GTM Series Part 1: You're Probably Solving the Wrong Problem

When founders think about growth, the conversation often starts with solutions—but solutions are easy to identify:

• "We need paid ads."
• "We need a new website."
• "We need a rebrand."
• "We need to hire a marketer."

Finding the root problem is much harder.

And if you're solving the wrong problem, even the best solution won't get you where you want to go.

"They confuse activity with traction. Posting on LinkedIn five times a week isn't a marketing strategy. Marketing creates measurable demand, not visibility."
— Adam Taran, Aardvark Marketing

The Website Might Not Be the Problem

One of the most interesting insights from my conversation with Jonathan Hart (Bigmouth Creative) was how often clients arrive requesting a specific deliverable.

• A new website
• A fundraising campaign
• A new brand

But Jonathan shared that these requests are often symptoms rather than root causes.

An organization may have launched new services. Leadership may have changed. Priorities may have evolved. Internal transformation has happened, but the outside world still sees an outdated version of the organization.

Before his team recommends solutions, they start with a discovery audit, because:

• A website problem may actually be a positioning problem.
• A fundraising problem may actually be a messaging problem.
• A lead generation problem may actually be a customer definition problem.

As Jonathan put it: "What is your brand doing out in the world?"

It's a deceptively simple question that many organizations never stop to ask.

Startups Love Tactics

Adam Taran sees a similar pattern working with startups.

Many founders arrive focused on channels before they've clarified their message.

They're deciding whether they should advertise on LinkedIn, Google, Meta, or industry publications before they've answered a more fundamental question:

What exactly are we trying to say?

According to Adam, startups often obsess over activity because activity feels productive.

You can launch campaigns, publish content, attend events, spend money. But none of those activities guarantee traction.

"They obsess over channel choices instead of message. A great message struggles to fail across channels. A bad message can't be saved by the best channel."
— Adam Taran

That distinction feels particularly relevant right now as AI makes it easier than ever to create content.

More content is not automatically more growth and more activity is not automatically more demand.

The Founder Trap

One thing both Jonathan and Adam touched on was a challenge many early-stage companies face.

Founders are incredibly close to the problem. That's usually why they started the company. But being close to the problem can make it difficult to see how customers experience the solution.

Adam described this as optimizing for founder assumptions instead of customer behavior.

Founder intuition is valuable. It's often where great companies begin. But eventually intuition has to be tested.

The strongest growth strategies are built around what customers actually do, not what founders assume they'll do.

That means listening carefully, watching behavior, testing messages, and being willing to discover that your assumptions were wrong.

What This Means for Founders

If growth feels harder than it should right now, consider the possibility that you're solving the wrong problem.

Before launching a campaign, ask:

• Do we know exactly who we're trying to reach?
• Have we validated our message with customers?
• Are we measuring outcomes or activity?
• Is the issue awareness, positioning, conversion, or retention?

The answer may lead somewhere unexpected.

And it may save you from spending significant time and money solving the wrong challenge.

Tangerine Takeaway

One reason this topic resonated with me is because we see a similar pattern in hiring.

Companies often come to us convinced they need a specific role. A recruiter. A salesperson. A marketing hire. An HR leader.

Sometimes they're right.

Sometimes the underlying challenge is completely different.

The most successful companies I've worked with tend to slow down long enough to diagnose the problem before prescribing the solution. Whether you're building a GTM strategy, hiring your next employee, or scaling your team, clarity tends to compound.

And growth has a way of creating new questions:

• When is it time to make your first sales hire?
• Do you need a full-time marketer or agency support?
• How should you structure a growing team?
• What HR considerations emerge as you add people across states or countries?
• What is the most cost-effective way to build capacity?

Those are exactly the conversations we have every day.

If you're growing and aren't sure what comes next, let's talk. Download our capabilities overview or schedule a call. We'd be happy to help you think through your options.

Next month in the GTM Series, we'll tackle one of the most expensive mistakes startups make after product-market fit: trying to market to everyone.

We'll explore why great products still struggle to gain traction, how to identify your true audience, and why customer language matters far more than founder language.

_{Until then, keep listening to your customers.}