What is GTM for Startups?
Practical go-to-market guidance and playbooks for early-stage founders building their commercial strategies and teams.
What can you expect from GTM for Startups?
Most GTM advice is either too theoretical to be useful or written for companies with resources you don’t have. GTM for Startups is built specifically for early-stage founders and teams navigating the messy, high-stakes work of hiring salespeople, building marketing functions, and figuring out what to prioritize when everything feels urgent.
Why subscribe?
Every post is designed to be something you can actually use: hand it to a new hire on day one, reference it when your board questions your strategy, or revisit it when you need a sanity check on your GTM strategy.
Free subscribers get the full articles. No paywalls, no gated content.
Who is this for?
Founders still in a founder-led sales motion or those looking to transition out of founder-led sales, making their first commercial hires (and determined to get it right)
Early-stage GTM operators joining startups who want real onboarding roadmaps, playbooks right-sized for a startup, and an explanation of the “why” behind the “what”
Anyone building GTM from scratch at a startup where resources are tight and every hire (and investment) has to count
What to expect
I publish a new article weekly-ish, covering the real challenges of building go-to-market at startups: hiring your first salespeople, structuring comp plans where the math actually works, onboarding marketing hires so they’re not flailing for six months, knowing when it’s time to transition out of founder-led sales, and a whole lot more.
I’m big on what I call “GTM Multivitamins” - making sure every initiative serves multiple purposes across your funnel. When you’re resource-constrained, single-purpose activities are a luxury you can’t afford.
What I write about
Founder-led sales and when to transition out of it
Hiring and onboarding your first commercial roles
Sales compensation that incentivizes the right behaviors and doesn’t break the bank
RevOps for people who don’t have a RevOps team
GTM strategy that accounts for startup reality
Marketing that actually supports revenue
Signal-based GTM and ABM - reaching the right accounts at the right moment
…and more. If it’s related to go-to-market or revenue, I’ll probably cover it.
Who is Jess?
Before starting Amplify Group, I was an early-stage venture investor. I watched dozens of portfolio companies struggle with the same GTM challenges - hiring too fast, hiring too slow, building comp plans that didn’t make sense, onboarding people into chaos. Smart founders with great products kept stumbling on the same avoidable problems.
That’s what inspired me to start Amplify. Over the past four years, I’ve worked with more than 40 early-stage startups to build or scale their go-to-market functions, helping them achieve 150-590% year-over-year growth.
GTM for Startups is where I share the frameworks and playbooks that actually work (and I explain why).
And personally…I am a new mom to a cute little toddler named Luca. I’ve lived in London, New York, and Chicago for many years but I now call Miami, FL home.
What we built: Amplify ABM Intel
I’ve written a lot here about signal-based GTM. The best time to reach an account is right after something changes - a new leader, a layoff, an acquisition, a lost deal whose original objections no longer apply. Most founders agree with that. The hard part is catching those moments in time, because nobody has hours to watch 100 target accounts manually.
So we built Amplify ABM Intel. It watches your target accounts for six moments that reset budgets and buying committees: layoffs and RIFs, acquisitions, revenue growth, leadership changes, closed-lost re-engagement, and hiring surges. When a priority signal fires, your rep gets it in Slack with the evidence and a recommended first move, and a dated, owned follow-up task lands in HubSpot automatically.
It’s a GTM Multivitamin in one tool - one system feeding outbound, ABM, closed-lost re-engagement, and expansion at the same time.
Bring your target account list and see your first signal →
Want to chat? Find me on LinkedIn or reply to any email - I read them all.
