Why Founders Get Marketing Wrong: GTM Comes First

Founders sometimes get marketing wrong because they just often see it out of context of their company’s go-to-market positioning. Meaning, they approach it too early, too broadly, or with the wrong priority for their company’s growth stage. Marketing at the early stage isn’t about awareness or image; it’s sales infrastructure that supports how your GTM motion actually works.

Here I’m attempting to give you clarity on why early-stage founders misunderstand marketing, what actually changed in today’s landscape, and how to fix it with a lean, GTM-driven system that keeps sales, messaging, and execution aligned and focused.

What You’re Getting Wrong About Marketing 

Early-stage founders hit a point where they think, “we need to start doing marketing.” While they acknowledge that marketing is important, I found that there’s a gap in their understanding of what “marketing” even means for their unique circumstance. That thought assumes marketing and branding are independent functions.

But they approach it in a way that ticks a box instead of being intentional. And being intentional means understanding what your company needs from marketing. To contrary beliefs, that’s not an easy task to do. 

At this stage, marketing can’t be a separate function. It has to operate as sales support, especially when you’re still validating your product and sales is still learning what your customer actually needs. 

It sounds obvious, but it isn’t. It’s a mistake I’ve seen repeatedly with startups that want to grow too quickly.

Your company’s growth has stages and so does marketing. Before it becomes big-budget campaigns, trade show ads, and brand-building, before your company turns into a known name, it has to start as sales support.

What does that look like? Shortening the sales cycle. The faster the timeline, the faster you scale. That mindset shift keeps you focused. Because as you move forward, you’ll hit bottlenecks you can’t afford to ignore.

Your New Marketing Reality: Chat-GPT isn’t the Answer 

ChatGPT definitely helps, but it isn’t the fix.

AI killed the production problem and replaced it with a focus problem. You can spin up ten landing pages before lunch. None of them matter if you don’t know what they’re for. Creation is easy now; management is the real constraint. That means that the friction now is deciding what’s actually worth producing for your stage, your channels, and your timeline. 

The job of marketing at this stage when you strip it down to its core: online visibility to create credibility, which builds authority in your domain, which shortens the sales cycle.

The moment generative AI came into play, founders started producing content before they’d nailed product–market fit or repeatable sales.

When output becomes effortless, the real constraint becomes human. Prioritization, sequencing, and alignment.

Once you hit that wall, your bottlenecks start to look differently.

Today’s Common Marketing Bottlenecks

Bottlenecks never disappear. They just move.
In the early days, it wasn’t about having too few ideas. It was about translating them into collateral that actually helped sales and deciding what mattered when everything felt urgent.

Here’s where founders typically get stuck:

  1. What to create and why.
    Without a clear connection to sales goals, every new asset becomes another thing to manage. It creates anxiety, not momentum.
  2. Alignment.
    Founders, sales, and marketing move at different speeds. Early teams rarely sync fast enough to keep up with shifting priorities (especially in the Israeli climate). That’s why decision-makers end up approving every post, rewriting decks, and babysitting freelancers: no one else really knows the priorities.
  3. Vanity timing.
    Founders feel pressure to look “ready for scale” and start hiring marketers too soon or chasing full-funnel strategies before validating what actually drives revenue. Wrong marketing choices at this stage are expensive. You know you’ve crossed the line when you spend more time on “prep work” than on actually heating up leads and moving deals.

You don’t fix any of this with more tactics. You fix it with structure.

Why It Happens

Founders are mystified by marketing for their stage. Everything seems possible, so they over-spend or under-spend because they don’t actually know what they need. Startups burn money and time on marketing, PR, and branding they don’t need. They are driven by urgency, pressure, and copying big brands in a completely different phase.

Operating in Israel adds its own twist. We’re fast, hands-on, and skip bureaucracy as much as possible. We argue in meetings, decide on the spot, and don’t care much for titles. That’s a strength… until it hits marketing. Then it looks like this: the founder still wants to own every detail.

The balance is learning to set direction without becoming the bottleneck. A lean marketing system does exactly that: strategy stays centralized; execution gets distributed.

Tachles, what does that look like? I’ll tell you what it is not: a full-blown enterprise strategy, and it’s certainly not “every tactic under the sun.” It’s the smallest, leanest setup that supports sales today and won’t collapse when you scale.

This is common knowledge that is underrated. 

The Lean Marketing System 

Your marketing exists to close deals. Here are the 4 foundational principals you need to consider when building your lean marketing system:

Priniciple 1: Start with what sales actually needs
Yes, it’s obvious. But this should be your guiding sentiment at all times. When in doubt, come back to this. 

Ask one question: What does sales need this quarter to close more deals, faster?

That might mean:

  • A deck that doesn’t require 40 minutes of explanation
  • One solid case study
  • One-pagers or product enablement material
  • Trade show materials if that’s your main motion

Base your year around where your buyers already are e.g, LinkedIn, trade shows, webinars, and build only the assets that meet those moments. Make that collateral evergreen. Once it’s in place, echo it across your marketing channels.

Principle 2: Pick channels that fit your stage

At this stage, you don’t have enough data to know which channels are “the best.” That’s fine. Don’t over-engineer it.

Show up where your buyers already hang out:

  • Founder-led LinkedIn
  • Simple email nurture
  • Trade shows 

Start collecting data: who engages (where, when, and how often), what resonates, what triggered conversion, and the conversations move forward. 

You might not know exactly what to do with that information yet, but you’ll need it later. Guaranteed.

Principle 3: Treat marketing as discovery, not optimization

You’re not scaling yet. You’re learning.
Don’t rush to hire a full-time generalist or a CMO if you can’t sustain it. You don’t need a “Head of Brand” for two sales reps.

You need:

  • A partner who can test assumptions
  • Someone who can translate sales conversations into messaging and assets
  • A setup that moves fast and doesn’t create chaos

This is not the time to build a 10-person marketing team. It’s the time to get sharp.

Principle 4: Iterate deliberately
Your lean system is not static. It should grow with you. As traction builds, then you layer:

  • Stronger brand
  • Paid media
  • Deeper analytics

But every layer has to earn its place by serving a clear purpose tied to revenue. More funding doesn’t mean “more marketing.” It means more focus.

Finally 

The only way to stay ahead is to make marketing work like the rest of your startup: lean, fast, and tied to outcomes. A lean setup keeps your sales cycle short, your message consistent, and your burn under control. When every asset and message has a clear role in the sales process, marketing becomes intentional. That’s what go-to-market is really about, and it’s how you build a system that compounds.