The days of being everything to everyone are long gone.
One of the biggest mistakes Matthew sees is founders claiming to serve a “wide range of use cases” or a “broad audience.” In reality, focus is what unlocks scale. You need to be crystal clear on who you are for, where you can genuinely win, and why that segment should care.
This goes beyond basic ICP definitions like company size or geography. Founders need to understand how their ideal customers think and behave as organisations. Some buyers are early adopters, comfortable with risk and innovation. Others are cautious, preferring proven approaches.
Understanding this organisational mindset helps shape everything, from your positioning and messaging to your sales motion and brand. Write it down. Codify it. And build your business around winning deeply with one segment before you start to think about expanding.
Great marketing and sales don’t happen by accident.
Matthew is a strong believer that systems and processes matter just as much as creativity. Go-to-market cannot be ad hoc. Founders need clearly defined marketing and sales stages that are designed from the customer’s perspective, not internal convenience.
That means setting clear entry criteria, activities, and exit requirements for every stage - from marketing-qualified accounts to sales-qualified opportunities. If a deal moves to the next stage, it should be because something tangible has happened, not because someone “feels” it’s ready.
Equally important is a shared discovery process. Your ICP, personas, and customer jobs should translate directly into the questions your teams ask in discovery. This alignment creates consistency, improves conversion, and makes growth repeatable.
We are operating in one of the noisiest GTM environments ever.
With generative AI flooding the market with content, the way to stand out isn’t volume, it’s belief. The companies that win are those with a clear, compelling point of view about where their market is going and why they exist.
Even in B2B, growth is human-to-human. Founders need to articulate what they believe, who they believe it for, and why their approach is better. This means being comfortable not being for everyone and instead going all-in on serving a clearly defined segment exceptionally well.
When done right, a strong point of view cuts through noise, strengthens brand, and dramatically improves GTM efficiency.
This is the flip side of ICP clarity, and one of the most common failure modes.
Matthew shared an example of a trade finance software business with a genuinely strong product, but an unfocused GTM approach. Because the market was huge, the team believed they should target everyone. In reality, as an early-stage company, this made execution impossible.
Ambition is important, but scale starts with choosing where to win first. Focus creates traction, evangelists, and momentum. Only once that foundation is built can expansion happen effectively.
One of the most dangerous assumptions founders make is mistaking early sales for product-market fit.
Matthew has seen companies hire aggressively, burn cash, and collapse because they scaled before validating real demand. His favourite definition of product-market fit comes from Sam Jacobs: it’s not when customers buy, it’s when they renew.
Renewal proves adoption, value, and willingness to pay again. In early stages, shorter contracts can actually be beneficial, because they force founders to validate fit quickly rather than hiding behind long-term revenue commitments.
Product-market fit is existential. Getting it wrong can kill an otherwise promising business.
Product innovation can unintentionally break a business if GTM doesn’t evolve alongside it.
Matthew described a company that introduced a powerful new product feature, only to realise it changed the buyer, the user, and the value proposition entirely. The business flatlined because marketing, sales, and onboarding were still designed for the old audience.
The product wasn’t the problem; the go-to-market motion was.
Founders need to recognise when innovation requires a re-engineered GTM strategy: new messaging, new sales profiles, new onboarding, and sometimes even a new target customer. Ignoring this can be catastrophic, even at scale.
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