Don't Just Ship Features, Ship a Business: A Go-to-Market Playbook for Your MVP

• Strategy
• August 28, 2025

Don't Just Ship Features, Ship a Business: A Go-to-Market Playbook for Your MVP

Your MVP is finished. Now what? Most founders get this part wrong. Shipping the code is step one; acquiring your first 10 paying customers is the only thing that matters next. This is the playbook for turning your product into a business.

• 1. Stop Hiding and Start Selling (Before You're 'Ready')

  The biggest mistake founders make is waiting for the product to be 'perfect.' Your real job is to get feedback from people who pay. We'll show you how to start manual, high-touch outreach on LinkedIn and in niche communities to land your first 5 customers by solving their problem directly, not just selling software.

• 2. Nail Your 'Pain-Point' Messaging, Not Your Features
  

  Early customers don't buy features; they buy solutions to expensive, painful problems. We'll walk through a simple framework for turning your feature list into benefit-driven messaging that resonates. Hint: If you're talking about 'AI integration,' you're doing it wrong. Talk about 'cutting support tickets by 30%.'

• 3. Instrument 'Aha!' Moment Analytics from Day One

  You can't improve what you don't measure. Before you even launch, you need to define your 'Aha!' moment—the key action a user takes that signals they 'get' your product's value. We'll cover the essential events to track with tools like PostHog or Mixpanel to measure your activation rate.

• 4. Create a High-Touch, Manual Onboarding Process

  Don't build a fancy automated onboarding sequence for your first 100 users. Do it manually. A personal 30-minute call with every new signup will give you more insight than a thousand analytics dashboards. This is Paul Graham's 'do things that don't scale' in action.

• Your go-to-market strategy starts before the MVP is finished.
• Sell the solution to a pain point, not the features of your software.
• Get your first 10 customers manually. Don't hide behind marketing automation.
• Measure your activation rate from the very first user.
• Your initial onboarding should be a conversation, not a product tour.

An MVP is not a product; it's a tool to learn what product you should have built. Your go-to-market is the process of using that tool effectively.

Thanks for reading.