GTM00 — Customer & Market Understanding (Series Index & Reading Order)
Print-Flow-360 GTM research series · 2026-06-16 Start here. This is the map to GTM_01–GTM_06.
Why this matters first
At pre-PMF, every GTM lever you can pull — positioning, channels, pricing, packaging, roadmap sequencing, the investor story — is downstream of one thing: how well you understand the customer and the market. Get the customer wrong and a brilliant funnel just acquires the wrong people faster; get the market sizing wrong and you build for demand that isn’t there.
For Print-Flow-360 the stakes are sharper than usual because of three facts already established in the series:
- The buyer is non-technical and singular. “Maria, the local print-shop owner” is a one-person buying committee who runs on email + spreadsheets + a generic Wix/Shopify site. She won’t tolerate a clumsy onboarding or jargon, and she won’t convene a committee to evaluate you. Misreading her job-to-be-done is the fastest way to churn.
- The scarcest resource is founder attention. Customer/market understanding is not a department here; it’s the founder doing interviews. That forces ruthless prioritization of which research actually changes a decision this quarter.
- Known product gaps gate real deals (preflight/CMYK, partial fulfillment, carrier/tracking, production-spine maturity; payments limited to Stripe/Razorpay regions). You cannot pretend these away in research — you have to hear how often they kill deals and price/position around them.
This index exists so the founder reads the right doc at the right decision, instead of treating all six as a backlog to grind through.
What’s in the series / when to use each (reading order)
GTM_01 — ICP & Positioning (GTM_01_ICP_AND_POSITIONING_2026-06-15.md)
The foundation. Defines the beachhead (small non-technical local print/sign shops, $200K–$5M revenue, 1–30 staff), the persona (Maria), and the category claim (“Online storefront + design studio for print shops” / web-to-print — explicitly not print MIS). Read first, and re-read whenever you’re tempted to chase a larger or more technical buyer. Everything else assumes this ICP; if it shifts, the rest of the series needs re-grounding.
GTM_02 — Jobs To Be Done (GTM_02_JOBS_TO_BE_DONE_2026-06-16.md)
The “why she’d switch” layer. Captures the functional, emotional, and social jobs Maria is hiring software to do — and what she “fires” (the Wix site, the email-and-spreadsheet workflow). Use when writing copy, choosing which features to lead with, or deciding what the first 5 onboarding steps must accomplish. JTBD is the raw material that makes positioning concrete and keeps the roadmap honest about what’s actually worth paying for.
GTM_03 — Win/Loss & Churn Interviews (GTM_03_WIN_LOSS_AND_CHURN_INTERVIEWS_2026-06-16.md)
The reality check on GTM_01–02. A repeatable method for interviewing the deals you won, lost, and churned, and coding the reasons. Use it the moment you have any closed deals or cancellations — even two or three. At pre-PMF this is your single highest-signal feedback source: it tells you whether the ICP is right, which gaps are deal-killers vs. nice-to-haves, and which competitor keeps showing up.
GTM_04 — Pricing Research Methods (GTM_04_PRICING_RESEARCH_METHODS_2026-06-16.md)
How to find willingness-to-pay and the right packaging, not what to charge in a vacuum. Covers methods (Van Westendorp, value-metric selection, simple WTP probing in sales calls) suited to a tiny sample. Use when designing or revising tiers and the usage dimension (per-store monthly + orders/stores). Pairs with the existing PRICING_RETENTION_REFERRALS_STRATEGY_2026-06-15.md — GTM_04 is the how-to-learn, that doc is the current plan.
GTM_05 — Competitive Intelligence (GTM_05_COMPETITIVE_INTELLIGENCE_2026-06-16.md)
A standing practice for tracking the alternatives Maria actually considers — including “do nothing” and the generic Wix/Shopify status quo, not just named web-to-print vendors. Use when sharpening positioning, handling objections, and deciding where the product must reach parity vs. where it can win. Feeds directly off GTM_03 (every loss names a competitor) and back into GTM_01.
GTM_06 — TAM / SAM / SOM Modeling (GTM_06_TAM_SAM_SOM_MODELING_2026-06-16.md)
The market-size layer, built bottom-up so it survives scrutiny. SAM is explicitly gated by the Stripe/Razorpay payment regions and the non-technical-local-shop ICP; SOM is what you can realistically capture given founder-led GTM. Use for the investor story and for grounding annual/quarterly planning targets. Read it last — it only means something once the ICP (GTM_01) and pricing/value-metric (GTM_04) are credible.
The operating cadence
| Practice | Cadence | Owner (tiny pre-PMF) | Trigger / note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Talk to customers & prospects (JTBD-style) | Continuous | Founder | Several conversations/week; never delegate or pause |
| Win/loss & churn interviews (GTM_03) | Continuous (per event) | Founder | Run within days of every close, loss, or cancellation |
| Competitive intel refresh (GTM_05) | Continuous-light + Quarterly deep-dive | Founder | Log competitors named in calls as they appear; full sweep quarterly |
| Pricing / WTP research (GTM_04) | Quarterly (or before any packaging change) | Founder | Also re-run after a major value-metric or gap change |
| ICP & positioning review (GTM_01) | Quarterly | Founder | Re-confirm against the quarter’s win/loss + JTBD signal |
| TAM/SAM/SOM model (GTM_06) | One-time, then revise on material change | Founder | Rebuild only when ICP, payment-region coverage, or pricing shifts |
At this stage the honest answer to “who owns it” is the founder owns all of it. The cadence column is really about attention budget: continuous practices are the heartbeat; quarterly ones are scheduled stops; the one-time model is rebuilt only when an input materially changes.
How they connect
The series is a set of feedback loops, not a linear funnel:
- JTBD → Positioning. GTM_02’s jobs and “what gets fired” become the substance of GTM_01’s positioning and category claim. Vague positioning is almost always a sign the JTBD work is thin.
- Win/Loss → ICP + Competitive Intel + Roadmap. GTM_03 is the central hub. Wins/losses validate or break the GTM_01 ICP, name the competitors that populate GTM_05, and surface which product gaps (preflight/CMYK, fulfillment, tracking) are actually killing deals — feeding roadmap sequencing (
PLATFORM_GAP_ASSESSMENT_2026-06-07.md). - Pricing Research → Packaging. GTM_04’s WTP and value-metric findings drive the tier/usage shape in the pricing strategy doc. Pricing also can’t be set without GTM_02 (value) and GTM_05 (competitive anchors).
- Competitive Intel ⇄ Positioning. GTM_05 tells you where to claim difference vs. where to reach parity; that loops back into GTM_01 and into objection-handling for the funnel and acquisition work.
- TAM/SAM/SOM → Investor story; SOM → Planning. GTM_06’s top line is the fundraising narrative; its SOM is the grounded number that sets realistic quarterly targets — and it’s only as credible as the ICP (GTM_01) and value-metric (GTM_04) feeding it.
In short: GTM_01 anchors, GTM_02 supplies substance, GTM_03 is the truth source that corrects all the rest, GTM_04/05 shape pricing and positioning, and GTM_06 rolls it up for investors and planning.
If you only do three things this quarter
Given pre-PMF stage and founder-attention as the binding constraint:
- Interview every win, loss, and churn — without exception (GTM_03). With your deal volume this is the single highest-signal, lowest-cost activity. It will tell you faster than anything else whether the Maria ICP holds and which of the known gaps (preflight/CMYK, fulfillment, tracking) is the real deal-killer. Do this before any new feature build.
- Pin down the one job Maria is really hiring you for (GTM_02), and rewrite positioning to match (GTM_01). Until the JTBD is sharp and the “online storefront + design studio for print shops” claim reflects how owners actually describe their pain, the funnel and channel spend will under-convert. This is what makes onboarding and copy land for a non-technical buyer.
- Validate the value-metric and tier shape against real WTP (GTM_04). You have a per-store + usage (orders/stores) model on paper — get five to ten honest WTP conversations before locking tiers, so packaging is grounded in value rather than guesswork. Defer the full TAM/SAM/SOM rebuild (GTM_06) and the deep competitive sweep (GTM_05) to next quarter unless fundraising forces GTM_06 sooner.