i'm a technical founder who had never sold anything to an enterprise, and then i had to run gtm from scratch. no playbook, no coach, just me. here's everything i learned taking mireye's gtm from 0 to 1, and the exact loop i'd run again. tldr: gtm is mostly pattern recognition and positioning. and both of those you can engineer. the exact loop i run every day: thesis → prospecting → messaging → outreach → followups → retro → repeat and for the entire first month i had one goal. not revenue, not logos. maximize calls booked. it's a simple game theory move: collapse the whole game to one win condition, and every decision answers itself. does this book a call, yes or no. everything else is noise. week 0. thesis. > pick one. an insight, a customer conversation, a problem you hit yourself. don't overthink it, it will change anyway. > mine was "data center developers want a cited site report in minutes and cheap, everything on the market today is slow and expensive." broad, and a little wrong. > doesn't matter. a thesis isn't meant to be right, it's meant to be tested. write your best guess and go. week 1. find the first 50 by hand. > no lists, no scraping. i read 200 company sites one by one to find my first 50. > my first list had xai and coreweave on it. reading their pages back to back, it clicked: those are the exact companies that will never buy from me. > then the email. write as a founder, five sentences, no fluff. the bar is embarrassingly low. it just cannot read like ai wrote it. no links. don't ask for a call. simple cta. > my first version opened with "80+ cited fields across 31 datasets." silence. the version that got replies was plain: "we'll analyze your site in minutes." same product. i just said it like a human. week 2. run the loop by hand. automate nothing. > i'm an engineer, so every instinct screamed automate this on day one. ignoring that was the best decision i made. > because week 2 isn't about sending emails. it's about collecting the exact words people use for their problem. that vocabulary becomes your positioning. > so i went from 10 emails a day to 15, all by hand, and after every call i wrote the problem down in their language. > then two calls in one week cracked it open. one founder came from real estate, one came from oil and gas. completely different worlds, both walking into data centers, both missing the same thing: knowing which land actually clears. > that overlap became my entire icp. that's the pattern recognition, and it only shows up when you do it by hand. > helped us change the thesis and product positioning: agents will comb through every parcel in the country to find you off market sites that meet your exact requirements. week 3. proof first, then automate. > the signal i waited for: different people describing the same problem in the same words, all around the same company size, and 10% response rate. > my icp went from a vague guess to three sharp ones: 1. land developers who just crossed into data centers chasing the ai boom. 2. developers whose site just got rejected, carrying a fresh loss i could fix. 3. powered-land flippers hunting land that already has power. week 4. build the machine. now its a numbers game. > i turned every step of the loop into its own claude skill. prospecting, messaging, crm, followups. now claude and i run the same loop every day and learn together. > the stack is simple: @ExaAILabs agent to find prospects @EmailHunter api to find and verify emails @meetgranola mcp to read my call notes @Superhuman mcp to send > a csv for a crm. yc agent when i want a second brain on a strategy call. > company brain with all the learnings md files. > a diligence doc before every demo, a learnings doc after every call. > before one demo i ran our own screen on the prospect's own site and found a air-permit issue they didn't know about. i walked in knowing their land better than they did. that's how you win a call. but the highest-leverage thing i did? followups. > someone opens my email, and i reply with the close: here's what we do, the value, demo pdf and call link. > i've booked more calls on that second email than on any first one. once they've read you, you're in. you just have to show proof. the lesson under all of it: do things that don't scale, on purpose, to learn anly what you've proven works. i still read every draft before it sends. if it smells like ai, i rewrite it by hand. pattern recognition from the retro. positioning from their own words. both engineered by running the loop. if i can do it, so can you. comment "gtm" and i'll send you my skills.