The Zero to One Go-to-Market Playbook

We recently hosted a webinar where Ryan Decker, our go-to-market strategist at Philo, walked founders through the playbook we've developed over the past year working with our portfolio companies. The session was packed with practical insights, real examples, and a few hard truths about what actually moves the needle in early-stage go-to-market.

Your go-to-market strategy needs an owner, and if you're a founder, that owner is you.

The Founder's Job: Figure Out These Two Things

Before diving into tools, tactics, or the latest growth hack making rounds on LinkedIn, Ryan outlined what he believes is the non-negotiable role of the founder in go-to-market: figure out your sales motion and your messaging.

"I saw the CEO of one company do this every single day, from 20 employees all the way up to 250," Ryan shared. "They never stopped figuring out the motion and the messaging, and they never stopped connecting, creating, and closing."

That consistency is what separates founders who gain traction from those who get distracted by the endless noise in the go-to-market space. And there's a lot of noise right now.

Where the Magic Happens

Ryan showed us an example from Boardwalk, one of our portfolio companies. Morgen, the founder, had done the positioning work. He knew his ideal customer, understood their pain points, and had refined his messaging through countless conversations. When Ryan sent outbound messages on Morgen's behalf using that refined messaging to the right people at the right companies, the response rate was remarkable 2 out of 10 prospects responded positively within 15 minutes.

"This doesn't happen unless you have the right message going to the right person at the right time," Ryan explained.

But here's where most founders stumble: they see that kind of success and immediately want to automate it. They want to spin up sequences, deploy AI agents, and scale before they've truly validated the fundamentals. Ryan calls this "automating too quickly," and it's one of the most common mistakes he sees.

The value of go-to-market engineering, connecting signals, intent data, and automated outreach, only works when you've already established what the right message, right person, and right time actually look like. Until then, automation just makes you sound like a robot at scale.

Position: The Foundation That Everything Else Builds On

When Ryan sits down with founders, he starts with three columns: Position, Plays, and Pipeline. But it's clear which one matters most.

"Position is the foundation of everything," he said without hesitation when asked which of the three P's was most important.

The positioning work begins with deeply understanding your ideal customer profile, not just demographically, but psychographically. What are their watering holes? What pressures are they under? What language do they use?

Ryan walked us through an example from Intermission, a women's health company in our portfolio. Initially, the team thought they should focus on the term "perimenopause" as a keyword play. Then a BYU professor visiting our Philo programming offered a different perspective: "You're trying to shoot at the flock of ducks instead of just shooting at the one duck you want."

That reframing changed everything. The team identified one person who perfectly represented their target customer and built all their messaging around solving for that one person, then validated there were millions more just like her. The result was clear, compelling messaging that resonated because it spoke directly to a real person's real problem: the lack of a comprehensive blood panel specifically designed for women's health needs, combined with expert clinical interpretation.

This kind of clarity doesn't happen overnight. It took months of conversations, iterations, and refinement before Intermission ever made a sale. But that foundation made everything else possible.

The Messaging Hierarchy That Drives Clarity

One of Ryan's favorite exercises is drawing a triangle on the whiteboard with founders and working through five layers: product category, problem, capabilities, features, and benefits.

Most founders can articulate the first four relatively easily. They know they're a "women's health app," they understand the problem they're solving, they can list capabilities and features. But the benefits, the actual value delivered, often prove surprisingly difficult to nail down.

For Intermission, the answer emerged as "better blood work for better sleep, better energy, better relationships." That became their value proposition, the hero message on their website.

Ryan pointed to Attio as another example, noting that while their current positioning around "Agentic Revenue" might be trendy, their previous tagline - "customer relationship magic" - was actually more descriptive and compelling. "It does feel like magic sometimes when you use Agio," he said. "That's way more descriptive of the value than Agentic revenue, which I'm not really sure what that means, to be honest."

Keep revisiting your messaging hierarchy. As you grow and talk to more customers, or investors, it's easy to lose the clarity that initially resonated.

Content Strategy: Tofu, Mofu, Bofu

Ryan acknowledged that he says "tofu, mofu, bofu" multiple times every day around our office, but the framework remains valuable for a reason.

Top of funnel content should gain attention, industry insights, observations, showing your work without always talking about your product. Middle of funnel content should earn trust by connecting your product to industry problems and demonstrating expertise. Bottom of funnel content makes the offer. sign up for a trial, book a demo, download the guide.

Morgen at Boardwalk exemplified this approach perfectly. Before launching, he'd been building his LinkedIn network from 300 followers to over 4,200. Then his first actual post drove roughly 90 percent of his current pipeline. He turned that post into an ad, and it continued driving growth.

Now Morgen posts nearly every day, experimenting with different formats and lengths. "He'll tell you that teaching the market through content helps him learn more than just doing the thing itself," Ryan explained. "It's his form of constantly refining the messaging and building social proof."

The same tofu-mofu-bofu framework applies to paid advertising. Ryan shared how Intermission is now running three ad sets, prospecting, warming, and closing, with three creatives in each set. The prospecting ads don't even mention Intermission; they just speak to the problem. The closing ads clearly state the offer and pricing.

The Connector Strategy: Your VIP List

Before diving into any marketing channels or campaigns, Ryan asks founders for two critical lists: their connectors and their target accounts.

Connectors are people well-connected in your industry who would be willing to make introductions. These are your VIPs, the people you take to lunch, meet where they are, and treat accordingly.

Target accounts are exactly that: the specific companies you want to sell into, not just broad categories of potential customers.

The strategy is to map connectors to target accounts, finding warm introduction paths. Ryan uses a tool called The Swarm for this, which automates the process of identifying who in your network can introduce you to specific companies and contacts.

"Recognition is a lot easier than recall," Ryan explained. "Rather than asking a connector if they know any solution engineers, show them you're specifically trying to reach the head of solution engineering at MongoDB, explain why it's a fit, and even provide a templated email they can use for the introduction."

This queues up your connectors for success rather than putting the burden on them to remember your exact target profile.

When the Pipeline Actually Matters

Ryan was refreshingly direct about his perspective on pipeline: it can become an illusion of progress if you're not careful.

"Getting sucked into the rev ops of the pipeline and the mechanics of how it should operate—that's a dopamine hit," he said, showing Boardwalk's CRM with deals totaling over $500K. "This looks good and feels good, but it's not actually doing anything. What does something is talking to each of these customers, understanding what commitment you've put them on, and figuring out why they haven't converted if they completed a trial."

The value of a CRM isn't in having clean stages and impressive pipeline values. It's in serving as your source of truth so you can work the actual relationships and commitments effectively.

Ryan's general pipeline structure is simple: Outreach, Qualification, Evaluation, Negotiation, Closing. But within those broad stages, he encourages founders to get specific about commitments. What are the four or five risks to closing a deal? What do successful deals look like at each stage?

After a conversation with a sales leader, Ryan and Morgen recently refined Boardwalk's evaluation stage into multiple sub-categories based on actual commitments: Has the prospect had a demo? Are they on a free trial? Is the decision maker someone who needs approval from their boss, or are they the boss rolling this out company-wide?

"A fuller, more descriptive pipeline beats an inaccurate, clean one," Ryan said. "As much as I like cleanliness and simplicity, being more specific usually wins."

The Tools That Matter

Ryan walked through his current tech stack, emphasizing that tool selection should follow strategy.

For building and enriching lead databases, he uses Lemlist, noting that the platform consistently releases new features and stays competitive. For CRM, it's Attio, despite being more expensive than alternatives, because the team trusts they'll stay on the appropriate edge of CRM innovation.

But the workflow is what matters most. Ryan typically starts with target accounts in Lemlist, manually finding the right titles. He exports those to CSV, imports them into Agio as the source of truth, then does personalized outreach from there. Only after manual outreach fails to get responses does he enroll contacts in automated email campaigns.

"Cold email response rates are lowering across the board," Ryan noted. "So I've started treating outbound like inbound - making emails HTML-based, pretty, interesting, like a billboard or LinkedIn post. No offers at first, just gaining attention and earning trust."

He's also experimented with phantom blogs for SEO purposes - content sites that provide pure information in a company's industry, occasionally linking back to the main product. For RevHawk, which sells to pest control companies, this blog publishes daily on a cron job, varying topics and citation patterns. For Intermission, they created herbloodwork.com, essentially a "mom blog" that doesn't mention Intermission anywhere but builds topical authority and backlinks.

The Habits That Sustain Momentum

Ryan wrapped up with a simple framework: daily, weekly, and monthly habits that keep go-to-market momentum alive.

Every day: post something on LinkedIn. Every week: have a go-to-market sync to discuss plays and pipeline. Every month: review your systems and see what's working.

These rhythms prevent the drift that kills early-stage traction. They ensure positioning stays sharp, plays remain focused, and pipeline actually converts.

The Bottom Line

If there's one insight that threaded through the entire webinar, it's this: founders who own their go-to-market strategy by deeply understanding their positioning will always outperform those who chase the latest automation tool or growth hack.

The work isn't sexy. It's months of customer conversations before making a sale. It's refining messaging hierarchies until the benefits are crystal clear. It's posting on LinkedIn even when it feels uncomfortable. It's personally reaching out to prospects before ever thinking about automation.

But that foundational work is what creates the magic - when the right message reaches the right person at the right time, and a 15-minute response turns into a closed deal.

Everything else is just ancillary.