free playbook · the GTM engine
The GTM playbook
How to find your first paying customers without ads, in reading order. Each board is one phase; each card is a stage with its own page and the deep dives under it. Start at the top left and work across.
The ICP is only as good as the brief under it. This page lists every field the brief needs, where each one comes from, how much to trust it, and which line of the ICP it feeds.
Before the ICP is drawn: list the competitors, map every channel they distribute through, and note where their customers talk and complain. The gaps in that map are where you start.
Turn the brief into a filter anyone can check from outside: who fits, who you'd turn away, and the trigger window that says when someone is ready.
hands off a filter of who fits and who doesn't
Who is ready to buy, how you spot them, and how one person moves from a random post on the internet to someone you message. Five words, how a link becomes moments, the tree, then the full map.
A detector is a rule that watches one place for one moment: where to look, what to match, how strong a match has to be, and how fresh.
Store your own feeds the way a data lake does: transcripts, RSS, newsletters, communities and bookmarks, each pulled once, kept raw and checked for health.
A signal is one real person caught in one trigger: the post, listing or event a detector matched, frozen as it was, judged, and routed.
A qualified lead is one real person who fits the ICP and shows fresh intent. This page covers how signals about the same person merge into one lead, the lead as an object, how a lead is scored and tiered, a library of…
hands off a ranked list of people who are ready now
Twenty-two distribution playbooks, written out message by message: what to send, on which day, to whom, and when to stop. Paste your site once and every template fills itself in.
A campaign is one run of one playbook, with its sequence, on one segment, inside a window. It has an offer, a stop rule, arms and a holdout.
A sequence is a playbook's messages in order: which step goes out, on which day, on which channel, who sends it, and what ends it.
hands off messages actually sent, each one traceable
What to record at every stage of the pipeline so that, months from now, the data can answer which triggers pay, which detectors are right, which leads reply, and which messages work, and can train models that do it…
The funnel is the ladder a person climbs from "found" to "paid". This page defines both ladders, the one rule for picking the constraint, every metric once (the formula, the window and the event it reads), how a sign-up…
Every stage has a knob: a prompt, a rule, an offer, an opener, a send time. The experimentation engine picks which knob to test, assigns at random, reads the result against a rule written before launch and records what it learned.
Every number the pipeline records gets a line it shouldn't cross. When a metric crosses its line, the loop fires: it diagnoses which part broke, writes one hypothesis, and hands a test to the Experimentation engine.
hands off one tested change, then the loop
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