Hello, GTM! Go-to-market for developers.

”You built it. No one came.”

You can architect systems, ensure reliability, and ship features on a deadline. But getting someone to pay? That’s a different game entirely. Developers are trained to build, not to sell; and because of that, great products die in obscurity every day.

My story

I had great co-founders, a compelling MVP, but ultimately the wrong idea. After doing an interview round with Y Combinator, they informed us that our total addressable market was much smaller than we thought. It took us months before we realized they were right. A hard lesson in market validation, turned into an obsession of go-to-market. A few years after, I joined a startup as employee one, supporting the CEO in GTM from pre-seed to series A. Here is where I finally turned theory into scrappy practice, and this course is a formalization of my hard lessons learned in the startup trenches.

Your instructor

Mark Freeman is a startup operator with over eight years of experience in early stage VC-backed companies. In addition he is published O’Reilly author, keynote speaker at developer conferences, and an online instructor with 35k+ students and 600+ five-star reviews. Beyond his technical work, he has led successful startup launches, funding announcements, & conferences generating thousands of leads ranging from startups to F100s. Finally, Mark is an alumni of the Stanford GSB Ignite program, which was a catalyst for his passion for building pre-seed to Series A companies. You can learn more about him on LinkedIn or his personal website.

Course - Ideation to First Customer for Developers

The course walks through nine modules, from idea validation to revenue:

1. Why should you build less product at first?
2. Where to find early market research quick wins?
3. How to validate your business assumptions?
4. What goes into building your first funnel?
5. What makes a user interview useful signal?
6. How do you identify what GTM experiments work?
7. What is the market research feedback loop?
8. Should you raise VC or bootstrap?
9. What gets you from discovery call to contract?

Alongside the course is a public Discord community for devs building companies, as well as private channels for discussions with fellow course learners.