The Convergence of Product & Go-To-Market

Aka Carriages Work Well With Horses but Not as Well with Cars

One thing that I think still does not get talked about enough is tying product to go-to-market and vice versa. There are some products and markets that require a certain gtm and thus product approach.

A good example would be when Crowdstrike started in endpoint detection and response (EDR), if they tried to sell that to an end user, it’s unlikely it would have scaled. End users for the most part weren’t concerned with EDR and to this day still aren’t necessarily. It is very much a management and company wide concern as it protects the whole “network” and org rather than a single application. Thus Crowdstrike built a direct sales engine combined with a “weightier” product. What I mean by that is the initial product had more heft than say a dev tool serving an individual developer. This was needed in order to convince management and CISO personas that the product would protect their companies fully. Peep the pic below, the feature comparisons, breadth of the platform, and language all points to a certain weight in the product. It’s selling comfort and full end-to-end functionality rather than end user experience which fits for the market they’re serving.

Sales reps helped walk these buyers through the pros and cons of Crowdstrike’s product. Over time Crowdstrike worked to remove friction with the free trial as you can see from the picture below. The free trial still has some inherent and deliberate friction because of the persona that is targeted.

In case anyone’s wondering, this approach is working just fine for Crowdstrike :)

Product is tied to gtm which is tied to the market and end users!

Contrast this to Snyk, a Boldstart portfolio company, that helps developers secure the entire software development lifecycle (SDLC) by serving end users first. While security is still a top down mandate, making applications more secure takes time and requires costly delays to roadmaps for devs. Snyk solved this for developers by enabling them to make their products more secure natively within their day to day workflows, removing the delays to building core features on the roadmap. Below you can see the the messaging is much different than Crowdstrike, here’s the specific problem Snyk solves and how it’ll help serve an end user.

Snyk’s product was and still is more “lightweight”. The first product helped individual developers using javascript OSS libraries to identify and remediate vulnerabilities within their day to day workflow. Now Snyk supports all major programming languages and has branched out into infrastructure as code security, container security, static analysis, and much more in the future. As Snyk has rolled out more products, gtm has started to include more of a direct sales force as the Cloud Native Application Security Platform has become “weightier” but each product line is still adopted by individual end users. In the pic below, contrast this to Crowdstrike’s trial page, Snyk allows you to auth in and directly start using the product.

Snyk is doing just fine with their approach as well :)

Tying product to gtm and gtm to product is a core component that founders need to think about early on. If the product is targeting end users, but is too “weighty” it will turn customers away. On the flip side, if the product is targeting whole orgs or teams and is too “light”, traction will be hard to get. A lot of this insight can be gleaned from the persona and market you are targeting.

For example, if you tried to sell a CI/CD product top down right now, it would be a hard slog. Management does care about developer efficiency, but the product that you would show them, would not have any insights or anything better for them directly. The market necessitates an end user first approach as the developers are the ones experiencing the pain.

Founders should think carefully about this in the early days as it can save time and have compounding benefits for many years in the future. A top down, bottoms up, or “sandwich” gtm model is OK for any company as long as the product aligns to the go-to-market!