Go to Market Best Practices with Richard White

Since its founding in 2020, AI notetaker application Fathom has gained rapid traction. The startup announced it had raised a $4.7 million seed round earlier this year. Additionally, the application, which was developed exclusively for the Zoom Marketplace, is currently the #1 app on the platform. 

Fathom Founder and CEO Richard White attributes Fathom’s early success to the startup’s go-to-market model. The company landed on a bottom up model early on and the model informed much of their strategy. 

“We thought about go to market and distribution at about the same time we came up with the product itself,” White says. “Knowing your go to market model really drives a lot of product decisions, as well as marketing decisions and team composition decisions.”

On April 12, White hosted a webinar for Founders Network members where he provided different go-to-market models in tech and how deciding on a go-to-market model early on can greatly benefit startups.

Here’s a sneak preview of White’s experience in the startup community and what it taught him about go-to-market best practices.

To learn more about different go-to-market models in tech and how deciding on a go-to-market model early on greatly benefits a startup, see if you qualify for membership and check out the webinar from April 12.

Learning from experience

White has decades of experience as a startup founder. He founded one of his first endeavors, UserVoice, in 2007 and still serves as chairman of the board more than 14 years later. That experience taught him valuable lessons about the benefits and pitfalls of various go-to-market models. 

“We did every go to market strategy,” White says. “We started as a freemium tool. We did bottom up and at some point we pivoted and did top down. We didn’t have a hypothesis early on. We just built a product and it worked.”

Strategy first

Startup journeys tend to follow a similar trajectory. Founders come up with a product, they hire a team to build and market that product, and then they go to market. At Fathom, White approached things differently. He says he had a clear picture of the startup’s go-to-market strategy from the start. 

“We know with Fathom, we’re bottom up. It makes everything easier,” White says. “Our team is all engineers and success people because all we’re trying to do is bottom up and word of mouth and that means we need high quality customer care. On the product side, we knew we were word of mouth so we optimized for the best single player experience we could build. If I was going to do top down sales I would focus immediately on team level features and functionality because I’d have to go sell this to a team. 

“Without knowing our go-to-market model, we would have spread our bets across everything. We would’ve done a little bit of single user stuff, a little bit of growth stuff, and a little bit of team stuff. That’s a common thing I see people do. They go shallow in a lot of stuff.”

Pick a lane

In addition to landing on a go-to-market model early, White recommends being precise about your channel. He says founders often look at successful companies and try to reverse engineer their success, but they often miss the point. For example, while a company like Hubspot does it all today, they only did inbound marketing at the start.

“When it comes to go to market, there’s a lot of folks who want to do everything,” White says. “If you look at a large company, they do everything. They do social, ads, partnerships, events, etc. But that’s because at that stage, you’ve raised enough money, you might as well do all the things. But if you look in the beginning, almost every company only had one channel and that’s what helped them get off the ground.  It’s hard to execute multiple channels. Usually it’s one channel that you get growth from in the beginning.” 

At his webinar, White covered:

• The benefits and challenges of different GTM models
• The factors to consider when choosing a go-to-market model
• What research to conduct before deciding on a go-to-market strategy
• How GTM strategy is different from a product launch

To learn more about different go-to-market models in tech and how deciding on a go-to-market model early on greatly benefits a startup, see if you qualify for membership and check out the webinar from April 12.