for your product.

Closing thoughts

The mistake most founders make is thinking GTM is a launch week activity.

It isn't.

GTM starts before launch, and for a B2B SaaS founder, that's where a huge part of the battle is won. If you get the planning, positioning, and channel strategy right early on, everything else becomes easier.

If you're just starting out, keep it simple:

• position narrowly
• do some build-in-public
• monitor real conversations
• write useful SEO pages consistently

You don't need a massive marketing machine.

You just need a clear product, a clear audience, and enough discipline to keep showing up in the right places.