What is First GTM Hire?

What is First GTM Hire?

My goal is to help founders and their first GTM hires find product market fit.

That process is messy, subjective and iterative. It requires a willingness to absorb feed and mix together quantitative and qualitative signals.

It’s also often hard for founders who don’t come from a sales or GTM background to do some of the core activities that customer development requires.

Things like cold outreach, running a sales process, deciding how to price and package, engaging multiple stakeholders who are involved in buying your solution are hard to do and are very different skills than product and engineering.

About me

My name is Tim Geisenheimer. I’ve been the first GTM hire at early stage startups three times and I was most recently the Founder/CEO of Correlated. I’ve taken startups from $0-$18m ARR and build 25-person sales teams at larger tech companies.

I love the process of finding product market fit and going from 0 → 1. I believe that customer development and early B2B sales can be systematized to determine what to build that solves customer pain. I also think that more founders should do customer development earlier, before they have written a line of code.

First GTM Hire and beyond

My plan is to publish this newsletter and eventually form a community around it to help demystify many of the elements involved in doing early customer development and sales for B2B startups.

I’m also working with select founders more closely to help them with customer development. If you’re interested in learning more about how I can help, please get in touch by filling out this form.