What Founders Wish Marketers Knew About GTM

# Role: Founder/CEO

# Theme: Marketing & Growth

# Role: Community/DevRel

# Theme: GTM Strategy & Trends

# Theme: Leadership & Executive Perspectives

Explore five lessons founders wish marketers understood about go-to-market. Practical insights and tactics for stronger cross-functional alignment.

December 4, 2025

Joshua Zerkel

Marketers are often on the front lines of go-to-market, tasked with shaping narratives, generating demand, and fueling growth. Founders, on the other hand, carry the responsibility of the entire business: raising capital, defining vision, building teams, and delivering results across every function. The two perspectives overlap, but not always smoothly. Misalignment can lead to wasted resources, mixed messages, or campaigns that don’t connect with real business needs.

For founders, GTM is not just about marketing outputs — it is about how every function comes together to reach the market effectively. Many wish marketers better understood the pressures they face and the context behind strategic decisions. Here are five recurring themes that founders emphasize when talking about what they want from their marketing leaders.

Focus on outcomes, not just activities

Founders care about the impact marketing creates, not just the number of campaigns launched or assets produced. Activity is necessary, but outcomes — such as qualified pipeline, product adoption, or improved retention — are what truly matter. Canva’s early founders often spoke about the importance of tying marketing directly to user growth and adoption, not vanity metrics like social reach.

Key takeaways:

Frame marketing updates in terms of business impact, not output volume.

Align metrics with company-level goals such as revenue, adoption, or retention.

Create a shared scorecard with sales and product so outcomes are tracked consistently.

Ask founders directly which outcomes matter most at the current stage of growth.

Understand the investor and board perspective

Founders operate under constant scrutiny from investors and boards, who want clear evidence of growth. Marketing can play a powerful role by translating GTM activity into proof points that resonate in that environment. At Twilio, for instance, early marketing leaders built narratives around developer adoption rates — a metric investors quickly grasped as a proxy for long-term revenue.

Key takeaways:

Learn what metrics and stories resonate most with your founder’s stakeholders.

Build marketing reports that can be shared directly in board decks.

Highlight how community-driven insights or adoption trends reinforce strategic positioning.

Anticipate tough questions by grounding campaigns in hard data.

Bring the market in, not just the message out

Founders rely on marketers to do more than broadcast. They need marketers to bring insights back from the market that inform product, sales, and strategy. Shopify’s founders, for example, have long emphasized the role of their merchant community in surfacing new opportunities. Marketing leaders who engaged deeply with that community helped shape product roadmaps and GTM plays that were grounded in merchant needs.

Key takeaways:

Treat customer and community conversations as a core input to strategy.

Create feedback loops that ensure insights move from marketing back to product and sales.

Share market insights in leadership meetings to elevate marketing’s role as a strategic partner.

Position yourself as the “voice of the market” internally, not just the owner of messaging.

Balance creativity with pragmatism

Founders value bold ideas, but they also need to see disciplined execution. Marketing leaders who can generate creative campaigns and prove their effectiveness build credibility faster. Miro, for example, grew rapidly during the pandemic by experimenting with creative campaigns that showcased collaborative use cases, while also measuring adoption rates with precision. This blend of creativity and pragmatism reassured founders that marketing was both innovative and accountable.

Key takeaways:

Test bold ideas, but always tie them to measurable goals.

Use pilots or small experiments before scaling campaigns.

Show how creative campaigns influence adoption, engagement, or pipeline.

Demonstrate adaptability by pivoting quickly if results do not align with objectives.

Recognize that speed matters

Founders often operate under tight timelines, especially in early-stage companies. They need marketers who can move quickly without sacrificing quality. Airbnb’s founders, for instance, leaned on fast, scrappy marketing tactics in their early days — from grassroots campaigns to community-led storytelling — while still building toward a scalable brand.

Key takeaways:

Develop a bias toward action by shipping quickly and iterating based on feedback.

Avoid overengineering campaigns when speed to market is critical.

Balance long-term brand building with the urgency of near-term growth goals.

Use community as a testing ground to validate ideas quickly before broad rollout.

Why this matters for GTM alignment

When marketers understand what matters most to founders, they strengthen alignment across the entire GTM motion. They help ensure marketing is not operating in isolation but in sync with sales, product, CX, and community. The result is faster execution, more credible narratives, and strategies that resonate with both the market and the boardroom.

Founders want marketing leaders who act as business partners, not just campaign drivers. By focusing on outcomes, surfacing insights, balancing creativity with pragmatism, and moving with speed, marketers can become indispensable to GTM success.

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Table Of Contents

What Founders Wish Marketers Knew About GTM

Explore five lessons founders wish marketers understood about go-to-market. Practical insights and tactics for stronger cross-functional alignment.

Focus on outcomes, not just activities

Bring the market in, not just the message out

Balance creativity with pragmatism

Recognize that speed matters

Why this matters for GTM alignment

Popular

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