It’s not uncommon for technical founders to build something impressive and still struggle to identify exactly who needs it. At the earliest stage, startups naturally accumulate customers who have different problems, but it’s the founder’s job to find the sweet spot:

“It's not enough to say, ‘we're a painkiller,’” says Shruti Bhat, Head of Marketing for Observe at Snowflake. “You have to really be specific and say, ‘if you have left knee pain and it hurts when you're climbing up the stairs, we're built for you.’”

That emphasis on specificity comes partly from Bhat’s path into marketing. She started her career as a software engineer, and it shaped her approach to GTM strategy.

“I hated marketing,” she told me. “I thought marketing was full of fluff. I thought it was full of lies. I thought it never quite represented the product correctly.”

Because technical founders tend to treat marketing as an isolated function, many will start investing in demand generation before they’ve figured out positioning, messaging and targeting. If you don’t understand how customers want to buy, wondering whether to go all-in on PLG or stick with a sales-led strategy isn’t particularly useful.

One of the most interesting reveals in the conversation happened when I asked if she’d wait for repeatability before bringing in a full-time marketing person. “If you wait for that, you can be waiting for a really long time, because product teams tend to just want to ship,” she says. “I would hire a fairly senior product marketer fairly early.”

Product managers were less technical in the SaaS era, Shruti says, but thanks to generative AI, they can build and ship prototypes that drive velocity faster than ever. As a result, product marketers should be on board long before the company finds repeatability. At this stage, their job isn’t to pour more leads into the funnel; it’s to help the company figure out what a repeatable sales motion actually looks like. 

When she was at Rockset, Bhat hired her first product marketer within a year. They built the website and sales pitch, tested positioning and different customer segments, worked on messaging and sales flows, and stayed close to the sales team throughout.

That last part matters because early sales hires are expensive experiments. Without someone helping them understand which customers to pursue, what to say and why deals are or aren’t moving, they can spend months “thrashing about,” she says. Instead of building separate sales and marketing functions too early, she recommends creating a small GTM pod: a couple of salespeople paired with a strong product marketer who knows enough about demand generation to help them find a motion that works.

Which brings us to the larger point: a handful of paying customers isn’t necessarily evidence of product-market fit. What you’re looking for is a repeatable pattern.

It’s common for charismatic founders to personally manufacture early sales, and five customers who have completely different personas, pain points and use cases are not a market. To find repeatability, look for clusters of similar accounts, she suggests.

“If you win two or three deals, and then you can go find 10 more lookalikes, and all of those just breeze through your sales process, you're starting to see some repeatability.”

🎧 Apple Podcasts

🎧 Spotify

(2:28)  From Engineering to Product Truth

(7:10)  Finding Observe’s Enterprise Sweet Spot

(16:48)  When Technical Founders Need To Hire A Product Marketer 

(24:57)  Hiring Your First GTM Leader Depends on More Than Stage

(34:27)  How GTM Leaders Build (and Lose) Trust With Technical Teams 

Shruti Bhat on LinkedIn

Snowflake

Observe by Snowflake

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