Going to Market

This is a typological theme organising four competing answers to the question ‘how does a product win its market?’ — synthesised from April Dunford on Product Positioning, April Dunford on Sales Pitch, Christopher Lochhead on Category Design, the Better Trap, and Languaging, Geoffrey Moore on Crossing the Chasm, the Technology Adoption Lifecycle, and B2B Go-to-Market, Arielle Jackson on the Art of Building Legendary Brands, Emily Kramer on B2B Marketing, the First Marketing Hire, and Fuel vs. Engine, Ethan Smith on Answer Engine Optimisation, LLM Search, and the Citation Playbook, Jeanne DeWitt Grosser on Go-to-Market Engineering, the Buying Journey as Product, and Building Sales Teams Engineers Trust, Claire Butler on Figma's Go-to-Market and the IC-First Growth Model, Andy Raskin on Strategic Narrative and the Power of Movement Thinking, Barbra Gago on Category Creation, Rebranding, and Opinionated Software, and Lulu Cheng Meservey on Making Ideas Spread, Cultural Erogenous Zones, and Going Direct.

The organising axis

Four positions recur across the wiki on what makes a product win buyers. They are not fully incompatible — each assumes a specific starting condition — but they give meaningfully different answers to the first question a founder must answer before writing a word of copy or hiring a salesperson.

Where all four agree. You must choose a specific buyer and a specific frame. Untargeted launching — building for ‘everyone’ and letting the market decide — is not a go-to-market strategy; it is the refusal to make one. Every practitioner in this wiki locates failure at the same point: the founder who mistakes a good product for a reason buyers will find, evaluate, and choose it.

Where they diverge. The four positions disagree on whether the frame is something you find (relative to an existing category) or something you design from scratch; on whether the primary sequence runs from positioning to messaging or from narrative to category; and on whether the locus of demand is controlled at the moment of sale or upstream in the buyer’s information environment before anyone picks up a phone.

Position 1 — Positioning-first: you control the frame the buyer evaluates you in

April Dunford‘s five-step Product Positioning framework starts from a brute observation: roughly 40% of B2B deals are lost not to a competitor but to ‘no decision’ — meaning the buyer defaulted to status quo because they could not see how to choose confidently. The primary work of go-to-market is therefore not persuasion but orientation. Give buyers a frame; remove decision paralysis; make the choice legible.

The sequence is fixed: competitive alternatives first (including status quo, which is almost always on the short list), then differentiated capabilities, then the value those capabilities enable, then the customers who care most about that value, then — last — the market category that makes the value obvious to them. Starting from category, or from ‘why do people love us?’, leaves no way to evaluate whether the chosen frame is right. April Dunford on Sales Pitch extends the framework into the pitch itself: the first section of any sales narrative is a market-education segment (insight → landscape of alternatives → agreed selection criteria) that gives the buyer the conceptual tools to say yes. Forty to sixty per cent of B2B purchase processes end without a decision; the JOLT Effect research Dunford cites shows FOMO tactics make indecision worse, not better. The correct response is to teach the buyer how to buy.

Arielle Jackson’s complementary 3P brand framework — Purpose, Positioning, Personality — applies the same logic to brand identity. Positioning in Jackson’s model starts with concentric audience circles (TAM down to model persona), then problem, then current solution, then benefit statement. Her ‘bar test’ is that the benefit statement should sound like something a human says at a bar, not a homepage copywriter: the H1 and the ideal word-of-mouth referral sentence should be the same line. Brand name choice, visual identity, and personality all flow downstream from that settled benefit statement. See Arielle Jackson.

Andy Raskin’s strategic narrative adds a narrative layer above positioning: name the shift from an old game to a new one, establish the stakes, define the rallying-cry mission, then present the product as the tool that equips the prospect — now recast as the hero — to win. The prospect is the protagonist; the product is a prop. Raskin argues this is not a sales-deck trick but the appropriate level of abstraction for go-to-market strategy: the narrative is the bar for roadmap, hiring, and fundraising, not just the pitch.

Position 2 — Category creation: refuse the existing frame entirely

Christopher Lochhead builds from a single empirical observation: in US venture-backed technology (2000–2015), one company in each category earns approximately 76% of total category market capitalisation. Accepting an existing category frame means competing for the remaining 24%. The dominant go-to-market strategy, he argues, is therefore not to position better within an existing category but to design the category itself.

Category Design operates through three moves: frame (restate the problem in a way that makes the incumbent solution obviously inadequate), name (create new language — ‘languaging’ — that encodes the new frame in vocabulary buyers now use), and claim (execute category marketing consistently enough that your company becomes synonymous with the category you created). The company that creates the category’s language wins it: Starbucks’ ‘venti/grande/latte’ created price differentiation by moving the category of what was being purchased; OpenAI’s vocabulary for generative AI now owns the conceptual field. Christopher Lochhead on Category Design, the Better Trap, and Languaging calls the alternative the Better Trap: building an incrementally better version of an existing solution generates no demand because ‘a known problem with a known solution produces no new category economics.’

Barbra Gago’s Miro experience illustrates the threshold condition for category creation: a buyer budget line must not yet exist, customers must not yet have settled vocabulary for the problem, and competition must be scarce enough that the first mover’s framing can become the default. ‘Visual collaboration’ succeeded; ‘recruiting optimisation platform’ at Greenhouse failed because buyers still called it an ATS and the category never separated from its parent. See Barbra Gago on Category Creation, Rebranding, and Opinionated Software.

The tension with positioning-first. Dunford and Lochhead are sometimes presented as rivals, but they address different starting positions. Dunford’s framework assumes you have a product and need to find the right competitive frame; Lochhead’s assumes you should question whether the frame itself is worth accepting. Product Positioning notes Lochhead’s own summary: ‘positioning in the competitive-comparison sense is category design for the cowards.’ Both practitioners would agree, however, that the enemy is the same: accepting by default the frame someone else has set.

Position 3 — Adoption sequencing: cross the chasm before the mainstream

Geoffrey Moore‘s Technology Adoption Lifecycle is the third position, and in some ways the most operational. The question is not what frame to use but when and for whom. The five buyer types — technology enthusiasts, visionaries (early adopters), pragmatists (early majority), conservatives, and sceptics — each require a fundamentally different sales motion. The chasm between visionaries and pragmatists is the critical gap: pragmatists buy by peer reference, and visionary references are useless to them because visionaries make decisions pragmatists would never make.

The corollary is that the right go-to-market sequence is a beachhead strategy: pick one segment small enough to dominate within two years (same geography, same industry, same profession, one compelling use case), reach 30–50% market share in it, trigger partner ecosystem formation, then expand adjacently. Spreading across multiple segments simultaneously never crosses the chasm; no single segment’s reference network reaches depth.

Each stage of the lifecycle requires a mutually incompatible go-to-market playbook. The bowling alley (chasm-crossing) requires suppressing your own product story in favour of deep engagement with the customer’s specific problem — ‘shut the God damn laptop’ is Moore’s instruction. The tornado (mainstream adoption) requires a land-grab standard-product motion that would be fatal in the bowling alley. The common failure is sticking with a mastered playbook after the market has moved on. Product-led growth cannot cross the chasm; it works only in the Main Street expansion phase, where follow-on purchases carry low risk and the pragmatist reference network already exists. See Geoffrey Moore on Crossing the Chasm, the Technology Adoption Lifecycle, and B2B Go-to-Market.

Claire Butler’s Figma account is a direct illustration. Figma ran no sales team for three years; growth was entirely self-serve from individual contributors — designers — who loved the product and championed it within their organisations. The IC-first model works when the target audience has passionate tool preferences, a pre-existing community channel, and high connectivity that makes individual contributors natural super-spreaders. The ‘Tom Factor’ (designer advocates joining enterprise sales calls without a quota) raised close rates; design systems were simultaneously the biggest adoption blocker and the biggest enterprise upgrade driver once unlocked. See Claire Butler on Figma's Go-to-Market and the IC-First Growth Model.

Position 4 — Distribution and demand mechanics: control where discovery happens

The fourth position holds that the upstream question is not what frame to use or which segment to enter first, but whether potential buyers encounter the product at all. Three sources in the wiki address different layers of this problem.

Emily Kramer’s fuel-versus-engine diagnostic cuts the go-to-market function into two binding constraints. Fuel is the content, words, positioning, and creative that add value to buyers. Engine is the channels, distribution, operations, and tracking that deliver fuel to the right people. Most founders with strong products have a fuel surplus and an engine gap: excellent content that no one reads, or compelling positioning that lives in a document no one distributes. The first marketing hire must address the binding constraint, not the easier one; product marketing is usually the correct first hire because it spans both dimensions. See Emily Kramer on B2B Marketing, the First Marketing Hire, and Fuel vs. Engine.

Lulu Cheng Meservey’s Cultural Erogenous Zones concept addresses the distribution multiplier: every target audience has topics about which it feels intensely. Communications that locate these pressure points and connect the product to an existing, unarticulated conviction travel faster and require less persuasion than communications that ask buyers to form a new belief. Substack’s appeal to journalists worked not because it installed a new belief about newsletters but because it connected to a live nerve — frustration with editorial control. The same mechanism governs viral brand campaigns and category-defining thought leadership. See Lulu Cheng Meservey on Making Ideas Spread, Cultural Erogenous Zones, and Going Direct.

Ethan Smith’s Answer Engine Optimisation addresses the newest layer: LLM answer engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini) are now a discovery surface for buyers before any human sales contact. The mechanics differ from search engine optimisation in two ways that matter for go-to-market. First, citation count determines ranking in LLM answers, not citation rank — a new company mentioned across ten Reddit threads can outrank an incumbent with a single first-position page. Second, query length averages roughly 25 words, not six; buyers are asking decision-support questions before reaching a vendor’s website. Early-stage companies can win the LLM layer before they could win organic search. At Webflow (a client): LLM traffic converted at 6× the rate of Google traffic. See Ethan Smith on Answer Engine Optimisation, LLM Search, and the Citation Playbook.

Jeanne DeWitt Grosser adds the agentic layer: as software commoditises, the experience of being sold to becomes a competitive differentiator. The Go-to-Market Engineer — typically a former sales engineer who writes code — shadows the top performer in a GTM function, encodes their workflow into an AI agent, and redeploys humans to higher-value work. At Vercel, one engineer spending six weeks automated the inbound SDR qualification workflow, maintained lead-to-opportunity conversion at human parity, and redeployed nine of ten SDRs to outbound. The agent costs roughly $1,000 per year. The structural implication is that go-to-market operations are increasingly software products and should be managed with the same iteration discipline: the ‘lost-bott’ (automated deal-loss analysis) disagrees with AE self-reporting on cause of loss roughly as often as a code review disagrees with a developer’s confidence in their own diff. See Jeanne DeWitt Grosser on Go-to-Market Engineering, the Buying Journey as Product, and Building Sales Teams Engineers Trust.

Where the positions genuinely differ

The deepest conflict is between category creation and positioning-first. Lochhead holds that accepting an existing category frame concedes the most important decision in go-to-market — who defines the problem — to someone else. Dunford holds that positioning is the correct move for most companies most of the time, and that category creation is expensive market education that founders underestimate. The resolution is partly empirical (the 76% statistic applies specifically to venture-backed US tech 2000–2015 and may not hold in adjacent conditions) and partly diagnostic: Gago’s three tests for category creation — no buyer budget line, no settled customer vocabulary, scarce competition — are a useful gate.

The second conflict concerns sequencing versus simultaneity. Moore insists that each lifecycle stage requires a different and mutually incompatible playbook; Figma’s IC-first model ran a different logic (earn IC love continuously, enable organisational spread as a downstream consequence) that does not map cleanly onto the bowling-alley beachhead. Figma’s model required a specific precondition — a passionate, connected IC community — that Moore’s framework assumes does not exist in B2B pragmatist markets. Both are right within their domain; the error is applying either as universal.

A third tension runs through all four positions: whether the primary work of go-to-market is controlling the buyer’s frame of evaluation (Dunford, Lochhead) or ensuring that buyers who would choose you actually encounter you (Kramer, Smith, Grosser). The answer is not ‘both simultaneously’ — the binding constraint changes at different stages, and diagnosing it correctly is itself the core go-to-market skill.