Go-to-Market Consulting for Deep Tech
A pipeline you did not have to chase.
Your product does not generate demand. A machine does — and I build it, run it, and hand it over working.
Go-to-market for engineering-bought products · Seed through Series B
Every engagement starts in the same place. Something works. The market has not caught up. Runway is being spent while it decides, and there is a board meeting on the calendar at which someone will ask whether any of this repeats.
Good products do not sell themselves, and no amount of further engineering will make them. Demand is a separate machine, and somebody has to build it — the positioning, the proof, the artifacts, the channels, and someone in your prospect calls while it is made to work. That last part cannot be bought any other way. None of it is new: the foundations were settled a hundred years ago, and they need reading carefully and translating to your category and your buyer.
Demand that shows up without you in the room.
Not awareness. Not impressions. Qualified people, with budget and authority, asking for access to the thing you built.
Everything your buyer meets before they meet you.
Which ones, and in what order, depends on where you already are. Nobody is sold work they do not need.
Language
Your positioning and the words that carry it — the sentence your champion repeats when you are not in the room, and the ones that make the right people lean in.
Evidence
That message documented properly — the site, the pages, the proof, the answers to the objections. Findable, forwardable, and able to survive a security review without you.
Witness
Earned coverage in the publications and channels your buyers already read, with your product inside the story rather than beside it.
Machine
The inbound engine and the routing behind it, tuned to people who have the problem today — not people who are merely in your space.
You do not have a year
to rediscover this.
Marketing was solved a long time ago. Hire brilliant generalists, give them the problem, and they will derive it from first principles — and it will work, eventually. Eventually is a year you do not have, spent arriving at conclusions that were settled decades ago, while the company that hired people who already knew them is that same year ahead of you, in front of the same buyers.
Experienced people put you most of the way there on the first morning. What remains is the hard part: the fraction that is specific to you, that nobody has written down anywhere, and that is the only fraction actually worth a year of your life.
14
months
What it costs a capable team to derive, unaided, the position a practised one holds in week one.
The first four fifths is not insight. It is inventory — written down, tested, and paid for by somebody else.
The last fifth cannot be bought from anyone. It is the part you are actually engaging me for.
You compound at the same rate either way. Only the starting position moved.
That inventory is not secret. It is published in full, and free to read — the twelve precepts →
You are not hiring a person.
You are hiring a department.
A full-time VP of Marketing cannot execute this alone. Nobody can. You hire the VP, the VP tells you they need a team, and you are building headcount again — four salaries and four people to keep busy. That hire arrives alone, and spends a quarter learning your category before the first thing ships. For the same money you get a fractional CMO and the department behind them, already assembled and already moving.
The department you cannot afford, for the price of the person you would still have to train.
People who have already done this in your category, at a level you could not hire full-time at this stage.
A department's worth of skills rather than one person's — strategy, build, design, editorial, production.
No ramp, and no rediscovering what is already known. The work starts in week one, at eighty rather than at zero.
The leadership, the team and the tools on one line item, instead of four salaries and the year it takes to fill them.
One senior marketing hire costs roughly what this costs.
One fee covers all of it — me, the team I have worked with for years, and the stack they work in. You own everything it produces: the positioning, the assets, the accounts, the reasoning behind every decision. Graduating you is the plan, not the failure case.
Start with a conversation.
Book a meeting
Thirty minutes, at a time you choose. No deck, no pitch.
Needs and fit
What you actually need, and whether I am the right person for it. Sometimes the answer is no.
A written analysis
Positioning, category risk, the moves to make next. Yours to keep, before any money changes hands.
A proposal
Scope, deliverables, fee — only if you want one. Nothing before this costs you anything.
The work begins
Week one is execution, not onboarding.
I work on a narrow problem, with a specific kind of founder, at a specific stage.
Seed through Series B. A technical product. An enterprise buyer with a purchasing committee, a procurement officer, and a security review.
Prosumer PLG. Developer swipe-and-go adoption. Post-Series B funnel optimization. Different stage, different work — and there is someone well suited to it who is not me.
Pre-Seed and Looking for Advice?
Advisory
Before there is a pipeline to build, there is a message to get right. Nothing you make gets built on a guess, and no question waits a week for an answer — you take it to someone who has done this before, the day it comes up.
Regular scheduled meetings, email and Slack in between, and the templates and guides for the stage you are actually at.
Book a meeting →A call if it is urgent. A letter if it is complicated.
Take an appointment.
Thirty minutes on your go-to-market: who you should be selling to, what to say to them, and where to reach them. Bring a deal that stalled and we will work on that one.
Or open a correspondence.
Two fields and a paragraph. The paragraph is the one that matters.
Received. It is in my inbox, not a queue.
That did not send. Try again, or write to dtb@standardpropaganda.com.
