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Go-to-market is a space our team knows intimately well: many of us were previously buyers and users of these solutions, and Primary spends thousands of hours each year working with our portfolio companies on their sales, marketing and customer success rhythms. When we published our last GTM thesis, AI was just beginning to shake things up; today, that shakeup has accelerated dramatically. We have gained clarity on what truly matters for building a category-defining GTM company and are excited to hear your feedback.
GTM startups must fundamentally transform the company P&L
Our thesis: AI has finally made it possible to transform the GTM P&L, and the market is demanding companies act accordingly. Today’s best-in-class GTM solutions embrace these four market realities:
- Gross margin pressure requires companies to radically reduce operating expenses
The best companies are investing heavily in compute to stay competitive and eroding gross margin in the process. They simply must get more efficient with their operating expenses, but GTM financial metrics such as CAC payback and net magic number have been stagnant for years.
- AI-native companies are prompting an evolution to leaner org design
Growing revenue has historically been expensive and wildly inefficient due to the number of people required: human BDRs can only handle so many touches per week even with the newest tools, companies are forced to hire another middle manager for every X new AEs, and so forth. AI-native companies are achieving staggering productivity per employee, and are setting new expectations for what’s possible. Every company must reconsider the human intensity of their GTM motion. - Function-specific software silos are collapsing
It’s finally possible to break down the barriers across functional software categories (e.g. marketing software vs. sales software vs. customer software).
- Companies will collapse and integrate traditional GTM roles
We are on the brink of a new “full-funnel GTM” role, removing the traditional functional specialization between Marketing - BDR - Sales - SC - CS - AM. It’s conceivable to have one person – backed by powerful agents – cover pipeline generation, sales, and ongoing customer management.
We are excited to back founders building AI-native solutions to enable this exciting new world.
Introducing PRIME
We are looking for founders or aspiring founders building GTM businesses with a direct-line impact on the P&L. We've codified this as having demonstrable impact on PRIME:
- Productivity (Revenue per Employee)
- Retention (NRR or GRR)
- Investment Efficiency (Net Magic Number / S&M Efficiency)
- Momentum (Top-Line Growth)
- Expense Reduction (Headcount and Cost Eliminations)
This is our non-negotiable filter for GTM investing. Companies who explain ROI through opportunity cost, marginal efficiency gains, or indirect metrics don't fit our mold.
Consider a category such as digital deal rooms: they may accelerate cycle times and marginally improve win rates, but there are multiple steps of math required to translate that to the P&L. Marginal gains are certainly valuable, but we are committed to backing the companies that seek to deliver an order of magnitude impact.
Founders: we thrive with serial entrepreneurs who are obsessed with their customers
We've learned that second-time founders are where we add the most value. Our strongest fit tends to be with serial entrepreneurs who value what we bring beyond a logo on the cap table: our network connectivity and operating experience. Exceptional talent is exceptional talent and we’re excited to meet any high-slope founder who shares our category conviction. But founders such as Amanda Kahlow at 1mind, Ganesh Ramakrishna at Lyric, Richard Harris at Black Crow AI and Jon Sherry at Alium exemplify the type of builders we're excited to partner with: they have unfinished business.
The founders we're drawn to are aggressive about their own GTM and deeply customer-obsessed. They understand you cannot build enduring enterprise value without enduring customer value, and they're constantly challenging their own assumptions based on what they learn in the market. They obsess over the risk of the gross retention apocalypse. At the same time, they're Challenger sellers—teaching the market where it should be headed. Importantly though, the founding team must marry this customer obsession with world-class technical acumen.
The path to full-stack GTM
We love hearing a founder’s articulation for how they will bring this new GTM operating system to life. We’ve thought extensively about wedge vs. compound startup tradeoffs and are excited to share our own thoughts:
Wedge Strategy
The wedge approach starts narrow but has a strategic vision to become a platform. Wedge products must still meet PRIME criteria and demonstrate clear P&L impact because that guarantees the right to ultimate share-of-wallet expansion. But beyond financial impact, wedge products need two additional qualities:
- Obvious right to win – whether it’s a “Zero CAC” founder with a rolodex of prospects who already trust them, a team of 10x engineers shipping products at unprecedented speed or a former operator with an earned secret, the companies we back must have a clear right to win the lane of their wedge.
- Own the context – the best wedges embed into the bloodstream of workflows and data, earning the right to capture net-new signals or refine existing data into decision-grade context. If a wedge cannot maintain and resolve context, it will struggle with durability regardless of the initial P&L impact. Playing the context angle correctly also makes launching subsequent SKUs more seamless and more defensible.
1mind is a great example of a successful, context-rich wedge approach. When we led the Seed round, we were investing in Amanda’s vision to build an end-to-end AI brain for all GTM functions from first prospect engagement through ongoing support, but we recognized they needed to start with a wedge. 1mind carefully selected an inbound AI BDR wedge that facilitated thousands of customer conversations, enabling impressive context. The data ingestion needed to train their AI “Superhumans” combined with that conversational context positioned them to expand into adjacent workflows with an unfair advantage. 1mind’s right to win was Amanda’s track record: she had previously built a category-defining unicorn with 6sense, and had an incredible rolodex of prospects ready to take her at her word.
1mind also exemplifies PRIME: it makes sellers more efficient by having AI handle upfront conversations so reps can manage bigger deal loads (Productivity), increases efficiency through reduced hiring needs, thereby reducing CAC and increasing net magic number (Investment Efficiency), and drives obvious expense reduction because teams can hire fewer people (Expense Reduction).
"Wider" / Compound Strategy
The compound approach goes full-stack from the onset. The core question: why are customers trusting you for this risky, transformative move? Because these plays command higher switching costs, we believe founder domain fluency is essential.
We recognize compound businesses take longer to build, particularly in the 0-1 GTM phase. During that extended building cycle, we're looking for a best-in-class approach to design and development partners as well as evidence of off-the-charts engineering and roadmap velocity. We love it when we hear comments along the lines of, “I can’t even keep up with our engineering team because we’re shipping so fast” (a recent verbatim from Amanda at 1mind!).
If you’re transforming the GTM P&L, get in touch
The GTM category is at an inflection point. AI has created both tremendous opportunity and tremendous noise. The winners will be the companies that don't just bolt on AI capabilities to existing workflows, but fundamentally reimagine how companies acquire, retain, and grow their customer base.
We're committed to finding category-defining plays early and supporting them relentlessly. If you're building something that transforms the GTM P&L, we want to hear from you.