Building Your First 3-Month GTM Plan: A Step-by-Step Guide

You’ve done the impossible. You’ve wrangled code, battled bugs, and shipped a product. It exists. Now comes the second, equally hard part: getting people to pay for it. The term “Go-To-Market” (GTM) gets thrown around, often sounding like some mythical strategy document only MBAs understand. It’s not.

Forget the 50-page slide decks and five-year projections. For an early-stage founder, your first GTM plan is a 90-day sprint. It’s a series of focused experiments designed to do one thing: learn. You’re not trying to boil the ocean; you’re trying to find the first crack in the dam.

I’ve seen too many brilliant technical founders get paralyzed by marketing. They either do nothing, waiting for the product to be “perfect,” or they try to do everything at once and burn out. This guide cuts through the noise. It’s a step-by-step, 3-month plan designed for a product-focused founder who needs to start building a repeatable growth engine. Let’s build.

Before You Start: The Non-Negotiable Prerequisites

Jumping into tactics without a solid foundation is like writing code without specs. You’ll build something, but it probably won’t work. Spend a week or two getting these two things right. It will save you months of wasted effort.

Nail Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)

This is the single most common point of failure. If I ask who your customer is and you say “small businesses” or “marketing teams,” you’ve already lost. That’s not an ICP; it’s a demographic.

Your first ICP needs to be painfully specific. You are looking for the small group of people who feel the pain you solve most acutely. They are the ones who will forgive your clunky UI and missing features because your core solution is a painkiller for them.

Actionable Steps:

Get Specific: Don't stop at the company level. Define the person.
- Industry: e.g., B2B SaaS, not just “tech.”
- Company Size: e.g., 10-50 employees, not “SMB.”
- Role/Title: e.g., Head of Engineering, VP of Sales, not just “manager.”
- Pain Point: What problem keeps them up at night that your product can solve? What are they currently using to solve it (spreadsheets, a competitor, a manual process)?
Conduct 5-10 Interviews: Find these people on LinkedIn or in your network and ask for 20 minutes of their time. Do not sell them anything. Your only goal is to listen. Ask them about their workflow, their challenges, and the tools they use. Use their exact language to describe their problems.

Your ICP isn’t a persona with a cute name. It’s a precise targeting parameter for your entire marketing effort.

Clarify Your Core Messaging & Positioning

Once you know who you’re talking to, you need to figure out what to say. Technical founders love to talk about features. Your customers don’t buy features; they buy outcomes. They’re buying a better version of themselves—more efficient, more successful, less stressed.

Your positioning statement is your internal compass for all marketing copy. A simple template that works:

For: [Your hyper-specific ICP]
Who: [Struggle with a specific problem]
Our Product is a: [Product category, e.g., 'customer feedback platform']
That Provides: [The key benefit or outcome, e.g., 'a clear product roadmap']
By: [Your key feature or differentiator, e.g., 'aggregating user requests from email, Slack, and Intercom']

Example: “For Heads of Product at Series A fintech companies who struggle to prioritize feature requests from sales and support, our product is a feedback management platform that helps them build a data-driven roadmap by centralizing all customer feedback into one searchable repository.”

Stress-test this statement with the people you interviewed. Does it resonate? Is it clear? If they look confused, iterate until it clicks.

Month 1: Laying the Foundation (Weeks 1-4)

Month one is not about driving a flood of traffic. It's about building the machine. You're setting up the systems and assets you'll need to execute effectively in Month 2. The goal here is readiness.

Week 1: Define Your Goal & Key Metrics

What does success look like in 90 days? “Get customers” is not a goal; it’s a wish. You need a single, quantifiable North Star Metric for this sprint.

For a pre-seed or seed-stage B2B company, it's rarely revenue. It’s usually a leading indicator of revenue. Pick ONE:

10 qualified demos booked.
50 new trial signups.
200 downloads of our lead magnet.
1 paying customer. (This is great, but can be a vanity metric if they're not your ICP or if you can't get a second one.)

I recommend focusing on demos or trial signups. These force you to have conversations and get direct product feedback. Once you have your North Star, define 2-3 secondary metrics to monitor (e.g., website traffic, landing page conversion rate).

Week 2: Build Your Minimum Viable Marketing Stack

Founders love tools. It's a form of productive procrastination. Resist the urge to buy a dozen subscriptions. You need a simple, cheap, and functional stack.

Website/Landing Page: You need one page that clearly explains your value proposition and has a single call-to-action (e.g., “Book a Demo” or “Start Free Trial”). Tools like Webflow, Framer, or even Carrd are perfect.
Analytics: You need to know if anyone is visiting your site. Set up Google Analytics 4 or a simpler alternative like Plausible.
CRM: You need a place to track your conversations. HubSpot’s free CRM is more than enough to start. A spreadsheet is better than nothing.
Email Tool: You need a way to capture and nurture email addresses. MailerLite or ConvertKit are great starting points.

If you're a founder who prefers a more hands-on approach and wants to accelerate this setup, platforms like our self-service builder at AgentWeb can streamline the process of integrating these core tools.

Week 3: Create One High-Value Content Asset

You don’t need a blog with 50 posts. You need one single piece of content that is so valuable your ICP would consider paying for it. This is your “lead magnet.” It’s the currency you use to trade for an email address.

Ideas for a killer asset:

The Ultimate Guide: A comprehensive, 3,000-word guide on solving a core problem for your ICP. Example: “The Founder’s Guide to SOC 2 Compliance.”
A Spreadsheet Template: A powerful, pre-built Google Sheet or Notion template that solves a real problem. Example: “The Ultimate B2B SaaS Financial Model.”
A Free Tool: A simple calculator or generator built as a side project. Example: “The Startup Cap Table Calculator.”
Industry Benchmark Report: Survey 50 companies in your ICP’s industry and publish the anonymized results.

This asset becomes the centerpiece of your distribution efforts in Month 2.

Week 4: Pick and Prepare One Channel

Don't try to be on Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit, TikTok, and a podcast all at once. It’s a recipe for mediocrity. Pick ONE channel where your ICP actively spends their time and is open to discussing business problems. Just one.

Where do they hang out online? If you sell to developers, that might be Hacker News, Lobste.rs, or specific subreddits. If you sell to sales leaders, it’s LinkedIn, 100% of the time. If you sell to marketers, it might be Twitter or specific Slack communities.
Prepare your profile: Your personal profile (especially on LinkedIn) is now a landing page. Update your headline to reflect your positioning statement. Make sure your profile looks professional and credible.

Month 2: Activation & Execution (Weeks 5-8)

The machine is built. Now it’s time to turn it on. This month is about pure execution. It’s about doing the unscalable work to generate your first trickles of interest and data.

Weeks 5-6: Direct Outreach & Community Engagement

This is where the rubber meets the road. You can’t wait for people to find you.

Direct Outreach: Build a list of 100 people who perfectly match your ICP. Use LinkedIn Sales Navigator or manual searching. Send them hyper-personalized cold emails or LinkedIn messages. Do NOT use a generic template. Your message should be short, reference something specific about them or their company, and focus on their potential problem. Your goal is to start a conversation, not to book a demo on the first touch.
Community Engagement: Go to that one channel you picked and become a valuable member. Don’t just spam links to your product. Spend 30 minutes a day answering questions, offering advice, and sharing insights. When someone asks a question that your high-value content asset answers perfectly, you can say, “I actually wrote a detailed guide on this, happy to share if it’s helpful.” You earn the right to promote.

Weeks 7-8: Content Distribution & First Feedback

Now you start pointing people to your work.

Promote Your Asset: Share your high-value lead magnet in the communities you’re active in. Write a post about the problem it solves, not just a link to the asset. Explain why you created it and who it’s for.
Follow Up: When someone downloads your asset, you have their email. Send a personal follow-up a day or two later. “Hey [Name], just wanted to make sure you got the guide. Was there anything in particular you were hoping to solve with it?” This is a low-friction way to start a conversation.
Consider a Small Ad Spend: If you have the budget, run a small, targeted ad campaign ($20-$50/day) on LinkedIn or whichever platform your ICP uses. Target your ICP precisely and drive traffic to the landing page for your content asset. If you're wondering how to budget for this, our pricing page gives an idea of what a starter marketing investment looks like for a managed campaign.

By the end of this month, you should have a handful of new contacts, some conversations started, and initial data on what messaging is resonating.

Month 3: Analysis & Optimization (Weeks 9-12)

Execution without analysis is just being busy. Month 3 is about stepping back, looking at the data, and making intelligent decisions for your next sprint.

Weeks 9-10: Review the Data, Honestly

Open your spreadsheet or CRM and look at the numbers. No ego. No excuses.

North Star Metric: How close did you get to your goal (e.g., 10 demos booked)?
Channel Performance: Where did your most valuable interactions come from? The cold outreach? The community posts? The small ad spend?
Messaging Performance: In your outreach, which opening lines got the most replies? What pain points did people mention most often in conversations?
Qualitative Feedback: What did people say on your demos? What questions did they ask? What objections came up? This is gold. Write it all down.

Weeks 11-12: Double Down or Pivot

Your data will point you in one of two directions.

Double Down: If you found a signal—if your cold outreach to VPs of Engineering had a 10% reply rate, or your community posts in that one Slack group led to three demos—your job is simple. Do more of that. For the next 90-day sprint, your goal is to scale that one successful tactic. Refine the messaging. Automate parts of the process. Go deeper into that one channel.
Pivot: If you got nothing—zero replies, zero downloads, zero interest—congratulations. Your experiment was a success. It taught you that your initial hypothesis was wrong. This is not failure; it's learning. Go back to your ICP interviews. Was your core assumption about their pain point incorrect? Was your messaging confusing? Was your channel choice wrong? The feedback of silence is powerful. Use it to form a new hypothesis for your next 90-day sprint.

This cycle of execution, analysis, and optimization is the core engine of growth, but it's incredibly time-consuming for a founder. If you'd rather focus on product and have a dedicated team manage this entire process for you, exploring a done-for-you service like AgentWeb can be a game-changer.

Beyond 90 Days: Building a System, Not a Campaign

This 3-month plan is not a one-time event. It’s your first rep. The goal isn’t to build a perfect GTM strategy from day one. The goal is to build a system for learning and iterating.

Your second 90-day plan will be built on the data from your first. Your goals will be more ambitious. Your understanding of the customer will be deeper. Your execution will be faster. This is how you build a real, sustainable marketing engine from the ground up: one focused, 90-day sprint at a time.

Ready to put your marketing on autopilot? Book a call with Harsha to walk through your current marketing workflow and see how AgentWeb can help you scale.