How are you acquiring customers today? Is it repeatable? Scalable? Investors want to see a machine, not just a handful of early wins.
A go-to-market (GTM) strategy is your plan for getting your product in front of the right customers and converting them. At seed stage, you don't need a fully built machine — but you do need to show that you understand how customers find you, why they buy, and how that process could scale.
The founders who struggle to answer GTM questions are usually the ones who got their first ten customers through personal relationships and haven't thought hard about what comes next. That's normal. The question is whether you've started to think beyond it.
Be specific and honest. Did you cold email 200 people and five responded? Did you post in a Slack community and ten people signed up? Did a friend's introduction land your first paying customer? That's your origin story, and it tells you something about where your next customers might come from.
First: who exactly is your customer? Not "small businesses" or "HR teams." The specific job title, company size, and situation that describes your best customer. The tighter this is, the more targeted your acquisition can be.
Second: how do they find you? Your acquisition channels. This could be outbound (you go to them — cold email, LinkedIn outreach, events), inbound (they come to you — SEO, content, word of mouth, referrals), or partnerships (someone else brings them to you). Most early-stage companies use a mix, but one channel usually dominates. Know which one is working for you and why.
Third: why do they buy? What's the trigger? What did they search for, read, or experience that made them ready to try your product? Understanding the buyer's journey helps you show up in the right place at the right time.
Many founders try five channels at once and do all of them badly. At seed stage, the better move is to pick one or two channels and go deep. Prove that a channel works — measure the conversion rate, understand the economics, make it repeatable — before expanding. Investors are much more impressed by "we've proven outbound works at a CAC of £120 and we're going to scale it" than "we're testing SEO, LinkedIn, paid ads, and events."
The jump from ten customers to one hundred is a GTM question, not a product question. Investors at seed stage want evidence that you can repeat the process that got you your first customers — not by calling in favours, but through a system. That might be a sales sequence that converts at a predictable rate, a content strategy that generates a consistent flow of inbound leads, or a referral programme that turns existing customers into your best salespeople.
What good looks like: "Our primary channel is outbound LinkedIn. We send 200 messages a week, get a 12% reply rate, 30% of those convert to a demo, and 20% of demos close. That gives us roughly 5 new customers per week at a CAC of £95. We want to layer in SEO as a secondary channel in the next six months." Specific, measured, and scalable.
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Try the funding finder →This is general information, not financial or legal advice. Always do your own research and seek independent professional advice.