Your ICP Is a Guess; Until the Market Proves Otherwise

<< For those of you in the TL;DR category: Don’t Get Executive — Get Customers >>

A GTM (Go-to-Market) and RTM (Route-to-Market) blueprint isn’t just a strategic exercise—it’s your startup’s go-live playbook. It shows you how to turn a product into revenue, how to hit the market with focus, and how to scale without spinning your wheels.

At Fortra Via our Revenue Execution blueprint maps out nine key areas giving early stage companies the structure to execute and adapt as they grow. My take, upending traditional GTM/RTM thinking, follow Gall’s Law.

Don’t waste your early days creating *assumed* buyer personas, segmenting your market, and developing complex, intricately specific ideal buyer personas and signals. This over-engineered mythical scenario will never in practice exist. 

Instead, carve out a space in time to throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks. Cast a wide net, see what ingenious pain points people adapt your product/widget/service for.

Why? Because what you think your market is and what actually gains traction rarely line up early on.

Real Talk from the Early Cloud Days

A million years ago I was selling cloud infrastructure (back when IaaS still needed explaining), we assumed our buyers would be traditional IT teams replacing on-prem servers. Instead, our biggest growth came from born-in-the-cloud startups—engineers building gaming platforms, marketing tools, encrypted voice apps. They found us, not the other way around. And they didn’t match our imagined “CTO Chad - with budget from the Board” persona.

What won? Listening and adapting our thought process to real world use cases. Like shaving milliseconds off GPU latency - who knew cyber athletes and WAN parties would shape the future of cloud consumption.

Pharma as an industry has all sorts of examples that follow this intended persona to real world use mismatch Oh..Oh..Oh don't they :).  

The Smarter Path for Startups or Companies Looking to Reinvent 

The Fortra Via blueprint doesn’t lock you into theory. It gives you just enough GTM structure—ICP, messaging, sales plays—to move fast while letting your market shape itself around real traction. Think scaffolding, not a straitjacket.

Faster to market. Smarter to Scale. 

Best, Arielle