The definitive guide to debugging your GTM

I've worked with dozens of stuck startups over the past few years. $1mm in ARR, $3mm, $15mm—but growth has stalled. Unfortunately, this happens to almost everybody. They all ask the same question: what do you do when growth stalls?

This is meant to be the definitive piece on finding the bugs in your GTM. Hopefully it's useful to you—whatever stage you're at.

When to Debug Your GTM

You can debug your GTM anytime. But there are times when it's necessary and the best use of your time as a founder:

• When growth slows. If your growth rate drops significantly quarter-over-quarter (say, 20% or more), it's time to investigate.

• When your top of funnel changes for the worse. A sudden drop in lead volume or quality demands immediate attention.

• When your close rate changes. If fewer opportunities are converting to customers, something in your process has broken.

• When you have high turnover in sales. Salespeople leave when they can't hit quota—often a sign of deeper GTM issues.

Where to start

I always follow the path of the customer's journey when trying to figure out what's wrong with GTM. This means starting at the awareness stage—where they become aware of a pain that your company solves—and moving through the marketing and sales process to closing and eventually retention.

Obviously this involves some assessment of product market fit (PMF). PMF is not a permanent state. You can have PMF and then things change. Maybe the change was something you did, like Blackberry rejecting touch screens and focusing on the enterprise while Google and Apple did the opposite. Or maybe it's something external—like Docker, which lost a key piece of the value chain to Google's Kubernetes and struggled to monetize ever since.

We'll get into PMF, but there's a fundamental assumption that you have or had PMF throughout, and the issue is more in your GTM than in your product. That's a big assumption, so beware. If you're seeing problems across multiple parts of the funnel, the issue might be PMF itself, not GTM execution. There are a lot more variables to consider if you’ve never really figured out GTM–I’ll touch on them throughout.

Top of Funnel GTM

A good reason to start at the beginning of the customer journey is that's where most GTM problems originate. Think about your future customer at this stage:

• They may or may not know they have a problem

• They may or may not know that a solution to the problem exists

• They may or may not have any budget dedicated to solving this problem

Some markets overcome this issue with just the sheer magical nature of their solutions. Building entire websites with a one-sentence instruction does that—which is why AI coding tools have seen such rapid adoption.

Others have struggled. Blockchain and crypto were hot in 2021-22, but faded fast (they’re back, kind of). Virtual reality has consistently failed to deliver on the hype. Meal kit delivery was on fire in 2015-2018–Blue Apron IPO’d–but as the market became saturated, customer acquisition costs rose and share prices fell (90%, in Blue Apron’s case). I could go on.

Talk to prospective customers—or, if you're talking to them already, go back and mine the call recordings. Is what you sell, or the problems you solve, a top priority for them? Do they have budget for it? Just because you think it should be a priority doesn't make it so.

Problems in the Marketing Top of Funnel

Once you've figured out whether your problem still has a market—because it might not, times change—then dig into the actual details. A good way to think of them is by channel. Not everything has to be perfect, but was something working that isn't working anymore?

Owned Channels

Your website. Are you getting the same traffic? Is it the same quality?