GTM Strategy — Go-to-Market for Bootstrappers

Distribution strategy for founders who fund from customers, not VCs. No SDR army, no $50K/month ad budget, no "growth team." This is GTM for operators: find the buyers, reach them profitably, convert them repeatedly, compound over time.

Philosophy

Distribution is the bottleneck. Read .claude/skills/_shared/philosophy.md for the full framework. Code is cheap — the question is never "can we build it?" but "can we reach the people who'll pay for it?"

Bootstrapped GTM is different from funded GTM:

• No burning $200K/month on ads to "figure out" channels. Every dollar of CAC must pay back.
• No hiring 5 SDRs and "seeing what sticks." Distribution must be founder-driven early.
• No buying growth with VC money. Revenue funds everything.
• Channels must compound — avoid channels that scale linearly with spend unless the unit economics are rock-solid.
• Speed of iteration > quality of planning. Run the test, don't write the strategy doc about the test. The meeting to discuss a channel takes longer than testing the channel.
• Action bias always: Build the landing page, don't write the deck. Send the cold email, don't plan the outreach sequence. The permission loop, the polish cycle, and the planning phase all cost more than the prototype. Default to doing.

Competition validates distribution paths. If competitors are acquiring customers, they've already proven which channels work. Study them. Use their playbook. Then out-execute with better economics (lean ops, no bloat, profitable pricing).

Reference Books