How PMF and GTM can pivot creatively

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The way we were taught about "product-market fit” (PMF) and “go-to market” (GTM) at schools, through books and accelerators, bootcamps and YouTube courses, hackerspaces and events, is different from

the paradigms of 2024-2025.

Just like “sales” meant a different thing in 1980, 2000, 2018, and today.

And how “marketing” used to be tradeshows, print, magazines, booths, TV and radio.

PMF and GTM in today’s reality

I took the first crack at product-market fit in January in this myth busting post on my blog:

One particular quote that stands out here, I’ll copy over:

The previous playbooks were designed to operate under different rules, based on the constraints and the market penetration at the time.

The same reason my MVP building tutorial from 2020 was relevant, and vibe coding completely changed the name of the game today (including the earlier AI site builders beforehand).

The same goes with GTM motions.

A great read on the overarching GTM is Maja’s book, GTM Strategist. I also have a long chapter on digital GTM in my MBA Disrupted.

But while my earlier read focused on Inbound as “blogs and organic social” (both heavily disrupted today) and Outbound on “email and cold calls” (broadly speaking), the AI penetration and AI SDRs have nullified the efficiency faster than ever.

Event-led GTM was massive in the 1970s and 1980s, and completely irrelevant during the pandemic. It’s back on the rise today for a reason, and these paradigms cannot be copy-pasted blindly without the right macro context.

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Why are pivots needed again?

Considering the AI disruption, the pandemic pressure, macro challenges, layoffs, unstable economy, trade wars - and many additional reasons - most businesses have been riding a roller coaster heavier than ever over the past 5 years.

Many have fallen for good, filing for bankruptcy or selling for scraps.

The M&A space has been pretty active with bigger players acquiring a handful of smaller ones, unable to withstand the pressure.

So what active businesses have been doing? Pivoting again, recalibrating the GTM mix, and seeking new product-market fit.

GTM channel pivots

The most strategic change we’ve seen over the past 2 years is a cohort of businesses heavily reliant on SEO, further affected by 2023s “helpful content update” major core update, and later attacked by AI Overviews, with a series of additional updates, a longer rollout of overviews, and the recent AI Mode.

Nearly a dozen businesses we took on in the meantime switched to an arbitrage model of paid ads, a paid subscription model (ads → memberships), productizing into courses or masterminds, or any other source of events driven by paid media.

Social businesses impacted by limited reach pressed higher on influencer ads, ambassador relationships, strategic partnerships, and thought leadership ads (boosted posts on LinkedIn). This is another effective journey to offset the traffic drop.

Platform pivots

Many of the aforementioned media sites focusing on inbound (content generation) moved to Substack or Beehiiv - first-party data sources demanding emails to supplement with email marketing and grow a database of active users, independent from the algorithms out there.

Some moved over to Slack communities - I run two myself as the signal-to-noise ratio is dramatically higher.

Two e-commerce agencies in my space moved from WooCommerce to Shopify. Replatforming to a platform that’s growing faster or gets easier adoption - or generates higher contract sizes due to larger brands coming on - is another popular play.

Or moving from an enterprise platform with a steep license to a self-hosted, open source WordPress, including data ownership protection for compliance reasons in Europe. WordPress being the obvious choice here.

Some of these replatforming exercises are expensive and time-consuming, but often necessary long-term.

Service pivots

I noticed a handful of cycles alongside these pivotal changes in the previous two chapters.

DevriX was generating 70% of its revenue from publishers in 2018 and 2019, mixing in with lots of B2B SaaS in 2020 and 2021. Both faced backlash due to VC cuts or SEO updates in late 2023, leading to a slow 2024 with higher churn in these two categories.

Partner platforms were also in high demand - custom builds in 2020-2022. We haven’t seen any over the past 18 months.

Meanwhile, in 2022 SEO demand was extremely high, for a couple of years. This picked up heavily, and further morphed into conversion rate optimization, UX work, and A/B tests in 2023-2024.

We rode the ecommerce ways a couple of times during high seasons - the ecom boom of 2021 in the pandemic, and even this year with increased purchases before the trade wars (still going with all the pushback).

Being able to shift services and adapt core, foundational skills, to increased demand, is a strong play for professional service providers. I won’t even start on the AI hype wagon, there’s quite a lot done there in the interim - as well as lead identity projects and better signal tracking.

Geolocation pivots

While North America has traditionally been our main market, we closed a ton of business in Bulgaria. The standard of living went up dramatically over the past 5 years and local businesses accelerated quickly.

The other day, a Bulgarian satelite manufacturer raised a $49M round, putting them on the map to become the second largest satellite producer in the world.

At least a couple of unicorns here are growing steadily and, by definition, their surrounding ecosystem is growing as well. This covers everything from real estate and construction firms, interior design, catering, HR services, vendors and tools, agencies, and all subcontractors, partners, and local businesses in the area.

In my Strategic Growth Circle community, I see growing businesses in Macedonia, Greece, Ireland, Australia, Israel, and other countries seeing a steady flow of revenue and certain markets that are evolving over the past few years. This is no incident.

Industry pivots

Niching down is one of the key lessons for startups. The more refined your messaging, the easier the close.

Kit (ConvertKit) started as an email marketing system from bloggers, to bloggers. Beehiiv took a similar creator approach earlier on.

“For creators”, “For realtors”, “Only healthcare” are not uncommon, either. Niching down is a strong way to develop a consistent portfolio and grow a vertical.

This is what we did with publishing and B2B SaaS early on. But since we’ve always diversified, the portfolio is broader and includes a couple of notable examples from different categories - banking, automotive, healthcare, fintech, sports, and many more.

Defense budgets are going up now. A couple years back, clean tech and eco projects were on the rise. Following the capital influx and investments provides pivot opportunities to relocate more effort into growing categories.

ICP pivot

If you’ve stumbled upon the Revenue Vitals podcast (now GTM Live), Chris Walker was focused on servicing CMOs for a couple of years, given his demand generation expertise and solutions relevant to this audience.

However, CMOs have been feeling disempowered with budget cuts and constraints, limited say in the board room, and being overruled by other roles in the business sitting closer to capital allocation.

Instead, he switched the conversation over to finance and P&Ls as a top of the funnel. This attracted CFOs and CEOs, where decisions were taken faster, and autonomy was achieved sooner.

Moving up-market would mean your champions are different people wearing different shoes.

Collaborative pivot

SaaS companies were popular for their turnkey hands-off process. But complex SaaS always required support, integration, and implementation.

Having a “service arm” turned out to be a great addition to SaaS businesses with an integration team, a mix of in-house and strategic agencies plugged in for best results. Also, a revenue bump from the integration itself.

On the agency side, we see more demand for “done-with-you” services over the past year compared to “done for you” in the 2018-2022 period. After the wave of layoffs, executives want to keep their top talent around and increase efficiency with a mix of skills and talent, bringing external support without jeopardizing jobs.

Nobody wants to be replaced after a series of cuts across the market.

So now, our solutions focus more on consultancy and lower level integration, while half the work is taken care of in-house by existing staff.

Examples go on if you seek for them

This is by no means a comprehensive list.

But executives and founders who are stuck on channels that no longer work, with playbooks that are outdated, should look further, and explore different paradigms that work today.

PMF and GTM are two common examples here. We’ve seen government contracts moving downstream to DTC deals, opening up a $20M opportunity. And low-quanity, high ticket contracts substituted with volume + automation. The list goes on.

Take a weekend off to brainstorm creatively, run different scenarios, talk to ICPs, run some deep research with LLMs. Kickstart this exploration journey. The results may surprise you.