01The six blocks
Fill these in order. Skipping ahead is how teams end up with a launch thread for a buyer they never defined.
- 1. Market: the category you compete in and the alternative buyers use today (including doing nothing, or doing it by hand).
- 2. Buyer: the ICP, the user, and who signs off if they are different people.
- 3. Message: the positioning line, three proof points, and the demo that shows them.
- 4. Channel: where the buyer already pays attention. For most AI products, X first.
- 5. Motion: product-led, sales-led, or community and creator-led, and how a visitor becomes a user.
- 6. Metrics: the leading signals for week one and the outcome metric for day 90.
02How to use the GTM strategy framework
Run it as a two hour working session with the founders, not a slide deck. Write one answer per block. Then stress test: does the message make sense to the buyer in block two? Does the channel in block four actually reach that buyer? Does the motion fit the price point?
If two blocks contradict each other, fix the earlier one first. A channel problem is often a buyer problem in disguise.
03AI specific checks
Add these checks for any AI product before you call the framework done.
- Trust: what does the buyer need to see before they let your product touch their data or their customers?
- Durability: does the positioning still hold if a foundation model ships your core feature next quarter?
- Demo: can the value be shown in a short screen recording without narration?
- Cost to serve: does usage based cost fit the pricing you plan to launch with?
04What to skip at the early stage
Total addressable market slides, multi-segment persona maps, and brand architecture. They are not wrong, they are just not the bottleneck before product-market fit. Keep the framework to what changes what you do next week.
05Output
One page, six blocks, an owner and a date on each. Revisit it after launch and again at day 30, when real data replaces guesses.
Fill the six blocks in order, fix contradictions upstream, and keep the whole framework on one page.