Ready to build your own Founder-Led Growth engine? Book a Strategy Call
Frontlines.io | Where B2B Founders Talk GTM.
Strategic Communications Advisory For Visionary Founders
13 HR Tech Founders
GTM Channel Lessons
Pilot Every Channel Before You Scale Any of Them
Gusto’s early GTM team ran structured experiments across multiple acquisition channels before committing serious resources to any of them. Tomer described the approach directly: “We just tested different things. We tested a bunch of content and blog posts and things like that. Is that something we’re good at? Is that something that people want? We tested SEM. Are we too early for this? Is this the right time for this? We tested amplifying with third parties or, kind of resellers with contents and things like that. Is this the right thing for us? And it’s really all about piloting, testing, and learning.” Only after running those experiments did they identify what actually moved the needle. “That first thing that really worked was being out there. Very much consumer oriented. So being out there, around PR stuff, around social media, being out there on content. And that was the real majority of the channel, kind of the organic side of things.” The sequencing mattered: discover first, scale second.
Use Paid Social to Find Early Adopters Before Word of Mouth Scales
When Arist was building its early pipeline, Michael didn’t wait for word of mouth to develop on its own. He identified that his target buyers, innovative L&D leaders, were concentrated around specific voices in the HR tech space. “There’s certain thought leaders in the HR tech space that a lot of early adopters follow,” he said, which made paid social a precise targeting mechanism rather than a broad awareness play. “In the very beginning, a lot of our best leads came through Twitter (X) ads. So that was a big focus area for us for a while.” The channel wasn’t the end goal. It was the entry point into a community that eventually became self-sustaining.
Appear on Industry Podcasts Before Building Your Own Marketing
When WizeHire needed early distribution, Sid went straight to the media channels where their target audience was already paying attention. The hook was not the hiring platform itself, but a content angle the audience already cared about. As Sid put it, “my co-founder was the author of the personality assessment, the DISC aspect. So we actually went so far as to go into the industry media, hop on any podcast that would be interested in talking about the DISC assessment and hiring for real estate. That’s how niche we went.” The lesson he draws from that period applies to any early-stage GTM motion: “In the early days you have to be willing to do that work and then build systems that let you scale.”
Commit to Organic Channels Before Starting Paid Advertising
Jared Pope treated paid advertising as a commitment too serious to enter casually. “Our approach was if we’re going to start paid advertising, you have to be committed to continually doing paid advertising,” he explained, “and that was an approach that we just said, hey, you know what? We’re going to make a strategic bet that we’re not going to do that.” Instead, the team focused on organic: “Let’s focus on some organic; through our LinkedIn posts. Let’s do some blogs, obviously some SEO stuff, but really no paid advertising.” That discipline held across the company’s growth, and as Jared put it, they had been “really successful as a company to date. To where all without paid advertising.”
Redirect Outbound Resources Toward Inbound When the Channel Decays
Sloane watched outbound lose its edge over nearly a decade of running campaigns. His read on it was direct: “I was launching outbound campaigns and outreach, eight, 10 years ago and at first it was like a gold mine and I truly believe that channel has been pretty beat down and it’s certainly not what it once was.” Rather than investing more into a declining channel, he shifted toward inbound built on founder expertise. The logic was that buyers respond to credibility, and credibility comes from depth: “that’s when you come back to this inbound created by founder content and people really resonating with someone who actually has deep knowledge of a particular space and isn’t just building a technology point solution, but is building a real holistic business solution.” The channel shift was not about abandoning outbound entirely but about recognizing where trust-based demand generation had overtaken interruption-based outreach.
Treat Outbound as a Proprietary Asset That Compounds Over Time
John Kim made a deliberate choice to invest in outbound as a long-term channel rather than leaning on referrals and personal network, which he saw as fundamentally limited. His reasoning was structural: “outbound gets a lot of hate and it comes with mixed results, but I think if you really execute it well with the right tools, it’s really good.” The key distinction he drew was durability. Referrals and network-based growth have a ceiling because they deplete, while a well-built outbound system does not. As John put it, outbound is “one of those things where you can always rely on and it’s like your proprietary strength rather than referrals or your network, which depletes.”
Build Market Credibility Through Research and Awards
Barb described three things Sapia did to build its brand without a large marketing budget, and the first two were research and awards. “We have really invented a new science, which is the ability to understand people through language. And it’s reflected in peer reviewed, published research. So one thing I’ve done is we’ve had an R&D team from the beginning. I’ve backed them to go and publish their research and that built us a brand amongst key influences in our market.” The second move was simpler: “The second is went for a lot of awards with our clients in the early days because that’s a cheap way to get recognition.” Both gave Sapia visibility with the professional and academic influencers who shaped credibility in the space, at a fraction of what traditional brand marketing would have cost.
Host Dinners Before Conferences and Turn Clients Into a Referral Engine
When cold outbound stopped converting, Charlotte rebuilt her top-of-funnel around two high-trust channels: in-person presence and client referrals. Rather than sponsoring booths or blasting event lists, she focused on creating connection before the conference floor even opened. “Showing up in person to our events, to other people’s events, and really making connections and hosting like dinners before a big conference the next day where we know a lot of people will be there. Those two things have completely driven our top of funnel strategy. And honestly, we’ve pretty much turned off everything else.” She applied the same warm-intro logic to her existing client base, asking close clients to connect her with other CHROs in their network. “Once we’re close to a client, I’ll say like, hey, do you have any other CHROs that you know that would be interested in this? So we kind of just keep spreading it outside of just our investor group.”
Launch a Community Channel Before You Scale Your Sales Team
When Nitzan recognized that his GTM team of 7 or 8 people could never out-spend competitors on advertising, he built a community-led acquisition engine instead. “We’re never going to be the biggest advertisers,” he said, “and the way we got to people was through community selling.” The first move was a weekly LinkedIn Live show hosted by a well-known industry figure who brought his own following: “He already brought like a group of followers and then we bring guests every week and really build a machine around adding value and content marketing.” Nitzan layered on a recognition campaign, running an industry-voted Top 100 list that generated goodwill at low cost: “people surprise, they like to be recognized, so it creates a lot of love and a lot of feeling of community.” Both efforts fed a curated network of roughly 200 industry professionals that included active clients, future prospects, and companies that had chosen a competitor.
Get Listed on the Platforms Your Buyers Already Use
Hanns built a significant inbound channel by listing Cobrainer on the app stores of the major HR platforms his buyers already used. “Going to customers through their platform. So through the SAP App Store, through the Workday App Store, through the Personio App Store, going customers or approaching customers through the App Store really makes sense. It brings you on the radar of these large tech partners. They will start delivering kind of leads to you.” The listing also created a benchmarking environment: “you will just learn much faster in terms of also comparing yourself to other applications that are referenced on the App Store and basically being able to kind of distinguish yourself in a way from the other apps in the App Store.” For founders selling into markets dominated by large platform vendors, getting listed early turns those vendors into active distribution partners.
Activate Partner Sellers Directly Before Expecting Channel Revenue
Most founders treat a signed partnership as a pipeline source. Mike Fitzsimmons learned it isn’t. The real unit of leverage inside any partner relationship is the individual seller, not the company, not the agreement, and not the partner marketing manager. As Mike put it, “just having a partner marketing manager to help you exploit that channel opportunity, that’s not how it works.” The actual work is getting in the trenches with the reps on the other side: “it comes down to the sellers. The art there is you actually have to get hand to hand combat with the actual sellers right at your partner to make sure that they’re incentivized to go sell your stuff.” Without that, you are operating on a fantasy: “you signed the deal with XYZ and you just add water and do some activations and voila, you’re going to start getting great leads. It just doesn’t work that way in real life.”
Deepen Your Integration Until It Becomes the Product Experience
Guideline’s partnership channel drives 60% of new customer acquisition, but Kevin pointed to a different number as the one that actually matters. “In the end, 92% of all of our customers are on an integrated experience,” he said, meaning even the 40% who come in through the website end up operating inside a payroll-connected workflow. That depth of integration was deliberate from the start. As Kevin explained, “We know every intricacy of all these online, forward thinking payroll providers, which makes our integrations better than everybody else’s.” He connected that directly to scale: “We have 41,000 or almost 41,000 small businesses on our platform and we’re 360 people.” When the integration becomes the product experience, partners stop being a lead source and start being permanent distribution infrastructure.
Turn Webinars and Email Into a Community-Driven Distribution Channel
Andres described a community that formed around email and webinars, with those webinars growing to over a thousand attendees per event. He explained the mix of participants directly: “we invite people who are current clients to people that we’ve met along the way and we bring in some topics.” The community was not limited to sourcing discussions. Andres noted that members shared interest in how they were automating other areas of their work and topics like building diverse talent pipelines. That same group also connected to product development, with select members joining a client advisory board where, in Andres’s words, “they’re really looking at the product and they’re really giving us feedback about new features that we’re building.”