Make Your Next Big Thing a Success
New products. New segments. New use cases.
GTM Prototyping helps leaders get the insight they need to make their next big GTM a hit.
Insight for Inflection Points
New Product
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New GTM Motion
Upmarket, downmarket, product led, sales led. A new GTM motion means a new ICP, new messaging, new sales process, product changes, and new buyer's journey. We will help you adapt.
New Use Case
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New Segment
Upmarket, downmarket, product led, sales led. A new GTM motion will mean a new ICP, new mesasage and new approach to going to market.
(Big) New Feature or New Version
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New Pricing
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GTM Prototyping
When you are working on a new thing and want to know how customer will react to it. Discover your Jobs to be Done, get know your market, anticipate how they will make decisions, know what resonates with them (and what doesn't).
See the next card in the deck
Anticipate how the market will react before you even start planning your launch. GTM Prototyping helps you get the ICP feedback you need to shape your product, core messages, key features, and pricing.
Learn by doing
Selling is the only way to test demand. We developed our Simulated Sales method to help you explore demand with people who fit your ICP but aren't your customer (yet).
Low-stakes for high-stakes bets
Make progress on your big growth initiatives without over-investing money, time, attention, or brand equity. Place your big bets until you know your GTM is ready.
Insights in minutes, not months
Market research kills momentum because it takes too long and costs too much. Prototyping builds energy by delivering day one insights that get more powerful as you go. Rather than waiting for a report months from now, your team will be in the middle of the action from day one.
Test your entire GTM
Customers react to and get value from the entire offering — their needs, your promise to solve them, to the core features that get the Job Done, how you price and package. We will help you get market feedback to your whole GTM system so you can tune the individual components of it (product, message, pricing).
How It Works
GTM Prototyping covers the early, high risk decision making stages of the product development process. The final
The GTM Prototype
A GTM Prototype includes all the evidence you have to support the initiative, your ICP, core offering, Jobs to be Done, key messages, core functionality, value drivers, pricing.
Test Demand with Sim Sales
Our conversational research method will help test demand and value with people who fit your ICP but aren't yet using the product. During each simulated sales call we explore needs, give a product demo, and discuss value and pricing.
Debug and iterate
Simulated sales calls are deigned to expose bugs in the GTM. We will help you identify, debug, and retest. This test, debug iteration can continue for a few cycles until demand and value testing are successful.
Bet shaping
After a few debugging cycles, we will help you shape your bet with evidence. What is the real opportunity? What are the gaps in the product? What are the risks of going to market? Bets are shaped in a way that exec stakeholders and investors can make a decision.
Launch readiness
Your launch team will have all they need to go to market.
GTM Prototyping produces momentum .
What Our Clients Have Say
"We were trying to listen to the market, but everyone on the team just heard what they wanted to hear.
Ponder brought objectivity, credibility, leadership, and a methodology that helped us get our next product off the ground."
Damien du Chene
CMO
Dreem Health
Dreem Health
"Ponder gave us clear customer insight we used for brand, positioning, and messaging, and product decisions.
More than a year later, we are still actioning on the insights they uncovered."
Heather McKinnon
Head of Brand Mercury
"Ponder is part of my GTM playbook. They do more than research; they bring INSIGHTS into the business.
Their team is a partner, a strategic advantage in designing go to market processes that will meet my customers’ needs."
Jimmy Speyer
CEO
Glasshouse
Glasshouse
Escape the Growth Trap
Everything you know about your current ICP is bias and assumption when exploring demand in new segments The insights, processes, and tooling you use to succeed within your current PMF works against you when trying to find PMF in new segments. (link to growth trap article)
Explore and Exploit
Growth stage tech teams should be able to switch between exploiting current opportunities while exploring for new ones. This situation is unique to growth stage tech. (link to article commenting on the HBR article about Extrapolation).
Tooling for the Growth Stage
Growth stage tech lives in a weird bubble. Startups and enterprises are well served, but there is a lack of tooling to help with inflection points that growth stage tech companies constantly face. (link to article about why GTM prototyping is tailored for growth stage tech).
Q&A
01
How Does a Simulated Sales Call Work?
Forget interviews. Forget surveys. Selling is only way to test demand. A simulated sales call compresses the entire sales process into one conversation: Discovery, demo, pricing. Discovery allows us to validate needs and get the participant's emotional state primed. The demo allows us to show them how the product works so we can test their comprehension and the product's ability to meet needs. Finally we talk about pricing so we can determine how the participant positions your product and how they might calculate value. We do immediate post-call analysis.
02
How is this different than Lean Startup?
Lean startup is awesome. But it's more awesome for founders who live in exploration mode and have unilateral authority to make massive changes to the product and message. Growth stage tech is a little different. Everyone on the team has to balance exploring new opportunities with exploiting the good fit opportunities that already exist.
03
How is this different than User-Centered Design?
User Centered Design is more about understanding needs which are important. But just understanding needs does not help us get clear on our ability to get a person to buy our product to solve our needs. We have to test needs within the entire GTM system to assess market demand.
04
Who is GTM Prototyping for?
We have designed this service specifically for the needs and budgets of growth stage tech companies. We generally work with executive leaders and the cross-functional teams they have assigned to their new growth efforts. The insights we produce generally create alignment across product, marketing, customer success, finance.
