Go-to-Market Strategy for SaaS: Building the Right Puzzle
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A go-to-market strategy for a SaaS company isn't one channel, one hire or one campaign. It's whether your team structure, your first marketing hire, your content, your outbound and your diagnosis process all fit together, because if one piece is wrong, the rest of the pieces don't save you. Two companies can run the exact same playbook and get opposite results, and the difference is almost never the channel.
I talked through this with Öykü Sorgun Erakkus, founder of BOLD GTM Studio and a fractional CMO for Shopify apps and SaaS startups, on the video above. She's spent over a decade in tech, built and ran her own bartering platform, and has worked as a fractional CMO across SaaS companies for the last five years. Her framing for all of it: go-to-market isn't a list of tactics, it's a puzzle, and most companies are missing more pieces than they think.
Why do people say go-to-market "depends" so often?
Because it genuinely does. There's no universal team structure, first hire or channel that works for every SaaS company, only a set of pieces (the problem, the packaging, the team, the operations) that have to fit your specific stage and product. The job isn't finding the one right answer, it's diagnosing which pieces you're missing.
Öykü put it directly: go-to-market is a puzzle because it's never just one piece that matters, it's the combination. Whose problem are you solving, is the packaging something that person is actually looking to pay for, and are your team's operations working in sync with all of it. Take any one of those in isolation and it can look fine while the whole picture is broken, and packaging specifically, whether what you built maps to something the buyer already wants to pay for, is its own audit, covered in the $1M offer formula. That's also why "it depends" is one of the most common phrases in GTM, and why a founder walking through their situation on a call usually hears it more than they'd like.
What should your SaaS marketing team structure look like?
Most early-stage SaaS marketing teams are one person, and Öykü expects that to keep being true as AI accelerates what a single operator can do. The mistake isn't staying small, it's hiring a junior person into that seat without any senior guidance above them, especially when the co-founders have never run go-to-market themselves.
| Stage | What it usually looks like | Where it breaks |
|---|---|---|
| Early, pre-validation | One person, often the founder, doing most of it | Rarely breaks here, there's just not much team yet |
| Growing, some traction | Founder hires a junior marketer for budget reasons | Junior executes a lot, results don't show up, nobody above them can diagnose why |
| Ideal structure | One full-time hire dedicated to content, plus a network of freelancers or agencies for experiments, plus a senior eye (co-founder, fractional CMO, or in-house lead) | Rarely breaks, but it depends on having the resources or validation to support it |
That middle row is the trap. A junior marketer can execute a lot of tasks and still produce nothing, and the founder starts questioning the hire instead of questioning the structure. If nobody in the room has run go-to-market before, add a fractional or senior operator before you add headcount, because the problem usually isn't effort, it's direction.
What should your first marketing hire be?
If Öykü had a marketing budget to deploy and had to make one hire, it would be someone strong in content, not a specialist and not an outbound hire. The reason: content is what turns a hard-to-understand problem into a message people immediately get, and that same skill also strengthens outbound, because outbound only converts to a conversation when the message inside it carries real value.
That answer cuts against what most founders assume. The majority of people looking for GTM help are looking for an agency or a person to run outbound, cold email or cold calling specifically, because those channels feel more directly controllable than content. Öykü's counter is that outbound without a strong message behind it is just volume, and content is the thing that makes the volume convert. I've seen the same pattern from the paid side: across the accounts my team has audited, when a client already has an active organic presence on Instagram, Facebook or LinkedIn, their Meta ad performance is consistently better than clients starting from zero content. The ad isn't doing all the trust-building on its own.
If you're already running paid traffic into a call funnel and the real question is lead quality rather than the first hire, that's a separate problem worth solving on its own, covered in why most Meta ads leads are bad.
Is a fractional CMO worth it, or should you build in-house?
A fractional CMO earns their fee by being an outsider who has already seen your specific failure pattern somewhere else, not by replacing your team. Öykü's case for it: after working across multiple companies at multiple stages, patterns repeat, and someone too deep in daily execution usually can't see the leaky bucket problem sitting right in front of them, even when it's obvious from outside.
Fractional and full-time aren't competing options, they solve different problems. A company can have a fully staffed team and still need an experienced eye to work alongside them, because execution and diagnosis are different skills. As I said back to her on the call: you hire the fractional CMO for the brain, the strategy and the outside perspective, and your existing team still does most of the execution, sometimes as much as 90% of it. She agreed, and added the part I hadn't considered: bringing someone in also forces focus, because a portion of your team's attention now has to go toward whatever specific challenge justified the hire in the first place.
How does a fractional CMO actually diagnose a broken GTM?
By running an audit before touching anything: individual conversations with team members, a look at the funnels, a look at onboarding, and a deliberate refusal to trust the problem the founder walked in with. Öykü is explicit that the stated problem is often not the real one, and it usually takes a few conversations before the actual picture becomes visible.
That order matters. Jumping straight to fixes based on what a founder describes on the first call skips the step where you find out whether that's even the right thing to fix. An audit surfaces where the funnel, the onboarding or the team's operations are actually leaking, and only then does the rebuild-versus-patch decision make sense, because sometimes the existing puzzle just needs one or two pieces replaced, and sometimes it needs to come apart entirely. If the funnel itself is the leak, start with the most profitable funnel for B2B SaaS.
How do you balance gut feeling with data in GTM decisions?
Gut feeling isn't the opposite of data, it's data you haven't measured yet, and the discipline is testing it instead of trusting it outright. Öykü runs a specific exercise for this: every team member brings a hypothesis to the table, the group challenges it on why it matters and how it should be executed, then the team scores it on effort versus impact before committing resources.
The bias to watch for is treating a challenge to your gut feeling as a challenge to your experience, which makes people defend a hypothesis instead of testing it. I run into the same tension on the paid side: certain patterns hold every time I look at a call-booking funnel, so when the numbers point somewhere that contradicts what I've seen dozens of times before, I'll follow the pattern over the literal read of that day's data, while still checking myself on whether that's informed judgment or just bias protecting my own track record.
Score every hypothesis the same way before you build around it:
| What you see | Likely read |
|---|---|
| High-effort idea, high expected impact | Prioritize it, this is where growth experiments should go first |
| Low-effort idea, high expected impact | Ship it fast, it's the easiest win on the list |
| High-effort idea, low expected impact | Cut it regardless of who's attached to it |
| A hypothesis nobody can explain the "why" behind | Don't run it yet, force the reasoning out first |
Should you use AI for GTM content and copywriting?
Treat it as an enhancer for most tasks and expect it to fully replace some, because which one applies depends entirely on the task, not on AI as a category. Öykü uses it as a collaboration partner: she comes in with an idea, has it stress-test the angle or point out what she's missing, then edits her own draft at least three times before publishing, rather than asking it to generate the finished piece.
The risk she flagged is getting lazy: knowing exactly how a piece should read and structuring it in your head, then skipping the actual writing and just prompting for it, which produces something she's rarely satisfied with. She also referenced a study comparing writers using AI assistants against writers who didn't, where the AI-assisted group's creativity dropped. I'd push back on that being universal. I consider myself an analytical, non-creative operator by default, and AI has done the opposite for me, closing the exact gap I used to have on the creative side. One concrete example: a market research prompt I built in Gemini has cut roughly 40 hours off the market research my team used to do manually. The difference is probably how it's used: as a first draft to lean on, or as a collaborator you argue with before you touch the keyboard yourself.
What's the go-to-market question almost nobody is asking?
Whether you're building a community around your product instead of just an audience, because an audience that only engages with your content doesn't compound the way a community that talks to each other does. Öykü sees most teams pouring effort into doing more, often with AI as the accelerator, while missing the piece that actually protects them from being just another feed post: a network effect around the people who already buy from them.
There's no single template for building one. On her own bartering platform, the product itself was inherently communal, so she built interest-specific groups (eventually a Discord) where people found others to trade with directly. For a different kind of company it might look like an education-focused space where people trade information while they're learning a skill. Once a community exists, keeping it active takes a deliberately designed engine, and early on, that engine is usually a person, often the founder, manually keeping it alive until the system can carry itself.
What should you actually do first?
Start by figuring out which single piece of your puzzle is genuinely missing, instead of adding another channel on top of a structure that already has a gap in it.
- Check your team structure first. If nobody involved has run go-to-market before and your only hire is junior, fix that before you fix the channel mix.
- If you're hiring your first marketer, default to content, not a specialist and not outbound-only, because it strengthens every other channel that comes after it.
- Run your own audit before you rebuild anything. Talk to the people closest to the work, look at the actual funnel and onboarding, and don't assume the stated problem is the real one.
- Score hypotheses on effort versus impact before you commit budget to them, gut feeling included.
- Use AI to stress-test your thinking, not to skip the thinking. Draft first, then bring it in to argue with you.
- Ask whether you're building a community or just an audience. If every metric is about reach and none of it is about people talking to each other, that's the missing piece.
If your gap turns out to be on the paid acquisition side once the rest of the puzzle is in place, that's the part my team and I build for high-ticket and B2B SaaS companies: apply here and we'll walk through where your funnel is actually leaking.
FAQ
Why does go-to-market strategy always depend?
Because there's no universal team structure, first hire or channel. The pieces, the problem, the packaging, the team and the operations, have to fit your specific stage and product.
What should a SaaS company's first marketing hire be?
Someone strong in content, because content turns a hard-to-understand problem into a message people get, and that also makes outbound convert better.
Is a fractional CMO worth it?
When you need an outside perspective that has already seen your failure pattern elsewhere. You hire the fractional CMO for the strategy, and your existing team still does most of the execution, sometimes as much as 90% of it.