Your go-to-market playbook needs an update.

Traditional marketing and growth channels are in a grim state. They’re crowded and expensive. Consumers and businesses are responding less to traditional marketing playbooks as novelty has waned.

And yet, we still see companies growing faster than ever before. As of writing,

Cursor, founded in 2022, has scaled to over $200M ARR.

Mercor, founded in 2023, has scaled to over $100M ARR.

Lovable, founded 2023, is reportedly reaching $50M ARR.

That’s just a small sample.

That kind of growth used to take a decade.

Part of this lightning fast growth is AI. Most of it is how these companies have re-shuffled the outdated go-to-market playbook.

They’re leveraging new combinations of product strategy and GTM strategy to great results. Here’s the shift we’re seeing:

The Evolution of GTM Strategies: From Pull to Push

While GTM is always evolving, we’ve seen three generational trends in how companies grow.

Phase 1: Offline to Online (2000-2010) – Pull

The first wave of internet-driven startup success stories digitized offline information and put it online. Trulia did this too.

We took newspaper real estate ads, listings hidden in piles of office paperwork, or niche online listing services, made them discoverable.

The same playbook worked for Yelp with local business listings and TripAdvisor with travel guides. They took offline intel and made it easy to find.

We thought of this as a “pull” strategy.

Search engines were new. You could find anything on the internet. But you couldn’t find a place to live, because all the critical information was offline. We were like a center of gravity, and users were “pulled” into our gravitational field thanks to search, SEO, and the fact that you couldn’t get real estate information easily from anyone else.

The other complimentary strategy at this time was traditional PR.

This “pull” approach worked in a world transitioning from offline to online. Today, it may still work in verticals where information is hard to access, but that’s rare given the maturity of search.

But as everyone began to use this strategy (plus PR) it became tired. Now it’s almost impossible for a startup to scale fast using SEO pull and PR alone as primary growth channels.

Phase 2: Product-Led Growth (2010-2020) – On-Platform “Push”

The second wave introduced a new approach – products with built-in viral loops and network effects. These were products where the growth mechanisms were built right into the products themselves.

For example, Slack, DocuSign, Dropbox, LinkedIn, and Zoom created products where the value of each individual user increased the value of the system as a whole. You needed to share the product to use it. And the more people used it, the better the product became.

It’s easy to forget how novel this GTM strategy was at the time. I was recently speaking with the Founder of DocSend, Russ Heddleston (also a former Trulia intern). In the 2010s, some of DocSend’s investors were skeptical that the company’s product-led-growth was sufficient without a specific sales motion. Today, this type of growth is what investors want to see.

The product-led-growth era was the beginning of a transition to “push” based go-to-market. The pull approaches were saturated, and so founders turned to product itself to gain market share.

The product itself “pushes” users to share. They must take an active role in evangelizing to get the most out of it. And they’re rewarded for it with better work conversations, likes, follows, fame…

This model still dominates today. We expect all of our companies to be building virality, network effects, and multi-player growth into their value propositions. The product itself should drive adoption.

However, users have become tired of aggressive virality tactics, and with growing privacy concerns, these large-scale product-led growth approaches have become harder to scale.

They’re now more suitable for smaller group collaboration processes.

But now, with AI at the core, we’re seeing a new layer of GTM strategies evolve on top of this foundation.

Phase 3: Off Platform Push

The first generation of “push” based go-to-market strategies all had one thing in common: you owned your network or community. The thinking was that conversations related to your product should be captured, own and controlled by your platform.

This led companies to build their own community platforms. We tried this at Trulia. We built “Trulia Voices” – a community product on our platform. Countless other web 2.0 companies did the same.

This thinking is still partially right. You must build a network around your product. But you don’t necessarily need to own that network outright anymore.

What you do need is to build that network as fast as possible. Often the best path to start is to build this community where the users currently are and where there is a deeply engaged community. Some call this concept of using third party networks to drive growth “ecosystem marketing.”

Some companies develop a following on Discord, Reddit, TikTok, X, LinkedIn, for example, and then push users onto their platforms from there. Cursor has their own community forum, but it also has a large Reddit community of over 44k members. Others build directly where their communities are. Midjourney, even today, is still embedded within Discord. Clay, which has grown explosively in the last 18 months, saw growth surge when they narrowed their ICP and began a slack channel for their most engaged users. That community is now close to 20k strong, as of writing.

This is the next era of “push” GTM strategies. Pushing users from other networks into your own, or building right where your target communities already are.

What’s Working Right Now:

Today’s GTM is about combining inherent virality in your product with a truly authentic go to market strategy centered around community building. There are several tactics we see working, and two general ground rules.  There’s one rule for product, and one rule for go-to-market strategy:

Product Ground Rule: Be a multiplayer game. Think of your ICP as a node in a network. You want your product sharable by design. Keep friction low, and make your output highly sharable.

GTM Ground Rule: Be authentic.

If you are following these two ground rules, these strategies are far more likely to succeed:

1. Building in Public (GTM Strategy)

Max Greenwald, CEO of Warmly, is radically transparent. Warmly is building marketing AI agents that understand an ICP at the level of “person-level” intent signals.

Max shares his company’s journey, metrics, challenges, and wins in real-time on LinkedIn. He’s amassed over 30,000 followers – more than his company’s official account.

Authenticity is key. Twenty years ago, an airport ad was a sign that you built a trustworthy, large company in the B2B space. Today’s digitally-native buyers respond better to authentic content than traditional advertising.

Building in public is authentic. That’s the point.

It pays off in two ways.

First, it conveys trust to your users. They feel like they’re part of the process, and more likely to trust you.

Second, it’s motivating for you. When your success or failure is so visible, it’s a bit like being a public company. When things go well, it’s great. When things go badly, it’s awful.

But that visibility creates a powerful drive to deliver.

2. Community-Centric Growth

The traditional model was to build your own community platform and try to own the conversation. Now, you build the community where the community already is.

Being where your users already gather eliminates the need for traditional sales infrastructure. This, partially, could be why Midjourney is on track to generate $200M ARR, and still appears to have a minimal sales team.

It feels unnatural to some founders to build on top of another product. But think of it as a way to build a network fast.

And today, speed is essential.

3. Self-Service “Viral” Products

The self-service model allows users to discover, try, and purchase products without any interaction with sales teams. You don’t want users to have to get approval from their boss.  Just let them put in their credit card and experiment.

You want to reward experimentation with your product.

While not a new channel, we’re seeing this motion explode during the AI era. This is due to AI “breakthrough”product experiences, low-friction onboarding, and deliberate encouragement around product sharing.

Cursor does this well. Its AI coding assistant allows people to start using the product right away and purchase premium features with a credit card.

This approach enables extraordinary growth with minimal teams. Just as Zoom exploded during the pandemic because it was the best product in the market and users could simply enter their credit card to get started, today’s AI-native products are following this same playbook.

4. Prosumer-Targeted Products

The “prosumer” seems to represent a sweet spot for AI products. These users have:

• Higher willingness to pay than traditional consumers
• Genuine problems that AI can solve
• Decision-making authority for their own tools
• Preference for self-service and fast solutions they can try first.

Cursor targets developers, while ElevenLabs targets content creators and media professionals. The willingness to pay is higher because these products work right away. You can scale to meaningful ARR on the backs of these global, prosumer communities.

Eventually, many companies begin to go after larger average contract values. ElevenLabs for example, has a tier for individual contributors, but now is used by a reported 41% of Fortune 500 companies.

They seem to be doing both. Marketing to prosumers seems to dominate ElevenLabs’ early trajectory, and eventually, an enterprise sales level is built on top, when revenue is already scaling.

5. Open-Source Foundation

The open-source strategy builds a community around freely available software. There is still so much room to grow here.

The frontier of software development is expanding at an unbelievable rate, continuously creating new opportunities and tools to be built, while the horizon of everything else — media, Google, paid marketing — seems to be shrinking.

Open-source communities are thriving networks with great potential. Many companies have been very successful partially becaue they leverage this approach to both refine the product itself and drive adoption.

Snyk, a software development security platform, has leveraged this approach. Snyk created an API to help detect and fix software vulnerabilities. Developers have also contributed millions of code vulnerabilities into a database. The more users, the better the product.

You can always monetize that type of community later on. For example, 70% of companies that eventually bought premium services already had individual contributors using Snyk.

First community, then sales. (If you need sales at all).

6. Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing remains an incredibly fertile ground for growth because influencers provide that crucial layer of social proof that facilitates transactions.

We are all familiar with consumer influencer marketing, but today B2B influencer marketing is driving a significant amount of sales for some startups who can authentically execute on it.

Clay is an example influencer marketing done well. Clay has built tools within their product that help influencers showcase its full potential, and created formal programs for creators.

Critically, this is a two-way relationship. Clay builds features creators can use in a variety of use cases, which makes the creators look smarter.  This system grows each party’s reach in turn. It’s a virtuous cycle.

Today, in early adopter niches, social proof is far more meaningful than traditional advertising. Those early adopters are exactly the people you need to drive growth early on.

This may feel like a known tactic, but this world is far more fragmented than people tend to believe. It’s wide open for creative marketers, and likely to accelerate fast.

The tools for creative marketers and influencers are only increasing with the rise of AI powered “vibe marketing.” Now, individual contributors have the resources of a legacy ad agency at their fingertips.  And, these ecosystems are still less competitive than the traditional marketing channels.

If You Only Remember One Thing

When traditional marketing channels are expensive and saturated, it demands a re-shuffling of the GTM playbook. That’s what we’re witnessing right now.

The new formula is a product + community framework.

Build where your users already are, enable them to try and buy without friction, create authentic connections rather than sales pitches, and find ways to turn users into advocates on and off your platform.

These tactics are landing right now, but this playbook is always shifting. In fact, if the playbook feels too obvious, it’s a sign to get creative.

But for the right product and team at the right speed, there’s plenty of fertile ground here.