founder_gtm_playbook v1.0.0

name: "founder_gtm_playbook" description: "Build a complete go-to-market plan for a solo technical founder: positioning, the first ten users, launch sequencing, pricing, and founder-led sales. Use when someone says 'go to market', 'GTM', 'how do I launch', 'first customers', 'pricing my product', 'founder-led sales', or needs a GTM plan from scratch." metadata: { "includeInPrompt": true }

Founder GTM Playbook

Purpose

Get a solo technical founder from "built it" to "ten paying users" with one integrated plan instead of five disconnected tactics. This skill covers positioning, the first-ten hunt, launch sequencing, the first price, and founder-led sales as one system, because they break when handled separately: positioning without real conversations is guessing, launches without users to announce to fall flat, and pricing without paying customers is fiction.

Built for agents that run alongside the founder. The founder is the sales team, the marketing team, and the research team until user ten.

Workflow

1. Collect the inputs

Ask for, or infer from context, these seven things. Never invent them:

1. The product in one sentence (what it does).
2. The buyer: a named role inside a named kind of company. "Freelance bookkeepers doing 10+ client payrolls a month" is useful. "SMBs" is not.
3. The pain: the concrete, recent, expensive thing that happens without the product.
4. The current alternative: what the buyer does today. Usually a spreadsheet, a manual process, or nothing. Status quo is the competitor until someone names another product.
5. The price bucket: ~$10/mo (prosumer), ~$100/mo (SMB), ~$1,000/mo (mid-market). Day one is a bet, not an optimization.
6. Channels the founder can actually use: Reddit communities, niche Discords, LinkedIn, X, indie directories, warm network, conferences. Plus their real weekly time budget for GTM.
7. The founder's constraints: no audience, no budget, hates calls, whatever is true. Constraints shape the plan; they are not excuses.

2. Run the positioning sprint

Fill out references/positioning-worksheet.md with the founder. The logic:

• Narrow the segment until the message writes itself. If the positioning could describe three competitors, the segment is too wide. Cut it in half and try again.
• Name the status quo first. "Manual invoice chasing in spreadsheets" beats "other invoicing tools" every time. Most buyers are not choosing between you and a competitor; they are choosing between you and doing nothing.
• Lead with the outcome, not the feature. "Get your weekly report without touching a spreadsheet" is a message. "Automated reporting" is a feature list.
• Run the logo-swap test. Put a competitor's logo on the homepage copy. If it still reads fine, the positioning failed. Start over.
• Proof changes by stage. Early: founder credibility and raw demo. Later: customer quotes, numbers, comparisons. Do not fake stage-two proof at stage one.

3. Build the first-ten roster

Ten specific people, not a channel. Run the funnel math first with bin/gtm_plan.py so the plan is honest about volume:

• Typical planning assumptions (adjustable in the config): 50 to 100 contacted businesses yields 10 to 15 real conversations. Plan for the pessimistic end.
• Every first-ten user gets a personal demo call. No self-serve onboarding polish yet. On the call, set up their real data live. The confidence that a human will fix things is half the sale.
• Outreach is manual and value-first: a specific observation about their situation, one low-pressure question, never a pitch deck. Frame early asks as advice or a free audit, not a sale.
• Follow up. Most first meetings come from the second or third nudge, not the first message.
• Score each conversation on pain, not politeness. A polite "looks interesting" with no scheduled next step is a no. A short call where they describe how they handle the pain today is a yes.
• Charge from day one. A founding rate (discount off the real list price, locked for a defined period, traded for weekly feedback and a case-study quote) filters real intent from politeness. Free-forever users at this stage teach you nothing about willingness to pay.

4. Place the pricing bet

Day one pricing is a learning instrument, not a revenue model. The rules:

• Pick the bucket first ($10 / $100 / $1,000), based on who the buyer is and what the pain costs them. Ask "what does this problem cost them per month?" and price between the cost of their current alternative and the value you deliver.
• Keep it simple: one plan, maybe two. Do not build usage-based billing on day one unless the product is literally metered (APIs, infrastructure).
• Set the real list price first, then define the launch deal against it: 20 to 30 percent off for the first 48 to 72 hours or the first 100 to 200 customers, whichever lands first. Lock the discounted rate for 12 months, not forever. Scarcity must be real and visible; fake countdowns get noticed and cost trust.
• Favor annual billing at launch if cashflow matters more than conversion. A customer who pays upfront funds the next six months of building.
• Revisit pricing after ten paying users. Their questions and objections are the data; nothing else is.

5. Sequence the launch

Do not launch everywhere on day one. Each platform is a different audience with a different bar, and they feed each other:

• Weeks 1 to 2: directories. Submit to 20+ startup directories (BetaList, Uneed, Microlaunch, startup wikis). Low effort, steady trickle, backlinks that help later.
• Week 2: one useful article. A deep, honest write-up on a dev blog or the company blog: what you built, what you learned, what the numbers say. This is the piece with the longest tail.
• Weeks 2 to 3: communities. Reddit, Indie Hackers, niche Discords and forums. Earn it first: answer questions without links for a week, read each subreddit's self-promotion rules, then post as "I built this because X was annoying me." Answer every comment fast; threads die quickly.
• Day 21 to 30: the big launch. One Product Hunt or Show HN launch, not both on the same day. Product Hunt playbook: launch Tuesday through Thursday at 12:01 AM Pacific, 30-second demo, one-line tagline, a genuine maker comment about why you built it, and the founder glued to the comments all day. Ask early users to check it out; never ask for upvotes. You get one good launch per product, so do it after the foundation above exists.
• Cold outreach runs in parallel the whole time for B2B: 5 to 8 hours a week, first customers typically in 1 to 2 weeks. Lightweight SEO runs in the background with a 6 to 12 week payoff horizon.

After launch: monthly useful article, refresh directory listings with new screenshots, collect and show testimonials, write honest comparison posts against the real alternatives.

6. Run the founder-led sales loop

Until ten users, the weekly operating system:

• Two to three batch outreach afternoons per week. One message thread at a time, one question at a time, fixed script so it is not improvised from scratch.
• Async research on the other days: read support tickets, lurk where buyers complain, mine session data. A short daily habit beats a dreaded weekly marathon.
• Every conversation ends with one of three outcomes: a booked next step, a clear no, or a dated follow-up. "Stay in touch" is not an outcome; it is a follow-up with a date.
• Track the funnel weekly in the plan file: contacted, replied, met, trialed, paid. If the top is thin, add outreach hours. If meetings do not convert, fix the demo, not the volume.
• At ten paying users: write the first case study, pick the one channel that produced the most paid users, and double down on it before adding new ones.

Output Contract

A finished run of this skill produces all four:

1. GTM one-page plan (markdown, generated by bin/gtm_plan.py and edited by hand): product, segment, pain, status-quo alternative, positioning statement, first price, first-ten roster, funnel math, 30-day channel calendar, weekly sales loop.
2. Positioning worksheet filled (references/positioning-worksheet.md).
3. First-ten roster: ten named prospects or the ten niches that will produce them, with the outreach script and follow-up cadence.
4. 30-day launch calendar: which platform on which week, what asset ships, who owns each reply shift.

Operating Rules

1. Never invent buyer quotes, market numbers, competitor pricing, or launch results. If a fact is unverified, cut it or label it an assumption with the founder's initials next to it.
2. Every number in the funnel math must come from bin/gtm_plan.py output or be marked as a planning assumption the founder supplied. Defaults in the CLI are documented estimates from practitioner sources (see the sources file); they are adjustable, not facts.
3. Quality over completeness: a plan for one real buyer is worth ten generic positioning statements. If the segment is still "SMBs," stop and narrow it before continuing.
4. Never plan free-forever for the first ten. Founding rates, trials, and beta discounts are fine; charging zero teaches nothing.
5. Do not send outreach, post to communities, or submit to directories on the founder's behalf unless they explicitly ask for that execution. This skill plans; execution is their call.
6. Keep the SKILL.md core tight. Worked examples live in references/founder-cases.md; the funnel-math defaults and their sources live in the CLI's --explain output and the sources file.