Insight - Helen Forsyth, Fractional CCO
Launching a product that has no market precedent is the ultimate GTM challenge. Learn why you must educate before you attempt to sell.
There is a distinct, incredibly brutal GTM challenge reserved for pioneers: Category Creation.
If your startup is building a product or platform that has never existed before, you do not have the luxury of entering an established market. You are not competing on features, speed, or price. Instead, you are facing a market that does not even know it has the problem you are trying to solve—meaning they have zero reference points for what you do.
Part 01
In this environment, traditional sales playbooks do not just fail; they can actively destroy your credibility.
If you hire a standard sales rep and instruct them to run mass outreach or build a standard pipeline, they will get flat refusals. You cannot build a sales pipeline for a solution that buyers do not understand. When you are creating a new category, education and validation must precede the sales pipeline.
Part 02
To successfully commercialise a category-defining product, you must throw out the standard transactional playbook and adopt a highly structured, validation-first GTM approach.
This is the exact strategy I use with pre-revenue startups like legal tech platform Consolidocs.
Instead of launching wide, we approach category creation through three specific phases:
Before trying to scale outreach, run short, highly focused, time-bound test sprints. Test different messaging, channels, and buyer responses. Keep your sprints narrow, focusing on a tiny segment of early adopters who feel the underlying pain most acutely.
In a sector with no market precedent, buyers are naturally cautious. They do not buy software; they buy into a point of view. You must position the founder as a thought leader and market challenger, educating the industry on why the old, accepted ways of working are quietly costing them time and capital.
Do not give your software away for free in exchange for feedback. Instead, secure design partners who are willing to pay for early platform access. Paying design partners validate that your solution has real commercial value, and their actual usage provides the structured feedback loop you need to iterate your core proposition in real time.
Part 03
This structured approach is currently being deployed with Consolidocs as they build their commercial foundations ahead of full market launch.
Instead of relying on mass marketing, we work directly across the commercial and technical teams to ensure what is being built in engineering is exactly what is being pitched to the market.
By taking this highly targeted, relationship-driven approach, we are pitching directly to senior legal leaders, securing paid design partners, and gathering structured product feedback with every single prospect conversation.
The result is a commercial foundation built on actual market evidence, ensuring that when the platform is ready for full release, the market is already educated, primed, and ready to buy.
Questions
Traditional outreach relies on the buyer already understanding their problem and searching for a solution. When you are creating a new category, the buyer is unaware of the problem, meaning a direct sales pitch sounds irrelevant and confusing.
A design partner is an early-adopter client who uses your product in its early stages, provides structured feedback to help refine the software, and crucially, pays for access, validating that the problem is painful enough to warrant budget.
Before revenue launch, progress is measured through pipeline data, message validation, the number of secured design partners, and the depth of buyer engagement at key sector events.
If you are building a category-defining product or preparing a pre-revenue GTM strategy, let’s build your commercial foundations properly so you are ready to scale when the moment arrives.
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