A few weeks ago I had to say goodbye to my job as a Product Marketing Manager at a startup. While the news was sudden, The timing was perfect. I’ve been itching to work on my own thing as a creator on the internet for quite some time.

Now that I’ve had ample time to rest, think, and reflect on my approach, it’s time to transition from planning to action.

I have worked as a PMM for over five years, and I’m launching my brand with the same approach I use when launching new products. If you’re a developer, designer, author, or marketer looking to build your personal brand to attract more consulting opportunities or land your next job, you’ll find this post useful.

Here’s a high level outline of my GTM plan:

Topics:

1. Defining OKR’s and Key results
2. Strategy - Product & Positioning.
3. Creating a channel flywheel.
4. Growth Hacking.
5. Testing and optimising.

Defining OKR’s and Key results

The very first item that any go-to-market must outline is the objective and how you measure success. For me the objective would be:

While I could also track other metrics like my followers on twitter and medium. To keep things simple, my northstar is subscribers for my newsletter.​

Strategy — Brand, Product & Positioning.

A strategy involves deciding the product or service I am going to sell, What the target audience for the product is going to be and how I plan to differentiate myself from others.

In my case my primary skill is Product Marketing and secondary skills are coding and designing. Since I have the most credibility for marketing I am going to brand myself as a Product Marketer.

If you’re thinking about your personal brand, Its best to either start with a skill you already have credibility for or a lot of knowledge about.

Now that my brand is out of the way, I have to choose a topic for my newsletter. Given that my brand is Product Marketing, my newsletter ought to be something related to it. Since Product Marketing is a very broad topic and there are already a lot of great blogs and articles out there, If I have to compete I’d have to narrow down the topic of my newsletter to something that I can focus on and create content around.

Here’s a list of ideas I came up with:

I have decided to focus on Go-To-Market strategies for SaaS and digital products as the primary topic for my newsletter. This decision stems primarily from my intuition and gut instinct. If this topic fails to resonate with the audience and fails to gain traction, I may need to consider exploring alternative topics.

I will maintain consistency with this theme in my newsletter while simultaneously experimenting with different subjects on my Medium blog to identify which ones work most effectively.

Focusing on a specific topic is a wise choice when creating online content. If you are a developer, rather than posting general coding tutorials, consider specializing in a particular programming language or framework initially and gradually expanding your scope. Similarly, if you’re an author, instead of writing about the broad topic of “Personal Development,” you could start by discussing specific subtopics such as habits, enhancing your focus, or mastering french.

The more specific you are better.

Even the topic I have chosen is too broad. Here’s how I can narrow it down even more:

• Go-To-Market for Martech Software.
• Go-To-Market for Fintech Products
• Go-To-Market for Web 3.0 Products.
• Go-to-Market for Authors.
• Go-to-market for Indie Hackers.

Creating a channel flywheel

Product Marketing, when implemented consistently and effectively, can generate more leads and enhance brand awareness. It’s crucial to clearly define the process you intend to follow and maintain focus. While there are numerous flywheels you can create across multiple channels like YouTube and LinkedIn, it’s essential to focus on one channel first to gain an understanding of what resonates with your audience and what doesn’t

The flywheel involves

Writing content on medium → Distribute on Hackernews, Twitter etc → Funneling to my newsletter → back to my medium blog.

Growth Hacking

My flywheel of creating content on Medium relies on some luck and going viral on Hacker News. To effectively bootstrap this process, I need to reach a minimum tipping point so that network effects can kick in and propel me to gain more subscribers and popularity.

Following are some techniques I’ll be employing to gain more subscribers to my newsletter and followers on twitter.

Technique #1: Doing things that don’t scale.

I’ll be reaching out to SaaS founders on forums and Linkedin and offer either a 1 hour strategy session or 3 -10 hour service like sales enablement, A/B testing or helping them hone in on their positioning.

Technique #2: Create resources and tools

I’ll create resources and tools for SaaS founders / Marketers / Indie Hackers each month and launch it on Product Hunt/ Hacker news.

Technique #3: Engage on twitter:

I’ll engage with relatively small accounts on twitter and try to be helpful.

Technique #4: Guest posting

I’ll also try to write for other marketing blogs to grow my network and meet more people in the Industry

Testing and Optimising

Final step involves tracking and measuring what’s working and not working and optimising accordingly.

If you want to follow along my journey you can reach out to me on twitter.​