Your GTM is backwards
Note: Grant’s post about choosing between “rabbits” (many small customers) and “whales” (a few large enterprises) perfectly illustrates how even smart people can confuse tactical distribution choices with strategic positioning. He thinks he’s describing how to choose your go-to-market strategy, but he’s actually documenting symptoms while missing the disease (the causality flows opposite to what he suggests). By unpacking his framework, we can see how positioning (owning mental territory) determines distribution, not the other way around, and why even successful founders like those he cites can’t accurately explain their own success.
The Story We Tell Ourselves
Every successful founder has a story about their go-to-market strategy. Stewart Butterfield will tell you how Slack chose bottom-up adoption. Dylan Field explains Figma’s product-led growth. Marc Benioff describes Salesforce’s enterprise sales motion.
They’re all wrong about their own success.
Not lying. Not misleading. Just wrong. They experienced their success from inside and confused the music with the dance. They saw tactics and thought they were seeing strategy. They optimized distribution and thought they were creating markets.
This is the narrative fallacy at work — our psychological need to impose linear causation on what was actually emergent, complex, and largely predetermined by forces we couldn’t see.
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