Just Raised a Seed Round? First 90 Days of Go-to-Market

The money has landed. The announcement is out. And now someone, probably you, has to turn the funding into customers.

The first 90 days of go-to-market set the pattern for the next two years. Here is a practical plan that favours learning over noise.

What should the first 90 days of go-to-market look like?

Think of it as three blocks. In the first block you look backwards: who has already bought or tried the product, and why. In the second block you test: one or two channels, run tightly. In the third block you decide: scale what produced conversations, drop what did not, and write down the playbook.

The goal is not a big number at day 90. It is a clear answer to three questions. Who buys? What do they respond to? Where do we find more of them?

What should you do in the first 30 days?

Start with the customers you already have. List every user, pilot and paying customer. Talk to as many as you can, and ask what problem they had, what they tried before and why they chose you. Look for patterns in company type, role and trigger event.

Y Combinator’s startup library at the YC Startup Library collects advice from experienced founders, and a recurring theme is that early traction comes from specific customers and direct conversations. Paul Graham’s essay Do Things That Don’t Scale makes the same point: recruit users by hand, and learn from them.

By day 30 you should have a written ideal customer profile, a one-sentence offer and a list of 200 to 500 named accounts or people who match. Keep the list small enough to personalise.

What should you do from day 30 to day 60?

Pick one or two channels and run them properly. For a narrow, nameable buyer, outbound email and LinkedIn are often the quickest test. For buyers who already search for a solution, search ads can capture demand. For a community you know well, founder-led content can work.

Do not start five channels. A seed-stage team cannot learn from five at once. Set up tracking before you send the first message, so that each lead and meeting has a source.

If you use cold email, protect the basics. Google’s email sender guidelines ask senders to authenticate mail and keep spam rates low, and the FTC’s CAN-SPAM guide applies to business email too. Use separate sending domains, verified contacts and honest subject lines.

What should you do from day 60 to day 90?

Read the data and decide. Which message got replies? Which segment booked meetings? Where did deals stall? Compare cost per meeting and win rate by channel, and talk to the prospects who said no.

Then make three decisions. What to scale, what to stop and what to test next. Write the playbook down: the buyer, the message, the steps, the follow-up rules and the numbers. This is what you hand to the first sales hire, or to an agency.

What mistakes cost startups the most?

Four mistakes appear again and again.

• Hiring too early. A salesperson who inherits no playbook has to invent one, expensively.
• Spending before learning. Large ad budgets on an unclear offer buy expensive lessons.
• Chasing every segment. A message for everyone persuades no one.
• Ignoring follow-up. Many deals are lost in the days after the first reply.

Paul Graham’s Startup = Growth essay argues that growth rate is the defining measure of a startup, which is a reason to keep your tests small and your cycle short. Measure how fast you learn, not just how much you spend.

How should you measure progress?

Track a small set of numbers every week: conversations started, qualified meetings, pipeline created, win rate and cost per meeting. Keep a short learning log with three lines: what we tried, what happened, what we will change.

Investors usually respond well to this kind of clarity. Our guide on what investors want to see in your GTM numbers explains the metrics in more detail.

What should you prepare before day one?

Before the clock starts, gather what the next 90 days will depend on. Export your customer list with company size, industry, role and the date they bought. Find your top five reasons customers chose you, in their own words. List the tools you use for email, calls, tracking and reporting, and who owns each one. Agree who in the team is responsible for each part of the plan, and how decisions will be made.

Preparation looks slow, but it saves weeks. Teams that skip it often spend the first month discovering that nobody knows which customers were happiest, or where the data lives.

What does a simple weekly rhythm look like?

Keep the week short and repeatable. On Monday, review the numbers from the week before: replies, meetings, pipeline and anything that stalled. On Tuesday and Wednesday, send the next batch of outreach or launch the next test. On Thursday, hold a short review with whoever is selling, and capture what prospects said. On Friday, write three lines in the learning log and decide what changes next week.

This rhythm keeps the team honest. It prevents a common drift, where activity feels busy but nobody can say what has been learned. After twelve weeks you will have twelve entries in the log, and they will tell you more about your market than any planning document could.

When do you bring in help?

When founder time is the bottleneck and you have a clear enough playbook to hand over. An agency can run outbound, paid tests and reporting while you keep selling to the most important accounts. Read what a GTM agency actually does and how funded startups book their first 100 sales meetings before you decide.

To see how we work with young companies, visit our page on funded startups and YC companies and our go-to-market strategy service.

If you want a second opinion on your plan, book a free go-to-market diagnostic and we will go through your buyer, channels and numbers with you.