Make $5

I just came back from Founders Circle: From Launch to Traction. Go-To-Market Lessons from Founders, a meetup at the Corti office here in Copenhagen. I’ve recently started my own company, and I’ve been trying to semi-commercialize products for a long time, so when I saw a GTM meetup it felt like the right moment to get out. Good excuse to reconnect with some ex-colleagues from Airtame too.

Three founders on stage, moderated by my former colleague Simon:

Why GTM advice breaks down

Listening to all three founders, it became very clear why so much go-to-market advice breaks down, especially at the earliest stage.

What worked for one founder often had nothing to do with what worked for another. And it goes further than that. The same strategy that built one company might completely break another. What looks like a strategy in hindsight often includes timing, repetition, brute force, and some luck. The common thread was the ability to keep going long enough to learn what actually worked for their specific market.

That tells you something about entrepreneurship: it isn’t for everyone.

Every playbook, every manual, every YouTube video, every AI-generated answer about GTM starts to look much weaker once you put a few different founders in the same room. You realize how much of it depends on what you’re building, who you’re selling to, and when you happen to enter the market.

What they did agree on

First, know your user group. Find the niche your product is built for and sell to them as quickly as possible. Don’t be shy about asking for money.

Tony shared a story from the early Uizard days about pricing. They’ve spent a lot of time gathering data, writing graphs and charts to find the right pricing model. What they did in the end could have been a five-minute exercise: just check what competitors are charging and position yourself around that number. Pricing is often not rocket science.

One of the other founders took it further. Your go-to-market strategy should be: “I want to make $5.” Find one customer willing to pay you. The number is arbitrary. It could be $5, it could be $500. The point is to prove that somebody will exchange money for what you’re making. When that happens, find a similar person and see if they’ll buy too.

You don’t need a go-to-market strategy. You need one customer. Once you have that, you find the next one. That’s it.

There was also a lot of discussion about what I’d call social selling, even though nobody used that term. People follow personalities. They buy from a person, not a brand. Posting on LinkedIn, building a community, organizing events in person. All panelists agreed that building your physical network, showing up at events, appearing next to other names in your industry, gets you out there more than any strategy deck.

And then there was value proposition. One of the founders talked about selling the product and later discovering that customers were using features the founder hadn’t checked in months. They’d forgotten those features existed. Customers wanted things nobody planned for. Knowing what you actually solve, and for whom, that kept coming up.

Advice that doesn’t travel

Beyond those points, most of the discussion was specific to each founder’s industry and timing.

Tony from Uizard had a good example. They were one of the first AI design tools on the market, years before the current LLM wave. They’d been positioning themselves in SEO as an “AI design tool” for a long time. When the AI hype hit, they were suddenly dominating search rankings across every related category. His investors had actually advised against the SEO investment. Simon asked the panel about their biggest failures, and Tony turned his into a win: “We invested into SEO. A lot of investors thought that was wrong. But when AI became a thing, it turned into a massive win that brought a lot of traffic and users.”

It’s a great story. But it’s his story. It happened because of one product, at one moment, with one stroke of luck. You can’t copy it.

Most GTM advice is non-transferable. What worked for a design tool acquired by Miro has nothing to do with what will work for your B2B SaaS, your marketplace, or your consulting business.

People hear these stories and treat them as recipes. They’re not. They’re survival stories. And survivors often can’t tell you exactly why they survived. They just did, then reverse-engineered a narrative around it.

The real lesson

Go-to-market strategy is just another way of saying perseverance. There’s no playbook. The founders who make it are the ones who can allow themselves to fail enough times. Most people can’t. That’s why 90% of startups fail.

Find your person, make $5, and keep going.