Go-to-Market & Growth

At the start, the founders are the sales team. Ran Ribenzaft, Co-Founder and CTO of Harmony, spends about 90% of his time on GTM, and the company passed 50 customers in its first year with no salesperson at the outset. It began with roughly 100 discovery calls over three to four months, before there was a product, plus manual outbound on LinkedIn.

Those calls are research as much as selling. Ran opens with an open question ("what's on your plate?"), treats the call summaries as data, and used them to converge on a precise ICP: US tech companies with 500–5,000 employees. From there he moved quickly from validation to a real demo, because in his words the era of mockups is over.

Dani Avitz, an entrepreneur, fractional CMO and angel investor, reaches the same conclusion from the lean-business side: validate before you write code, with a landing page and outreach to strangers rather than friends, who say yes too easily. His first channel is almost always LinkedIn outreach through Sales Navigator, which brings 3-5 qualified meetings on average. It's manual and doesn't scale, and he advises against automating it since that breaks LinkedIn's policy.

Spending money on ads is easy; the hard part is connecting every dollar to the business numbers and seeing what actually moves the needle. That's how Guy Rozman, owner of Mediaflowzz, puts it — he builds Customer Acquisition processes for startups and global tech companies. His process has four stages: research that ends in a media plan and a budget split across channels, building the ads and campaigns, going live, and optimization that never stops.

Guy recommends reading reviews and running user testing to hear the words people use to describe their experience, instead of inventing marketing language. Shevi Dagan, who bought the e-commerce brand SPORTYWOLF, learned that focus wins: "women" was too broad, so he narrowed it to women who work out, aged 25–40. He sees a built-in conflict of interest between influencers and the brand, but also a source of first trust with people who don't know the brand yet.

The channels themselves are shifting. Dani Avitz thinks SEO isn't dead but changing: organic traffic is dropping while impressions rise, because users meet the brand inside LLMs. Hence the growth of GEO and AEO.

The real profit comes after the first purchase. Shevi Dagan says SPORTYWOLF's big margins will come from repeat customers, because there's no marketing cost there — by the third purchase it already pays off well. At AppsFlyer, Rachel Frenkel BenHanoch built a single Product Adoption metric that links usage to retention.

The metric is a weighted Compound KPI that returns a value between 0 and 1 and reflects depth of usage — which features are used, which configuration and which persona — not how often people log in. Customers were split into low, medium and high buckets, and historical data showed which adoption range predicts retention. A joint CS and marketing campaign aimed at the medium bucket moved 68% of the customers it reached into the high bucket within three months.

Itai Horn, a Senior Product Manager at Resident, works on conversion in mattress e-commerce, where every test is data-driven. Tests like an Affirm component showing a monthly payment and a dual CTA on the homepage proved themselves, and a CRO Agent the team built raised velocity from 2–4 to 8 parallel tests and the success rate from 10–20% to 35%. He also points out that the next customer may be an agent, and the race now is to be discoverable — and first — inside LLMs.