GTM ACCELERATION: A 12-step Guide for Startup Founders in 2025

Welcome to January, 2025. Your startup is advancing nicely from early design customer wins to now building its first go-to-market (GTM) engine – a major milestone in scaling your business. With this phase comes the new challenges of hiring teams and allocating resources to grow your customer base; increasing market share; and efficiently building recurring revenue streams.

GTM performance, however, is rarely linear as each stage of growth brings new and different challenges.  At Venture Guides, we’ve traveled this path many times, both as operators as well as investors serving alongside creative founders. With more than 150 years of experience in the infrastructure software domain, we recorded an 80+% success rate (19 out of 23 – including  5 public companies) and have experienced the opportunities and pitfalls of GTM execution.

Using our first-hand learnings, we’ve created a framework called “12 Steps to GTM ACCELERATION”  (listed below) to help founders prevent mistakes that damage their brand, bench, and balance sheet.  Throughout 2025, our Guides will share these insights and strategies monthly.

A Partner for Success

Venture Guides believes that “great companies are built, not born.”  Knowledge, commitment, and experience will vastly improve the opportunity for your success. Our Guides help technical founders through all important phases and challenges of startup ACCELERATION. In fact, our portfolio companies elect to co-locate their GTM operations with us to leverage our support and engagement services including weekly check-ins with our CEOs; account acceleration; and alliance formulation meetings.  Moreover, our Sales Academy and AE Master Class improve both the sales talent recruitment and growth for and within our portfolio teams.  Fundamentally, we know startups will spend a multitude more capital building their GTM ACCELERATION  than any other P&L function over time. We want to ensure they spend it wisely. 
Again, welcome to January.

If you are interested in learning more about Venture Guides’ unique approach to investing and guiding, contact us to set up time to talk.  We are committed to your success.