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About Maja Voje

Maja Voje helps companies build and execute winning go-to-market strategies. She is the bestselling author of Go-To-Market Strategist. Maja spent 15 years working in growth and marketing across the spectrum of high-profile unicorns and enterprises such as Google, Rocket Internet, Bayer, and Heineken to scale-ups and over 800 startups.

One thing became painfully clear: 

74% of products fail not because the products are bad but because of GTM mistakes. 

And even average products succeed if the plan is solid. 

And that became Maja’s mission: How to give great products the fighting chance they deserve. 

Maja invented the GTM Strategist method and created GTM Power Hour, GTM Checklist, and many other resources. That helped thousands of companies to thrive in their go-to-market endeavors and focus their resources on where they have the highest chance of winning.

In her career, Maja Voje has helped several companies invest up to $10-25 million and scale from $20 million to $60-100 million in yearly revenue. She studied at Said Business School, Oxford University, Wirtschaftsuniversität in Vienna, and the Shanghai Institute of International Trade.

Episode Highlights

Links and resources

• GTMStrategist.com: Maja Voje’s website
• Early Customer Profile (ECP) Archetype: Free resource from Maja Voje’s site to help you develop your early customer profile 
• GTM Checklist: Maja’s free checklist to evaluate and refine your go-to-market strategy and actions
• Go-To-Market Strategist: Maja’s bestselling book on go-to-market strategy 
• Clay– A data enrichment tool used to identify and build lists (e.g., marketers in manufacturing) for outreach and customer profiling.
• Techstars – A startup accelerator that supports founders through mentorship and funding, particularly useful for enterprise B2B startups breaking into tough markets.
• Substack – An online publishing platform that Maja used to launch her first AI copilot product and build initial traction.
• Hacker News – A social news website favored by tech communities, used for launching products and testing early interest.
• Reddit – An online community forum where early traction for AI tools and other startups can be generated through participation in niche subreddits.

Interview Transcript

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Hello Maja. Welcome to Invisible Ink. We’re so excited to have you here.

Maja Voje: Oh my God. It was about time, wasn’t it? I’m so hyped to meet your community.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Fantastic. I love your book. I should just tell you, I ordered the paperback too. I was reading it again in preparation and I decided I needed both the Kindle and the paperback version. It’s the best book I read on go to market strategy which is why I’ve been so persistent.

Maja Voje: I wanted to hear that. And you have read plenty, huh?

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Yeah

Maja Voje: Knowing you, you are a very studious person.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: I am a bookworm. So anyway, let’s just jump right in.

Understanding Go-to-Market Strategy

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: This “go-to-market strategy” is, like, a very nebulous term. Different people mean different things, but you are very specific in what you mean by “go-to-market strategy.” So let’s just jump into that. How do you view “go-to-market strategy,” and what’s critical about that for you?

Maja Voje: So I see it as your best attempt to align six elements that are mission-critical when you are conquering new markets where you attempt to do this. So the first one is market—knowing the competition, knowing what’s up there. The second one is just like your ideal customer profile—and later on, we will touch upon my very special definition of it that “early” should come before “ideal.” Then we definitely have to be considerate of product—that it delivers the value added to the ICP that we have in mind. Later on, we should know how to say this, how to present this to our audience. So that’s positioning and messages. And nevertheless, we have to charge money for it.

Huh. That’s a good idea. So it’s pricing. And then we need more users. Then we need to figure out how to build a growth and sales system around this.

So in the beginning, we are operating with a lot of unknown unknowns, right? And we can make a very informed attempt based on our research but the beauty happens once you are actually there on the market, testing all these assumptions and you will learn a lot when you are learning by doing.

And just like in terms of go-to-market, I know that a lot of people are mistaking it for the launch whereas the go-to-market literally has four stages. First one is problem-solution fit. We won’t be tackling problem-solution fit today—this is a topic for some other guests. Then we have product-market fit, meaning that like, your product can actually, like, deliver the value to customers predictably.

Well, and what is very problematic, I think, for the founders that are listening to this podcast is go-to-market fit. So that’s a beautiful moment when things suddenly align and you no longer have to worry where your next customer is coming from. You have literally built a reputable and scalable way to acquire customers, and scaling is a little bit further ahead. So today, we’ll talk about product-market fit and go-to-market fit.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Fantastic. That looks great.

So before we jump into it, as an expert looking into this, what are the signs when somebody has a good go-to market strategy? Are there telltale signs of a good go-to market strategy?

Maja Voje: So first of all, if somebody says that their go-to-market strategy is LinkedIn, I’m worried. Like, that’s definitely not a go-to-market strategy as we learned already. There are several elements that you need to apply in your go-to-market strategy and that’s more than the channel. So that’s the first thing.

And the other thing, which is often very problematic, is that people are just, like, mistaken for marketing and sales, which is also not the case, as we know now. Because in reality, in bigger organizations, who is probably in charge for go-to-market? It’s RevOps. These are product managers, product marketers. But in early stages, these are usually founders and it’s such an important part of your job because this is how you keep the lights at the office on.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Got it. So you touched on a really important point, which is early on it’s the founders and in many cases they’re bootstrapped, right? So I know we’re goin to get into the six elements.

But before we do that, is there a high level piece of advice or some pointers that you want to give to bootstrapped founders that’ll help them come up with a more effective go-to market strategy when they don’t have a lot of money and the money to hire a team?

Maja Voje: So we can be super tactical about this. I actually prefer to use free channels early in the early stages. Why? Because, if everything else fails, you can still buy users.

But ideally, you are solving a problem big enough that people will actually care for. If you are presenting your product in online communities, for example, or if you’re talking at events, and there are social media to use in order to promote your product and you can always ask for recommendations and do, like, warm interest and stuff like that, right?

So a lot of time I do hear this argument of just, “But we don’t have the budget,” and, “I don’t know how to do this,” or something like that. I didn’t know how to do this as well. Like, I literally had to learn that myself. But I learned because it is mission-critical, and as you are just like, learning this stuff, I think that it eventually makes you a better boss because you speak the language, and you can actually, like, monitor and manage people better. So this investment definitely pays off.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Love it.

Misconceptions About Go-to-Market

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: So, you talked about several of the misconceptions—that LinkedIn is a go-to-market strategy, marketing, sales is go-to-market. Is there one overarching misconception that you see trips up founders over and over? Like, is there one thing?

Maja Voje: So we already mentioned it, but it’s like mistaking it for the launch, and I was doing a bunch of Meta advertising for my newest product, Go-to-Market Checklist, and I actually saw that a lot of people on Facebook and Instagram do not even know what go-to-market is when we test it. Like, when we split test it, go-to-market and launch actually performed better for the sales.

So I was like, we still have to learn a lot in order to just make this term mainstream. But there is another important point that I have to stress immediately, which is: go-to-market is going on all the time in the organization. If you really think about this, it’s not only launching the product for the very first time, but as you are growing—remembering the stages that we talked about previously—you are opening new ICPs, so you are targeting other people.

You might be expanding geographically, so to open new markets like new countries. And last but not least, your product will evolve. So you might launch a new feature, then there might be another product in this family or something like that. So it’s a really ongoing process—not this one magic moment in time that we call launch.

Market Segmentation and Competition Analysis

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: I love it. So that’s a fantastic setup for your whole framework. So let’s just dive in.

So you mentioned that the market is the first thing that is the most important. So what is the right approach? How do you look at the market? How do you look at approaching, segmentation and approaching, and how should a founder think about that?

Maja Voje: Right. Some people would say that I’m a little bit too obsessed with competition analysis, but I very much like to know what or who I am competing against, right? Coming from your knowledge of ICP, we should also be very laser-focused on competitive alternatives that are relevant to them. Because if we just do this desktop research—like Google who does something that we do—we might come up with very wrong answers sometimes, and that happens a lot if you’re launching something really innovative like an AI product or something.

You would be competing against services, or just like doing this job yourself, or pretending that it exists. So it’s mission-critical to align your understanding of the competition arena to the factors that your ICP—like your persona—actually cares about.

The second thing, which is super important when it comes to the market, is that people have a lot of problems narrowing down their target market. And I get why. Because I’m a founder myself and I would like to change the world. I would like to help everybody. But if I spread my already limited resources towards multiple different segments, I won’t generate the critical mass—I won’t get that far, right? So it’s in my interest to really focus, to do the research and the scoring of these opportunities.

Previously, strategy could be seen as just like allocating limited resources against unlimited opportunities. So it’s your job in this type of market research to find your best bet. You are searching for this tiny little market segment, which is called a beachhead segment, and it fits four criteria.

The first one is that this type of profile needs to solve this problem now—not next quarter, not in a year but now. Like literally, now is the time, because you have three to six months to make it or break it.

Then the second one, super important if you’re bootstrapping, is that this part of the market needs to demonstrate some sort of willingness to pay. And this is a terrible mistake if you are not taking this into consideration early on because I know teams that have generated 7,000 users organically, just to see that nobody among them would pay for this type of solution, right? So the earlier you can validate that, the better for you.

Then for the third part of just what is important in your early segmentation efforts—it is your proximity to that specific target market. So Shubha, if we go and try to sell something to construction workers now, would we be very successful? Maybe you would.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: I wouldn’t.

Maja Voje: Okay so, probably not our best chance. We don’t know that market. We don’t know anybody there. We don’t know their lingo. We don’t know where they hang out. So we should be having some sort of proximity, and last but not least, this early segment should be selected in the way that it produces relevant evidence of traction meaning testimonials, case studies, and just like good references that you can mention in your future sales calls.

So that’s when somebody, for example, from the hotelier industry asks you, “Yeah, okay, have you been doing any work or in hospitality?” and you are not, we have been working with newspapers and with secretaries. No problem, we got you covered because people will want relatable references when you are moving upmarket.

So that, in a nutshell is the logic, how we do early segmentation, and it is very, very, very difficult to just go and decide and stick to this decision for a quarter or two, without having any evidence. So the best recommendation that I can give to any founder is: Test different segments.

If you think that your target audience could be moms, but also teachers, and then you might have some sort of self-improvement books, go and test it. Don’t guess. Don’t just say, “Oh, I like the mom segment. They are very friendly. Let’s rock and roll.” Just do some initial work to validate if this segment is responding to your value proposition. And that would be like my honest advice to you guys.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: I love it. So I have just one on that which is, there’s this: accessibility and proximity, which I totally get. And then there’s also the question of is this really an- Now I come from a finance mindset, so I’m always looking at what’s the size of the opportunity? Right? So does that figure it all into your, how you look at market opportunity, and if so, how does it.

Maja Voje: So, in terms of growth prospects, I am trying to just have these sanity checks that this is not like some dying niche market, that it is like a proxy of a bigger market. So that’s kind of an assumption that you have in the beachhead segment strategy: first, you win this tiny piece of the market, and then you move up-market. So that would be like literally framing this decision-making.

I’m so happy that you stressed this. Of course, I don’t want to go and serve a market that maybe has a market size of 50 companies if I’m selling some sort of SaaS that needs volume. If I’m selling engineering solutions for autonomous vehicles, I can. But yeah, if you need mass, mass needs to exist.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Okay, great. And then you talked about evidence, you talked about testing. Can you offer maybe one tip for somebody who’s just a small founding team on the best ways to get that evidence quickly.

Maja Voje: No problem. So, a lot of my AI tools are just like generating early traction in Facebook groups, for example. Some do it on Reddit. Like, then what else is very cool outreach. So you can literally spend time reaching people on LinkedIn without judgment. It’s a technique that works. And look, if you cannot decide on this, like without doing any sort of solid research, go out and test multiple different segments using very inexpensive and very fast-paced methods.

And then reverse engineer the users that are successful. So, either users that are retained or users that have paid for this type of service, because this is literally how you learn. By doing this, it’s one of my favorite tactics that I’m using with practically all AI agents that I’m working with at the moment. Because in that space, such an innovative space, it would be dangerous to guess.

We don’t know what will happen, so we would rather assume that our audience is B2B marketers and then learn that agencies are actually the ones paying for this product, and just revamp our go-to-market strategy to be centered at them. I wouldn’t like to just say, “Here is Magda, let’s find 40,000 Magdas on LinkedIn based on my brainstorming exercise.”

Defining Your Early Customer Profile (ECP)

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Okay, so that brings me to my next question, which is, you talked about ICP, which stands, I think, for Ideal Client Persona. So then that brings us to the second pillar of your framework, which is the customer profile. And you talk about ECP versus ICP. So can you talk about why there’s a difference there and how I, as a founder, should go about finding my ECP versus ICP?

Maja Voje: Sure. So my ECP profile is a very disappointing story. I realized that when your product is just off the ground, you cannot really target the client that you have in mind. For example, if I go and try to pitch, I don’t know what investment banks you’ve been working with? They would be like, you’ll never pass the compliance. You haven’t existed six months ago. Right? So I would have a much better fighting chance if I first just apply this beachhead segment logic and try to win a more approachable segment. But very importantly, this segment should be a proxy of whatever I think.

Let me walk you through an example of Clay. I hope that your audience knows Clay. For those that don’t, it’s a data enrichment tool. So, for example, if you want to have a list of all the marketers who work in manufacturing, you could develop this type of data with data enrichment in Clay. And their beachhead segment was literally outreach agencies. Later on, they expanded to internal teams because those might be interested in what their agencies are using, right? Based on the next traction, they went to super hot, hot startups, OpenAI. I’m even like, I shouldn’t probably call them startups anymore, so unicorns, Anthropic and OpenAI, and now they are looking at corporates.

Why did Clay not start with, we should be used by PepsiCo and McDonald’s? Because nobody would take them seriously when they are starting out. And that’s the whole point of what I’m saying here in the beginning. When you’re starting out, you need users that fit different criteria than later on. So they need to be more risk-tolerant. They need to be very generous with feedback and like work with you when something is wrong. They also have the traits of early adopters. So remember this burning pain point, meaning if you post about this on a Facebook group, like they would be, “Oh my God, why was this not existing already? I’m totally in, I will try today.”

So, this type of signal, and last but not least, early customers are usually smaller and medium companies in most cases. Why? Because the decision-making process is much less complex. For example, you can just convince the founder to take your solution for a spin. Whereas in a big enterprise, you would have to go through compliance.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: So there’s this obvious connection between the beachhead segment and the early customer profile, right? Because they’re coming from the beachhead segment. How do I go about finding them and how do I define my ECP to have as good a shot at success as possible?

Maja Voje: So I would definitely use the beachhead logic, but also what we talked about already from reverse engineering early traction. I would definitely invite these people for the interview and then I would put together, a.k.a, ECP personas.

So I need to be able to understand how to, like, attract more of them. And ideally, based on my initial traction, I would be seeing some patterns. For example, these are like smaller companies with up to 15 employees, with, I don’t know, five people working in marketing, and they work in this and that industry, so that I could make this profile actionable.

By actionable, I mean I would be able to describe it hiring in my outreach efforts, or I could target conferences, events that attract these types of folks, or I could be able to describe it in my advertising tools. So that makes things a little bit more fun. We are just ideally reverse engineering initial traction. But if this is not an option, you can still go and test a couple of segments directly and see what sticks. For example, whenever we are doing outreach, we don’t know, like, the company size, right?

Because we could be a company can have between 10 and 2000 employees. So I would prefer to divide this in batches and just observe what happens within a certain batch, right? I could still be operating with assumptions in this specific scenario, but with early adopters, you really don’t have to overthink too much because it’s very likely that they will find you if you just appear on the places when you are active.

And how you learn that is literally either you have beta users, either you can access some people through your network and you ask them this: Which are the influencers that you are following? What communities are you active in? And nevertheless, what is super important is to get sort of like industry insights. Ideally, you talk to them, you have interviews, but oftentimes, like this media space, how they are obtaining information is hidden. You cannot really do the desktop research on this because there might be enterprise communities, there might be professional groups, there might be, I don’t know, people meeting each other in real life.

So you really need to dive into that. 70% of time in early stages should be spent on defining and redefining and refining ICP, because everything else in go-to-market evolves around that specific decision: positioning, pricing, growth, channels that you are selecting, right? We have already talked about this, and this is, like, one of the biggest things that you have to nail.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: I love it. And one last thing on that because you said it is so important and you said founders have to have an understanding of, here are the things I know about my ECP. Right? How do I start defining those parameters or characteristics of my ECP? What should I be looking at? Because we’ve all seen the ICP where like, oh this is Jim, a manager who’s 30?

Maja Voje: Can we just share like this template ECP framework that I have?

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Yeah. If you can just send it to me.

Maja Voje: Literally everything is there.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Okay, perfect. So what I’m hearing is this has been kind of boiled down to a science and all you need to do is kind of go through that. Okay. Done.

Maja Voje: Based on research, not based on your figments of imagination.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Yes. Well taken and I’m all for empirical proof.

Product as a Medium of Value Exchange

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: So then the next point you mentioned was product, like when you laid out your framework and when I read the book, or when I read the book, I remember this particular phrase you talked about: the product is really a medium of value exchange. Right? I remember that really well. So, what does this mean and why does this matter to a founder as part of their GTM strategy?

Maja Voje: So good. I love this question. So, the product is a bridge.Here am I your user in the present state? That sucks a little bit and makes me miserable, and here is my dream. So, this is my desired future outcome. Product should deliver value from the status that sucks today towards something that I actually want to achieve.

Ideally, I would be like 10 kilograms lighter before summer without having to do any exercise. But that will probably not happen, right? So, we have to make sure that this value delivery that we are pitching, because people can get really wild on promises, especially like in AI. So, if 80% of the time saves 50% of the time and like a cynical, critically manual user will say, “Based on what? What numbers are you pitching here? What is the probability that I will achieve this? What’s going on here?”

So, especially in early stages, we have to back all the claims that we are making with solid evidence, with either social proof, with our data analysis that we have been doing, and ideally, we would come up with some case studies or user testimonials. This is super important because, as I’m explaining, this is from direct marketing and sales concepts, right? So, this is like super, super, super sales heavy. And as you are starting out, you have very little trust, very little credibility, very little traction. So, my best advice to you is: social proof the shit out of everything. If you are saying it, this is how I can back it up.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Meaning that I want those testimonials. I want those references and I want those case studies even from beta users and is there anything pre beta that I can do to even get my beta users?

Maja Voje: Hope you’ll have friends or just like this in online communities. But no, seriously. The majority of us are sourcing beta users from our personal network.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: And I want to ask this one little question about the product. You talked about this like the general case but if you’re talking about large B2B, not technology, but STEM like deep technologies and clean energy things, how does this change? Like would you say anything different or would you add anything to what you just said for those founders?

Maja Voje: Onboarding is a little bit heavier. So I’m working with one of really cool companies in clean climate tech space with AI, of course, because everybody that I work with includes AI these days. But like seriously, their go-to-market journey was literally dumb, like cold emailing corporates, participating in the startup programs.

They were part of Techstars, they were in corporate accelerators. They were working their asses off for like eight months in order to just gain access towards this ICP. And how they secured the first project is literally by hustling and grinding through networks that already exist before somebody said, “Okay, you can apply this technology. Let’s see if it’ll work.”

Then they had to do a lot of work just like onboarding the users. So the architecture that they set up, just like the whole setup of the use case, was very labor intense and this is your investment into securing the first use cases or like pilot setups. Based on that, it’s easier, like it’s so much easier if you are saying like, “Hmm, Nvidia has a working pilot here, so whoever would like to be NVIDIA, right?”

So, it’s a long journey. It’s definitely not a risk-free journey. You will have to do a lot of work in order to open this door. But the good news is that these deals are much more lucrative once you have secured them. So, if that’s your route of choice, patience please, and good luck.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Thank you. And it sounds like everything that you said is the same thing, except multiplied by maybe a factor of 10 or a hundred, and extended in time — which, because of the friction, the uncertainty, and I’m also hearing a piece around multiple parties who have to kind of bless it, and you not knowing who the key decision maker is.

Since we are talking about product, is there a piece around value definition in this product piece for those kinds of businesses? You go in and you say, “Hey, I have this technology. It can do this, and this.” And you start grinding. You get into these online communities, you do all these things. Do you see a chance of changing what the product definition is and what the value is?

Maja Voje: All the time. Oh my God. Literally, the best products that I work with are made to pivot. Like, seriously. The core architecture, like the whole way how the technology works—the engine—is hopefully the same, but there are so many changes. So I’m using this concept, product-market fit cycle, and most of the companies pivot at least five to seven times.

Often, we have to change the product. If we are lucky, we can only change the channel and positioning. But yeah, as you see users interacting with your product and seeing if they get the promised value out or not, and what other features are they missing? Always keep these options open. But hopefully, that won’t be too exhausting for you, so you can still go and try to pitch the same product towards, like, different ICP or something like that—because product changes are quite expensive.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: So it’s fascinating because what you’re telling me almost sounds like if you have to pivot, at least do it within a disciplined framework of a go-to-market strategy where you have a clear understanding of what you’re trying to do and why you’re trying to do it as opposed to, Oh, X, y,  z person didn’t like it and therefore I’m gonna pivot, and now where am I at?

Maja Voje: Yeah, but more often than not especially with technical founders, they would always prefer, and they would prioritize that they should work a little bit more on the product instead of maybe changing something which is going on, like in marketing and sales. So, before going to the product, I love to eliminate all other options to just give it a fair chance within other elements.

So, different ICP, different positioning, different challenge—like, product is something that I am very conservative of changing. But yes, if you have been working on this, like for a quarter, for two quarters or something like that, and there is no tangible movement, that’s an option as well.

Achieving Product-Market Fit

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Perfect. And then one last thing on the product — you mentioned this idea of PMF, product-market fit, as kind of like the holy grail, right? It’s been thrown around a lot. Everybody’s, “Oh, we need to achieve product-market” What is, in your view, the data-based, objective sign that somebody has achieved product-market fit? And how can they accelerate their path — in addition to all the other things from a product?

Maja Voje: Official academic answers to this are retention cohorts, but before we can really observe this at scale to make it statistically significant, there are like product-market fit signals. For example, your users might love the product—like they spoil you with a lot of positive feedback, and recommend others to the product.

That’s definitely a good sign. I would celebrate this one. Then activation—the experience of wow moment—is relatively easy and people get it. So you don’t see a lot of friction between registrations and whoever experienced the wow moment that you defined in the program, in the product. A very radical example of what actually happened to me when I launched my first AI co-pilot, which was a chatbot, in very tight, good terms.

So I launched it on my Substack and my own LinkedIn, and I assigned a certain amount of credits to it, right? So this was the number of credits that I was comfortable paying for. And in a couple of days, I was just like, bombarded with these DMs, like, “Uh, your chatbot is not working.” And I was like, “Should be working.”

I mean, we have been testing it. So I checked it out, and I saw that in a couple of days, people just used all the credits. That was definitely one of the signals of product-market fit as well — that they wanted to have their product back after it accidentally disappeared. But nevertheless, whenever it comes to just, like, product-market fit, I would even rely on a weak signal such as conversion rate.

Because when I’m observing just, like, conversion rate on my landing page, I can clearly see if people are reacting to what I’m pitching or not. And I can already start working on a different positioning or different type of acquisition engine. So I would literally take whatever I can get as good news, as a potential learning, in order for one day to have thousands of users that I could be analyzing with a retention cohort.

And there is one more mechanism that some people love other people hate. It’s called NPS (Net Promoter Score) score. So from zero to 10, how likely would you recommend this product? But I prefer they actually do it, not say that they would do it.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: And would you change any of the PMF criteria that you talked about, this retention cohort, very easy for SaaS type products?

Maja Voje: Yeah, but you need to have a critical mass. You’ll learn about this a little bit later.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: So is there anything different in terms of, like a large technical product of the kind you talked about. Like the clean tech company we’re talking about. How would they know they’ve achieved product market fit?

Maja Voje: I wouldn’t bother too much with this. I would be laser-focused on getting, like, free enterprise clients in the next six months or so. So, a product-market fit signal for me would be that the client would be satisfied with this pilot—that I would get, like, an efficient stamp of “proven”.

I could start monetizing and expanding this account. I wouldn’t be, like, very “we need to measure product-market fit on the sample of free core posts that I have to sell to.”

Pricing Strategies and Willingness to Pay

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Fantastic. I love it.

So then we come to the one that’s my favorite, which is pricing, right? So, all of this makes sense only if you can get money for what you’re doing. So, how one big thing you mentioned early on is this point around willingness to pay. How can you test willingness to pay? And how, especially, can you do it if you’re talking about these large B2B, technical-type solutions that we just referenced?

Maja Voje: Okay, so, I will just be totally frank. What we do in these cases is usually that we are getting some offers from competitors. And as a new player on the market, you are like 20–30%, plus-minus within that range because if there are some direct competitors, people will probably benchmark you against them.

And if you are a smaller company, depending on what type of technologies are you building, this is like a very good anchoring. If this is not available to you, you can, like, literally test this on the sales calls and try to increase price sequentially. So, you first figure out with just, like, this initial price—whatever flows, whatever feels good to say on the sales meeting—because you shouldn’t stumble when you are saying your price.

You should feel super confident, otherwise it won’t go that well. So, whenever you are, like, expanding on the market and making new offers, you can raise the price by 20% and see what’s happening with conversions, right? And if you are still, like, seeing conversion rates which are, like, higher than 30%, you are probably still too cheap. You can still have a little bit of a mess to work with.

And what I love to do, as somebody who’s developing products—this is more, like, for low-end products up to $10K—I just ask on the sales calls, “What’s your budget for this?” Or, “What would be fair to pay?” and try to work within these limits if you have a champion. This is, like, super, super, super easy. Now, for the product-led companies, it’s easier because, again, like, competition usually has prices public, right? And we can use the same type of framing as I was explaining before but we can do a lot of experiments as well.

So, we can literally do early experimentation to test different price points. We can play around with discounts, we can play around with pricing parity for different companies, so that we can really make sure that this data is solid. We don’t have to, like in the previous case, just hope that our anecdotal proof will turn out to be a profitable reality.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Got it. And then, is there anything analytical? So, you talked about the market testing. Is there anything analytical that backs it up to say, here’s where my price should be, what is that conversion point where you say, “I’ve gone too far”? You talked about 30% being too low. What’s too high?

Maja Voje: It depends on the category. Like, seriously, if you want to do legit pricing service, these are like Apple, Grainger. So these are surveys that require like thousands of responses. You can Google that, like how to do the willingness to pay research. You will come up with these usual suspects.

But when you’re doing sales, like 1 on 1, the scale that I would introduce—look, if 80% of your customers are accepting this offer, you are brutally too cheap. This is a terribly high acceptance rate, right? If nobody really cares, if you are like in the 10% of acceptance rate, I would first tackle the positioning problem, how we are doing the sales, and how we are presenting the product.

So this is like something that I wouldn’t tackle as a price point per say, because what I think is the biggest scam in microeconomics are supply and demand curves aka, if you would make it cheaper, people will want it more. This logic is so off. I mean, I don’t want to have cheap cosmetics on my face because I’m afraid that it’ll ruin my skin.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Got it. So I love that. I love the fact that you said don’t go to pricing first.

Positioning Your Product

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Which brings us to positioning, which is what you mentioned. So how do you view positioning and what should this early stage founder be really tightly focused on when they’re positioning their product?

Maja Voje: Cool. I like to start with UVPs and USPs in very simple words. UVP’s Unique Value Proposition, meaning your promise to the customer that you have to be able to deliver. And Unique Selling Proposition is why you, why not a competitor? Why not ignoring this problem? So something that would make them react. Now, I love to start with this. This is what I literally include in all of my product development documentation: UVP, USP’s, everywhere.

Now, I will tell you a very stupid shortcut. You can just put in all your competitors’ websites in an open AI model of your choice. Like I’ve tested it in the cloth in ChatGPT. Sorry, I don’t know. I’m using it on a daily basis and that one didn’t flow. But yeah, you can just look at these companies that have written this, now our product is this and this special. You are a senior product marketer or positioning expert; develop me UVP and USP for this product. And then you go out and test it.

How do you test it? My favorite words for how to do this is with ads. Because with a small ad spend of 500 dollars to maybe 2,000, you can already figure it out. What is the type of presentation of your product that moves the needle statistically relevantly? But if this is not available to you, you can do this on the sales calls as well, right? You are searching for the moments when your prospect is lead-like, where they’re really interested.

So I would definitely want to do this type of sales myself as a founder, that I am seeing the intangibles as well. And it’s very quick to test with outreach as well. So outreach officially doesn’t cost you anything, just the tools and data enrichment. And you can literally test this by sending different types of LinkedIn invites or cold messages, right? So I would be testing my UVP and USP first. This is something that I’m literally obsessed with.

Now, before I do that, there is one other mental framework that would help me a lot. Meaning that what we said in market research is that we are always competing and positioning against something or someone, or doing nothing. I really need to understand what are the competitive alternatives that my customer is considering at the moment? What are the evaluation criteria, how they are making this decision? Where based on scoring these opportunities, do I have a best fighting chance with the product as it is right now, not in five years?

And I’m trying to understand my unique differentiated assets. So what makes me, me? What makes my technology, let me use the word, superior here, in comparison with other competitive alternatives that my ICP is considering? Simple as that. I don’t like to overthink positioning in the early stages because I am yet to meet a team that wouldn’t change it in the first three months once the product actually hits the market. So I take it as a very simple assumption meant to be broken and just, like, robustly test the s**t out of it because that’s the only way how I could be getting any good insights down this line.

What helps is whenever you have this social proof, like testimonials, use cases, or something like that, you can use this language for help, like for significant help when you are defining this stuff. But just, like, reasoning how your customers are describing your product and the value that it delivers to others. So that’s a little bit of a shortcut. This work is daunting. It never finishes. Like, literally, in three months, as your product will get better and you will know more about the market, you would be inclined to change it. But I hope that I at least gave some actionable insights here.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: No, you did, because what I’m takeaway as you were speaking was you need something, but not so much that you waste it. Like yeah, but it’s still objective enough that you can poke holes in it with actual data to test something very concrete, and then you keep refining it quick, like the quick and dirty iterative process. So it works for me at least as a founder and from the founders that I work with.

Growth and Channel Strategies

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: So the last thing I want to talk about in terms of your framework is you talked about growth and channel.

Maja Voje: Finally, this is my area now. The rest I had to learn.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: So, channel is the one where I see founders kind of tripping up all the time because, especially if you’re a technical founder, you don’t know much about it. So, just give us to start with, what’s your first take on what a founder should be thinking about and what should they be focused on when they’re talking about growth?

And, more importantly, what is the right time to be doing that? Because you talked about we have to do all these other things early on—positioning and all of that stuff. So, should I be thinking about channels at the same time, or should I put it off to later when I’ve got some reasonable evidence that I’m on the right track in terms of product-market fit?

Maja Voje: Okay. When I was launching, this was my number one regret: that I didn’t start sooner because I was in the maker mode. I didn’t want to be like a lot on social media and on events because I genuinely felt that that would defocus me so much. Whenever I’m in my ninja, I’m in my ninja. I eat, sleep, and work, and walk my dogs. That’s freaking it. So, once I got to the actual launch, like to the big launch that I was working one year towards, I was scared s**tless because, like, literally I didn’t have the audience built and warmed up for the launch. I regretted this choice so much but I also know that it was kind of a necessary choice to just finish the product.

So these are two factors that you need to balance. Whenever you are, aka, building in public, and by this, I don’t mean that you become an obnoxious influencer or LinkedIn, but just like that you are sharing some pictures, sharing some findings, sharing what’s up with the product. You are starting to create a community and just like a group of people will support you because they are cheering for the underdog. I don’t know what else to say here, right? So, it’s your loss if you are not doing this because those people might be your early adopters, or they might know somebody who will be your early adopters.

So, I would genuinely recommend starting the communication three to six months before you ever go and launch. Now, you could be doing sign up for launch, like build a mail list. That’s a very nice idea as well. But it depends on your resources that you have at disposal. I cannot be here and say you should be posting five times a week on LinkedIn to build demand for your upcoming go-to-market mission, because that’s not realistic for most people, right? But just make it once a week, once per two weeks, something which is approximately consistent. And by doing that, we are already creating important marketing and communication and sales assets.

More importantly, we are learning how to do this well because the majority of problems when it comes to channels, it comes with execution. As a founder, especially on a super tight budget, you will more likely than not have to DIY this. So if you are just like there completely burned out after the launch, after all the product works and like then trying to like, oh, and then I should write a LinkedIn status about my launch, this won’t work.

First of all, this status is not going to be very good because you haven’t developed the habit and the muscle, and the organic reach is going to suck because the audience is not nicely warmed up already. So that’s an asset that you definitely want to create.

Now, whenever it comes to channels, so I know that people are thinking, my go-to-market strategy is to post on LinkedIn a lot, to hire a couple of influencers and to go and speak on five podcasts a week. That’s not it. In terms of just making sure that we have a proper systematization of all this confusing landscape of 10,000 channels that are out there, let’s divide them into seven go-to-market motions.

The first one is inbound. That’s you posting about the product on social media, creating blog posts, doing free events, whatever content you can create that would potentially attract some leads. The second one, and we have talked about this a lot already, and I like that you haven’t resisted yet, so maybe you will in the continuation, is outbound.

I always love to say to my founders that there are two ways to get a client. First of all, they can find you, or you tell them you exist. Since I’m a very proactive person, I don’t like to wait for people to magically find me. I prefer to tell them that I exist. So, you send out DMs, you do cold calling, sometimes name mail, and just like making sure that you are talking to your target audience.

Then we have paid. When it comes to paid, people have a lot of prejudices. So, they think that this is going to be super expensive. Yes, if you do it on LinkedIn, where clicks cost like five to seven bucks even, but you can test it really well for product-led growth products even using simple Google ads. One of my teams who launched a symptom checker, which is health, they have literally spent $200 on Google ads in order to attract 1,500 users. So, paid does not have to be a $10K budget. You can play around with a small budget if that’s available to you.

Last but not least, when it comes to paid, we need to counterbalance it immediately and say communities. Communities are free to use. The important thing is that you go where the audience is, where your ICP is actually hanging out, and that you are not talking trashcan there, that you’re not like, “Good news! Today we launched this product!” Because that’s a recipe to get banned immediately. You really need to start by adding value in these communities and presenting yourself as a valuable member because otherwise you are a spammer. You are an intruder in the place that they trust and love, and they won’t be very nice to you.

Then we have account-based marketing and sales. So, this is very opposite to outreach. Imagine it in a way. If I’m here and I would like outreaching, I would say, “Here are potential 20,000 companies that could be using my products. Let’s try to see who is interested in this.” But in account-based marketing and sales, we are creating systems of multiple touch points such as email, phone call, LinkedIn message, maybe event, maybe we are liking and commenting on their posts in order to win a portion of very clearly defined accounts.

So, for example, we talked about enterprise beforehand. If my target is, for example, that Mercedes Benz and Tesla Innovation Center and just like a couple of other cars that I’m not familiar with dropping because I don’t know a lot about this… if I’m targeting these types of industries, I would identify decision-makers there and understand, just like decision-making units, multiple decision-makers that are making this decision together.

And I would be developing a very targeting plan, how to, in a longer period of time, develop a relationship with them, earn their trust, and potentially get them on a meeting. Because if I go now and I try to call outreach to a CEO of McDonald’s, I won’t get that far. Really? I won’t. I’m lucky, but that doesn’t happen a lot.

So, last but not least, we do have a poster child of what everybody wants, which is product-led growth, meaning that the product would actually be so awesome that people would recommend it and cover it and bring other members into this. Well, the problem with this one is that it still requires some input to the funnel.

So, you need to bring people to your own product, and luckily, if everything works and the product is amazing and you nail the users, you can unlock this lever of exponential growth. But I haven’t seen a single use case where people would be like very successful in developing growth loops and just like these types of mechanisms from the scratch.

So, you first need to acquire your users traditionally with other go-to-market motions that we have talked about. So, this is how I frame this question of channel. It’s never like almost never a single channel. I mean, I know the teams who have been like number one on Hacker News, for example, or Reddit, and like all these buzz came from a single channel. But more likely than not, it is a combination of channels and go-to-market motions that we talked about.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: So just to summarize the channel, it sounds like early on you have to be doing the inbound. Like I have you. You have to be out there on LinkedIn and your channels are going to start growing and stacking up along with the development of your own path.

Maja Voje: Well, you don’t have to. I know a lot of teams that have been successful with outbound alone. So in that case, you just need a LinkedIn profile. If you’re a B2B company that will look semi-decent and keep your jobs updated.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Got it. But there’s still the sequence, right? Like you start with the smaller things, the $200 ads, when you’re still testing out your value proposition and then you kind of invest more and more as you are, you get more certain and you’re more sure about it.

Maja Voje: Yes and no because if you are playing the enterprise game, you would have to go with account based sales and marketing already. Right? So some of the things are really product specific but like in theory, you are right. Like first we are doing a lot of stuff and like nothing is really adding up so far. And then you see this engines working and producing better results.

Experimentation and Testing Mindset

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Awesome. The last thing I want to talk about in terms of, topic is you know, this thought around experimentation and testing, right? So I’ve heard that theme throughout every single thing you’ve said which is what frankly I like the most about your approach because it’s very evidence-based.

Maja Voje: This is how I shake off all the responsibility as a founder. I don’t know. I will test it.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: So walk me through. Like for a founder, what are the basics of inculcating this experimentation mindset and how should I be thinking about how I can develop a muscle and a skillset around experimentation for my go-to-market strategy? If you can just give us the Cliff Notes.

Maja Voje: It’s more of a mindset. So, first of all, we have to be okay with scientific methods. Instead of us and our ego making all the decisions based on previous work experience and general opinions, we have to come up with the peace of mind that, in the beginning, there are so many unknown unknowns, and that’s okay. You don’t have to pretend that you know stuff, which you don’t. It’s better to go out there and generate some evidence, some sort of information, intelligence, on which you can make this decision, right?

So, we have to be okay with the idea of embracing uncertainty, and we have to believe that experimentation works. If that’s not an issue, fine, you can build successful companies without this as well. Allegedly. I haven’t done it, but the thing is, after you’re okay with the general mindset, imagine it as just like this typical scientific method. A lot of people here are from science and from technology, and obviously, I don’t have to quote Francis Bacon for you, but it’s literally you formulating hypotheses based on your observation of the market, whatever is going on in your product analytics, what your next competitors are doing, and maybe some sort of role model companies that you have, plus general ideas like human inception activity.

So, you have a bunch of hypotheses, and in order to just select the ones that will most likely move the needle in your business, you need a prioritization framework. How will you select the ideas to test based on 1,000 ideas that you think you should be doing? So, in order, your prioritization frameworks—I don’t have any favorites—but the simplest one to apply to start with is ICE, work by Sean Ellis. So, it’s impact. Confidence is, if I have an idea, I would score it one to five, from one to ten, whatever you want, based on three different criteria so that I can decide which ideas do I actually want to take for a spin. And then it comes to experiment design.

And this is where things get really messy in go-to-market, because more often than not, we cannot operate within the measures of statistical significance. We can, if we spend the ass out of the people or do a little bit of budget testing or something like that. So, if you are not in the position to do that, you will just have to learn to live with the fact that you cannot perfectly apply the experimentation method, but that you can at least generate some evidence of what could be more true than another thing, right? So, don’t seek perfection would be my favorite type of advice here because you can work with what you have pragmatically as that, and based on that, we learn and iterate.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Yeah, sorry to interrupt there. What’s good enough? Like knowing that I don’t have the budget, the $30,000, how do I get to good enough? Like is there a sign, is there a rule, a guideline?

Maja Voje: I would love to present it to you if there would be, but look, if you see like a very tangible difference. For example, when we tested positioning for the Go to Market strategies book, my initial idea as a dumbest founder was to write from overwhelmed to hyper focused because I thought that it beautifully captures the essence of the mindset of my founder.

Little did I know that it doesn’t mean anything to anyone. So when we ran ads and the budget back then was like up to a thousand bucks, I mean, it was not a huge budget. We were split testing like this. My idea, my ego founder idea against what we described as like more valuable positioning.

So my team member who’s in charge of the funnel said, like, the promise that we should be giving to people is how to get to profitable traction fast. Preferably, we would specify the time unit, but from strategy to profit is a clear idea. So from overwhelmed to hyper-focused had negative ROI and the conversion rates on the website were below 2%. So that’s definitely not something that I wanna keep.

However, when we had the refined positioning as the other variable, the conversion rates on organic were eight to 9%. When we added paid, it was like six to five, and I kind of saw two x differences between those. Was it super statistically significant? No, but I feel very comfortable about using this type of refined messaging and positioning because it consistently performs better than my initial idea. That was a painful thing for me to learn that I’m not the smartest, but I like to make profitable traction too so I had to live with this.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Fantastic. You’ve told us a lot, so I want to round out our conversation.

Top Three Actionable Steps for Founders

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: If you had, maybe the top three things regardless of where I am in the early stage as a founder. I may have already done certain things. Maybe I’m rethinking some of that. Give me three actionable steps I can take now to get back on track in terms of my go to market strategy.

Maja Voje: Okay, so first of all, you probably know that I have a free template, Go to Market Power Hour. I did a demo, and everything that we have talked about today is presented on one pager so that you can literally apply it to your company. So this is a template that will definitely bring you this overview of what is going on here and what are the parts that you don’t feel specifically comfortable filling in. I am a very focused person, so I always center everything around the objective so I can ask myself on a daily basis, is it mission critical? When I have an initial idea, add additional ideas, and when new opportunities emerge.

So for me, mission critical is achieving the objective for the next quarter or so. I’m committed and this is the only prism that I’m taking my decision to. So yeah. Is this one then like the second one would be to talk to at least like 10 or 20, if you can, customers or prospects on a weekly basis whenever you need more insights.

Because the best copy, the best type of this intelligence that we mentioned again and again. So where they are, how they are seeing your products, what are the questions? Can you watch them use this product in real time? I do believe that as a founder, as long as you are spending face-to-face time or like virtual time with your customers, that you are on a high note, that you will eventually get there and people will help you.

Because look, big corps will never do this, will like big corp, Such as Loom, for example, care about a user who struggles to remove timer from this tool. Not necessarily, but a small startup will, right? So that can be literally your superpower. And last but not least, is to build a lot of resilience.

As we have mentioned again and again in this podcast, there are so many unknowns. There are so many unknown unknowns, and we just need to buckle up and do this work and believe that we can do this over a prolonged period of time without seeing any delayed gratification, like without being immediately rewarding for what we are doing.

So delayed gratification is something that we can hope for, but the reward doesn’t necessarily come. So we have to live with the fact that we will do our best, that this is our mission for the next quarter or so, that we have done everything that we have possibly can in terms of giving it our best shots to literally prioritize and optimize the resources we had and we could obtain towards this vision that we are on.

And last but not least, you mentioned it beautifully, I think in the script or during the conversation but surround yourself with people that are in it to win it with you. Because the majority of our friends will be supremely bored if we start talking about positioning and pricing.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: True for me.

Maja Voje: Yeah, they’re special friends. So, just be around like-minded people. Surround yourself with people who are in it with you, together. Support each other with best practices, with sharing advice, with very honest feedback, because I love to believe it. Whenever I’m doing some sort of testing and people are like, “Hey, great, great, fantastic, locked,” I say, “No, no, no, no, no. Don’t tell me what’s good. Tell me what’s wrong so I can fix it.” This is literally the focus. So, I hope that from this monologue, you get the essentials of a go-to-market strategy.

And last, but not least, try to make it fun as well. Look, if it was easy, anybody could do it, right? My mom could do it. She’s a great woman, but she likes work-life balance a lot, and she is there with her hobbies. So, you would have to commit yourself to this journey. It will feel uncomfortable for some time, but also, the potential reward is exponentially higher than anything else that I can imagine.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Fantastic. This has been an amazing conversation, Maja. I know that all of our founders will love it, so thank you. We’ll definitely recommend your book. I personally think it’s one of the best I’ve read, if not the best on go-to-market strategy.

Maja Voje: Thanks for your Amazon review. This is a stellar one. I love it.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Fantastic. So I’ll be back in touch and I really thank you.

Maja Voje: Yeah. Cool. Take care. Bye.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Bye.