How to do GTM at pre-seed (without burning your runway)

Love @WisprFlow for AI prompts. For WhatsApp and team chats, not so much. Friends and teammates have come across cold to me, then said “oh, that’s Wispr Flow.” I knew them. Most people won’t. Some messages should still sound like you.

I'm at TechSparks in Bengaluru today. To start delivering on a promise. 27 hours ago, we launched @getUnkapped and made three public bets on India. Being here is step one. And something bigger is coming soon. But first, how we got here. The launch got picked up by publications across the US and India. For a bootstrapped team that spent months in stealth, that was humbling. But the press wasn't the best part. The DMs were. Founders, CIOs and GTM leaders. Most of them were strangers. All saying a version of the same thing: → We've spent a year on AI and can't point to one number it moved. → Every team bought its own tool. → We know what we want AI to do. The tools are there. Nobody owns making them work together. That's the gap we built UNKAPPED @getUnkapped to close. Our bets, made public so you can hold us to them: → 100 enterprises through an AI-readiness audit by March 2027 → AI running in the daily work of 25+ of them by December 2027 → 100 India-based forward-deployed engineers trained by the end of 2028 Which brings me back to why I'm here. DMs start conversations. Rooms move them. Today I'll sit across from CTOs, engineering heads and GTM leaders. Face to face. Just "what's actually broken?" Not every conversation converts. Most won't. But here's what you can't beat: Human connection Trust built in 20 minutes over coffee A network that remembers your face, not your follower count I keep telling founders the same thing: If you really want to move things, get up from that chair and go out. The answers aren't in your inbox. They're in the room. If you're at TechSparks, come find me. Or DM me and we'll meet. And thank you to everyone who shared, called and cheered. Now back to the real work! #TechSparks

I’m starting a new venture today. It’s called UNKAPPED @getUnkapped . I’ve rewritten this post more times than I’d like to admit. For a while now we’ve been in stealth, testing quietly before saying a word. We embedded forward-deployed practice at large cloud and infra companies. We ran Applied AI and GTM systems for cyber and devtools leaders, and for VC and PE-backed portfolios. The problem got validated faster than we expected. So today we go public, with bets. Honestly, this is the most nervous and the most sure I’ve felt about anything. 𝐖𝐇𝐀𝐓 𝐈𝐒 𝐔𝐍𝐊𝐀𝐏𝐏𝐄𝐃 A forward-deployed practice for Applied AI, enterprise transformation and GTM engineering. → Applied AI: forward-deployed engineers who put agents into production → Enterprise AI transformation: people, process and systems made AI-ready → Growth systems: pipeline, RevOps and demand, engineered 𝐖𝐇𝐘 𝐍𝐎𝐖 → Investors are forming advisory programmes → YC is investing in AI services → Bigger VCs and other funds are backing the forward-deployed practice → We're highlighting the gap on the stack-first view: “If you show me your IT stack, I’ll show you what you’re going to be able to get from agents.” → Software has never been cheaper to build. What gets scarce is the person who sits inside your stack and ships. 𝐌𝐘 𝐒𝐓𝐎𝐑𝐘 I started as a developer, then a solutions architect. Cloud and infra taught me one thing: nothing works until it’s deployed. Product marketing taught me the other half: great tech doesn’t sell itself. I took my company to $1M in 6 months. Last year alone, we helped move 50+ GTM teams. And I kept seeing the same gap. → Engineers who didn’t understand revenue. → GTM teams who couldn’t touch the stack. → Enterprises with budget, but no one to make AI work inside them. So I’m building this with two people I trust and my broader team. Neeraj @say2neeraj , a top 1% GTM expert, leads the forward-deployed and GTM practice. Sindhuri @sindhujl , who has led technology transformation inside large enterprises, leads enterprise AI transformation. 𝐎𝐔𝐑 𝐁𝐄𝐓𝐒 Public, so you can hold us to them: → 100 enterprises through an AI-readiness audit → AI in production at 25+ of them by next year → 100 forward-deployed engineers trained and deployed 𝐀 𝐅𝐄𝐖 𝐓𝐇𝐀𝐍𝐊 𝐘𝐎𝐔𝐒 This wouldn’t have been possible without the people around me My friends and communities in cyber, devtools and product marketing. You answered my DMs, took my calls and pushed me to think bigger. And to all of you here. You’ve been with me through every chapter. You’ve seen me struggle, fall, get back up and keep moving. So it felt right to share this with you first. -- Let's get UNKAPPED!!

Don't quit. A failed launch is fine. It just means your message missed. Adjust the pitch and re-target the audience. Relaunch next week with what you learned today.

In public. Show the bugs. Share the micro-wins. People don't buy from ghosts. They buy solutions from builders they trust.

Flip. The ratio. Stop building for months. And marketing for only six days. Build your distribution before writing code. 50% of your initial time belongs to marketing.

A thoughtful comment on a post doing 100,000 impressions puts you in front of more of the right people than your own post doing 3,000. You are renting distribution. The rent is attention and effort.

Run this test today. Ask a founder, an AE, and a marketer to describe your ICP in one sentence, separately, before they can coordinate. Three different answers means you do not have positioning. You have three private theories.

Product marketing is four questions with actual answers. ↳ Who buys and who does not. ↳ What they believe now that must change. ↳ What you do that the alternative cannot. ↳ What words they use, not what words you use. That is it. Decks are output, not the discipline.

Founders ask me this every week: "Why do we need you when we can hire a GTM Engineer?" You can. But hiring gets you a sharp builder who ships fast. Then nothing moves. Not because they're bad. Because building the campaign was never the hard part. It's: ↳ Sales ops ↳ Demand gen ↳ Product marketing Each its own game. Built on pattern recognition you can't get from a workflow. Have someone who can strategize and read data honestly? Hire internally. Don't? That's what we're for.

Value posts get bookmarked and forgotten. POV posts get followed. People follow opinions they want more of, not facts they can save for later. Lead with the stance.

Reach and follows are two different decisions made in two different places. A post moving means you rented attention. The follow happens later, on your profile, when someone asks what they get if they stay. Most people leak there.

I have four obsessions, and I rotate them. ↳ Business Models: How companies actually make money. ↳ Founder Psychology: Navigating the messy middle. ↳ Career Growth: Building an elite trajectory from a non-elite start. ↳ Philosophical Marketing: Using core principles as a brand multiplier. Four lanes. Every post lives in one.

Context quality determines output quality. Feed a model firmographics and you get noise dressed as targeting. The teams getting real leverage did the positioning work first.

Inbound compounds. Outbound decays the moment you stop paying for it. One point of view carried across every channel beats more volume on one. That is what allbound actually means. It is why single channel founders stay fragile.

The old way: guess the positioning, then spend a quarter proving you were right. That is perception bias. It is expensive. The point of AI in GTM is not more output. It is killing your wrong guesses faster.

Perseverance is not the grind everyone posts about. It is staying in through the flat part. Where nothing is moving and no one is watching. Most people quit in the flat part. That is the whole difference.