You can have the voice.
You can have the brand.
You can even have a stadium.
But if the pricing's wrong?
If the audience alignment's off?
You'll be playing to rows of empty seats.
Let's talk about the real GTM failure mode: misjudging the gap between perceived value and willingness to pay.
What We Think GTM Is
Most teams treat go-to-market like a checklist:
- Landing page? ✅
- Demo video? ✅
- Pricing page with a slider? ✅
- Announcement blog post? ✅
- Social media blast? ✅
- Product Hunt launch? ✅
Boom—launch.
But GTM isn't a checklist. It's a diagnosis. It's about answering two brutal questions:
Who exactly is this for?
And what pain are they willing to pay to stop feeling?
If you don't get those right, the rest is just theater.
Great Product, Wrong Price
We've all seen it:
An amazing product, elegantly built, loved by its early team… launches—and flops. Why?
Because the pricing doesn't match the market's perception of the problem.
You know what 500/month says to a startup?
"This tool wasn't built for teams like yours."
Mispricing isn't just about dollar amounts. It's a positioning problem. A narrative problem. A trust problem.
When you price too high, you create cognitive dissonance. The prospect thinks: "If this was actually built for me, they'd know I can't afford that."
When you price too low, you trigger a different suspicion: "What's missing? Why don't they value their own solution?"
Price isn't just a revenue lever. It's a communication channel. It speaks when your sales team isn't in the room.
The Prestige Tax
Here's what I see happening across the ecosystem:
Founders fall in love with the premium segment. They want to be Figma, not some scrappy utility. They want to be Salesforce, not a point solution.
So they price aspirationally—not for who their users actually are, but for who they want their users to be.
I call this the Prestige Tax.
You're paying for the privilege of saying "we're enterprise-grade" before you've earned it. Charging tomorrow's prices with today's product.
And the market? It sees right through it.
Solving for the Wrong Audience
Here's a dead-simple litmus test:
Are you solving a problem people know they have?
Or are you trying to educate them that they should care?
Because the latter is a much harder road.
If someone's never paid to fix the thing you solve, you're not just selling software—you're selling a worldview. That's fine if you're a category-defining startup. It's risky as hell if you're just trying to grow MRR next quarter.
Sometimes what kills GTM isn't messaging.
It's mismatch.
The Three Deadly Audience Misalignments
I've watched dozens of startups flame out from audience confusion. They usually fall into three traps:
1. The "Everyone" Trap
"Our solution works for everyone from solopreneurs to enterprise teams!"
Translation: "We haven't made any hard choices about who we're optimizing for."
When you say yes to everyone, you build for no one. Your feature set becomes diluted. Your messaging gets vague. Your pricing structure becomes needlessly complex.
The most successful products I've seen launched with almost offensive specificity. They didn't just target SMBs—they targeted "marketing agencies with 5-15 employees struggling with client reporting."
2. The "Aspirational Buyer" Trap
You've built for the mid-market but priced for enterprise. You've built for individual contributors but positioned for the C-suite. You've built for technical users but marketed to business users.
This creates a fatal disconnect between who discovers your product, who evaluates it, who champions it internally, and who approves the purchase.
When these aren't aligned, deals stall out. Evaluations end. Trials expire.
3. The "Future State" Trap
The most insidious misalignment of all: building for who your user wants to become, not who they are today.
"Once you scale up..." "When your data needs get more complex..." "As your team grows..."
These are death knells. They tell the user: "This isn't for you yet. Come back later."
Guess what? They won't.
No One Buys Features. They Pay to Stop Hurting.
Your beautifully designed dashboard isn't the product. The product is relief. Clarity. Time back. Confidence.
If you haven't tied every single feature to an urgent, painful, high-priority user need?
You're selling architecture.
They're buying outcomes.
Here's a story I keep seeing on repeat:
- Team builds something ambitious.
- They fall in love with the elegance of their solution.
- They price it like it's enterprise-grade.
- Their actual audience? Indie teams with Stripe cards and spreadsheet habits.
- Crickets.
Why? Not because the product's bad.
Because value < pain.
The Feature-to-Pain Disconnect
Imagine you've built a powerful analytics tool. It does cohort analysis, multi-touch attribution, custom event tracking—the works.
Your landing page proudly showcases these capabilities. Your demo video walks through them lovingly.
But your target user? They don't wake up thinking: "I need better cohort analysis." They wake up thinking:
"I'm in trouble if we don't increase conversion rates this quarter." "My boss is going to ask why we're spending so much on ads with little to show for it." "I have no idea if our product changes are helping or hurting."
They don't care about your feature. They care about the consequence of not having it.
This is the essence of pain-based positioning. It's not "look what my product does"—it's "look what my product prevents."
The Fan Who Stayed Home
Let's bring it back.
There's a fan out there. She loves the artist. She streamed the album. She saved up. But when she saw the price?
She didn't get mad.
She didn't write a complaint.
She just stayed home.
In SaaS, we rarely hear from the people who bounced. They don't email support. They don't hit "request demo." They just close the tab and never come back.
And they were your best shot.
The silence of non-conversion is deafening if you know how to listen for it.
The Danger Zone: High Consideration, Low Urgency
Not all problems are created equal. The most dangerous market position isn't where you're solving a non-existent problem—it's where you're solving a real but non-urgent one.
I map product-market fit on two axes:
- Problem Recognition: Do users know they have this problem?
- Problem Urgency: How quickly do they need it solved?
The bottom-right quadrant is the danger zone: High Recognition, Low Urgency.
Users nod along with your pitch. They agree the problem exists. They might even praise your solution.
But they don't buy. Because while they'd like to solve it someday, it's not burning enough to justify action today.
And in that gap—between acknowledgment and action—countless startups have died.
Star Power Doesn't Translate
Let's stop pretending design polish, a glossy brand, or a LinkedIn influencer launch thread guarantees traction.
Your audience doesn't care if you're "YC backed."
They care if your thing helps them win. Today.
Not "once the team grows." Not "after onboarding." Now.
If your pricing or value story assumes too much?
They'll find something else.
The Illusion of Inevitability
We've been conditioned by tech media to believe that success follows a predictable arc:
- Get into prestigious accelerator
- Secure seed funding
- Build beautiful product
- Launch on Product Hunt
- Growth takes care of itself
But the graveyard of startups is filled with beautiful products that had all the right logos on their "About" page.
Star power creates the illusion of inevitability. It tricks founders into thinking that awareness equals desire; that desire equals conversion.
It doesn't.
The Real Work of GTM
Here's what a good GTM strategy actually looks like:
1. Price Testing With Real Money
Stop guessing. Pre-launch surveys are great, but real-world pricing reactions are different. Try:
- A/B testing plan tiers
- Running targeted paid campaigns with different pricing anchors
- Talking to people who didn't convert and asking: "Was it the price or the value?"
But don't just vary the numbers. Test radically different pricing models:
- Per-user vs. per-usage
- Freemium vs. free trial
- Value-based tiers vs. feature-based tiers
The model matters as much as the amount. It telegraphs how you think about value creation.
2. Nailing the Moment of Pain
The ideal buyer isn't just "interested."
They're already actively solving the problem—manually, painfully, with duct tape and willpower.
You don't need to convince them they have a problem.
You need to convince them you're the faster, easier, more confident fix.
Pain has a timeline. There's "someday pain" (I should really fix that) and "today pain" (I cannot function until this is solved).
Build for today pain. Market to today pain. Price for today pain.
3. Owning Your Audience's Budget Reality
Your competition might not be another SaaS product.
It might be:
- "Do nothing for now"
- "Keep using Google Sheets"
- "Assign it to the new intern"
- "We'll revisit next quarter"
- "Let's wait for the enterprise-wide rollout"
GTM means understanding what you're replacing—not just functionally, but psychologically.
Budget constraints aren't just financial—they're emotional, political, and organizational. Your pricing needs to account for all of them.
4. Practicing Relentless Empathy
You can't guilt people into buying. You can't shame them into upgrading.
But you can meet them where they are.
Speak their language. Respect their budget. Solve their real problems. Then grow with them.
This isn't just about being nice. It's about recognizing the power dynamics in the buyer-seller relationship.
The buyer has all the power. They can walk away. They can say no. They can choose inaction.
Your job isn't to overcome these objections with persuasion. It's to remove them with alignment.
5. Building Momentum Through Micro-Conversions
We fixate on the big conversion: the purchase. But GTM is about creating a series of small, successful conversions that build confidence:
- From anonymous visitor to email subscriber
- From subscriber to free user
- From free user to paid trial
- From trial to initial purchase
- From initial purchase to expanded use
Each successful micro-conversion builds momentum. Each creates evidence that your solution delivers on its promise.
Don't try to shortcut this chain. Don't try to leap from awareness to purchase. The trust isn't there yet.
The Four Pillars of GTM Alignment
When I look at startups that got GTM right from day one, they aligned four critical elements:
- Value Narrative: What problem do we solve?
- Audience Definition: Who experiences this problem most acutely?
- Price Structure: How does our pricing reflect the value we create for this specific audience?
- Acquisition Strategy: Where does this audience already gather, learn, and buy?
When these four elements reinforce each other, magic happens. When they contradict each other, confusion reigns.
The Pricing Spectrum of Trust
There's a hidden psychological dimension to pricing we rarely discuss: the trust threshold.
Every price point creates an implicit promise:
- Free: "Try without risk, but expect limitations."
- $9.99/mo: "Solve a personal annoyance."
- $49/mo: "Make an individual more productive."
- $199/mo: "Make a team more effective."
- $999/mo: "Transform a business function."
- $9,999/mo: "Create organizational change."
The higher the price, the greater the trust required. The greater the trust required, the more evidence you need to provide.
This is why enterprise sales cycles are long. It's not bureaucracy (though that doesn't help). It's the burden of evidence.
Your pricing shouldn't just reflect your costs or your desired margins. It should reflect where you sit on the trust spectrum—and what evidence you can realistically provide at your current stage.
Closing Thoughts
If your audience isn't buying, don't reach for a better pitch deck.
Ask harder questions:
- Are we priced for the person we say this is for?
- Are we solving a now problem or a someday problem?
- Are we mistaking "love" for "purchase intent"?
- Does our pricing align with the trust we've earned?
- Are we asking for tomorrow's price with today's product?
Product-market fit is not optional.
Pricing-market fit is not cosmetic.
No one—no artist, no SaaS founder—is immune from getting it wrong.
Empty seats are feedback.
Listen closely.
And remember: It's not just about filling the stadium. It's about creating a show worth the price of admission.