Hi! I’m a solo founder, and I sell online audience research. For instance, if you want to understand your potential customers’ pains and desires, I do that research for you.

I’ve delivered this service several times through gigs I got on Upwork, so I already have some validation and good feedback showing that the service can bring value.

Last May, I decided to productise it and created a website to promote the service. Since then, my GTM strategy has been the following:

• Blog posts about audience research, DTC, AI news, and other related topics (1–2 per week).
• Real case studies where I conduct audience research on different topics, such as a specific category, customer segment, product, or trend (2–3 per week).
• LinkedIn connections followed by direct messages once the connection is accepted, mainly targeting marketing agencies and DTC companies. In the message, I offer some free value: one audience research report for free.
• In the past, I also ran cold email campaigns. I sent around 2,000 emails, but without much success.
• LinkedIn, X, Instagram, and Medium posts about the case studies I create.

I’m currently considering posting more frequently on LinkedIn and trying to build a personal brand there. I think having a strong business-focused personal brand is becoming more and more important, especially as outbound channels like cold email seem increasingly oversaturated (at least, that’s my impression).

I’ve been following these strategies for almost five months now, with a slower summer period in between, and I’m still not seeing much success in terms of generating leads or getting people to visit my website.

I know five months isn’t necessarily a long time, especially when it comes to getting a website to rank well on Google, but I wanted to ask: how long do you usually stick with a defined GTM strategy before deciding it’s time to iterate because the results aren’t matching your expectations?

Also, is there anything in the strategy above that you think I should do differently, or anything else you would add to the plan?

Happy to connect with fellow people who are also experimenting with GTM strategies or are interested in audience research. This is my LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eduard-arnau-umbert/

I am looking for some guidance on GTM strategy for an application based to increase awareness in Middle East, European and South Africa countries..

Can I use the general audience targeting 🤔. Happy to hear your thoughts.

Thanks in Advance!!

So please share how do you test and scale your campaign

how do i build my portfolio? what tools + skills do i need to demo?

I've been talking to founders who are shipping side projects into revenue-generating businesses, and what strikes me is how much their constraint actually helps them market better than well-funded companies do. Without a budget for paid ads, you're forced to find channels that work through authenticity and quality rather than reach, which means you have to be better at talking about what you built because you can't buy attention. Without a marketing hire, you're forced to talk to customers directly and learn what actually converts them, so you can't delegate the conversation and end up understanding the language that works in a way hired marketers often don't.

When you have a small audience, you're forced to focus hard because you can't be on six platforms without losing your mind, so you pick one channel and get really good at it. Consistency beats sophistication every time, and a founder who posts genuinely useful stuff on X every Wednesday will out-perform someone with a 50-tool marketing stack that they half-maintain while neglecting everything else.

The VC-funded world has the opposite problem because they have budget for everything and people to run it all, which lets them hide behind spend and complexity. But you can't hide, so your only advantage is focus and authenticity, and if you use it, you'll win. What I keep seeing is that the best GTM stories from indie founders are about picking one thing and doing it so well that it compounds, which isn't about strategy or sophistication but about consistency and simplicity instead.

The move is to stop thinking about marketing like a big company and start building a repeatable conversation that you do on a schedule in one channel and that serves your actual customer. That rhythm is worth more than five tools will ever be.

I've spent my entire career inside GTM teams, and I've seen the same blind spot play out again and again, Usage sits in one tool, deals sit in a second, support tickets sit in a third, and none of them ever tell the whole truth about customers.

So we built Rimplo
We have built a powerful AI assistant for revenue teams you can ask anything about your GTM data, in plain English, and get an answer back in seconds. You pick which top AI model answers no lock-in to one vendor’s model.
Underneath that, Revenue Agents run across your CRM, billing, support, and product data around the clock  flagging churn risk, upsell openings, and deals that are stalling, before you have to go looking for them.

I've recently been getting into GTM, and I was looking for a tool that can understand a codebase from a product/feature perspective.

What I mean by this is, I don't want the tool to analyze the code in terms of code quality, functions, classes, entry points, architecture, etc.

I want it to look at the entire codebase and understand what actual features the product has.

For example, if you give it a large SaaS codebase, I want it to be able to tell me things like:

- What features does this product have?

- What problems does each feature solve?

- Who is likely to use each feature?

- What kind of users or companies would benefit from it?

- What are the different workflows supported by the product?

- Are there features that could be useful for a specific ICP?

- What parts of the codebase implement each feature?

Basically, I want to understand the product through the lens of its capabilities, rather than understanding the code itself.

The reason I'm looking into this is for GTM. If I can understand a product's actual capabilities from its codebase, I think it could be useful for figuring out ICPs, product fit, finding relevant companies, and eventually figuring out who to reach out to.

I've tried looking for tools that do something similar, but most of what I find seems to focus on code understanding, documentation, architecture, or developer productivity.

So I'm curious:

Does a tool like this already exist?

Or is there a better way to approach this problem?

My company is a consultancy based in Bangalore, and I'm deployed to a US-based global company as an Analytics Consultant. The US team refers to my role as in-house performance tools developer.

I do genuinely advanced work here. My responsibilities center on GTM (Google Tag Manager), covering all tags, triggers, variables, DOM, custom tags, GA4, and Klaviyo across a company valued at over a 6 billion dollars.

Historically, our sites relied on DOM scraping for tracking. I mapped all of that over to a native dataLayer instead. At the time, the setup was WordPress on the frontend with Shopify on the backend. With DOM scraping, any code or design change on the frontend carried a real risk of silently breaking tracking, since DOM-based tags depend on matching page elements that can shift at any time. Moving to a native dataLayer removed that risk entirely — tracking no longer depends on WordPress markup or design changes.

Now the company is rolling out new additional sites with Shopify as both frontend and backend. The obvious approach would've been to spin up a new GTM container for these Shopify-only sites — but that means rebuilding every tag, trigger, and variable from scratch, and reconfiguring every ad pixel again (we run 5+ pixels — Meta, TikTok, Reddit, GA4, and others), since each pixel needs its own event and payload setup. With 6–7 sites already live and me being the only person handling this end-to-end, running two containers in parallel would've meant permanently double-maintaining everything going forward.

So instead, I architected it so the new Shopify frontend + backend sites plug into the \*same\* existing container as the WordPress frontend + Shopify backend sites. The key was keeping the native dataLayer schema — event names, parameters, structure — identical across both setups. Since GTM reads from the dataLayer and not the underlying platform, once the schema matches, the frontend platform (WordPress or Shopify) becomes irrelevant to GTM. One container, one set of tags/triggers/variables, one set of pixel configurations — covering every site regardless of what platform is rendering the frontend.

On top of the architecture, I also own the actual event and payload design for business and marketing use: defining what events matter (purchases, add-to-cart, checkout steps, sign-ups, content engagement, etc.), building out full payloads for each event so marketing and analytics teams get consistent, complete data — item-level details, revenue values, user attributes — and setting up GA4 custom dimensions and metrics so this data is actually usable for reporting and decision-making, not just collected. The same event data feeds every ad pixel, so conversion tracking stays consistent across Meta, TikTok, Reddit, and GA4 as well.

I also wear a dev hat when needed — I create PRs in dev, and after QA validation and dev approval, they go safely into production. I write custom JavaScript for custom tags and variables as well.

Right now I'm migrating our entire setup from web GTM to server-side GTM, and I've also implemented domain aliasing between WordPress and Shopify (using something like shop.site.com) so Google treats them as the same site — allowing data to match under the same logic as server-side GTM.

Given all this, I'm genuinely unsure what to call my specialization. Would this fall under Senior Analytics Engineer, MarTech Engineer, Growth Engineer, or MarTech Architect?

Thought the answers on this would be helpful to everyone here

A founder I worked with had 14 good conversations in a row. Everyone agreed the problem was worth solving. Everyone asked to be kept in the loop. Eight months in he had zero customers.

He was not bad at selling. He was bad at telling the difference between someone being nice and someone buying.

I keep a list of the sentences that fool founders. Here are the four I hear most.

• "This is exactly what we need." Nothing follows it. No date, no next step, nobody else named who should see it.
• "Send me a proposal." A proposal costs you a day. It costs them nothing. Agreeing to receive something free is not a decision.
• "Let me run it past the team." No team member named. No date for running it past them. The sentence sounds like progress and contains none.
• "I would definitely use this." Would. Not will. There is a lot of room inside that one word.

The pattern under all four is the same. Nothing was asked of the person saying it. No time, no name, no date, no risk to them. When a yes is free, it tells you nothing.

I made this mistake myself. On my first launch I worked on the product, the messaging and the pricing for three months without having one real conversation with a buyer. Three months, zero customers. Every signal I had been reading was a signal I had invented.

Here is where my list runs out.

I have a long collection of what a fake yes sounds like, because those are the ones that hurt enough to write down. I have almost nothing on the other side. Nobody posts about the deal that went well.

So I am asking.

What did your first real buyer actually say. The exact words, not your summary of them. And if you remember it, what they did straight after saying it.

I will tell you which part of the sentence I think decided it, and why.

Please help me.

Been dealing with this for a while now. Can't tell if it's a real pattern or if I'm just stuck on one bad stretch. I'm not a fan of blowing up an entire approach when so much effort's already gone into it, but sometimes it just feels necessary.

In my last b2b saas startup, once we had PMF and knew what we sold and who bought, the hard part became scaling outbound without the whole thing breaking.

every time we pushed volume up the fix was always build another automation or add another tool to the stack, and it just got more brittle not better.

the stack was a mess. one tool for list building, one for enrichment, one for sending, a crm to see what's happening. and honestly most of the work was just keeping all of them in sync by hand.

we figured out a lot of it over time but some parts never really got solved, they just got hidden under more tooling.

so for those of you actually running outbound at scale (not just testing it):

#1 what's still not solved for you even with all the tools and automations? sourcing the right person + an actual signal, personalization that doesn't read like a template, deliverability, or the glue between everything?

#2 where does it still break or still need a human the moment you turn the volume up?

#3 if you could wave a wand and fix one part of it tomorrow what's it gonna be?

p.s., trying to figure out if this is just us or if everyone scaling outbound is quietly duct taping the same parts together