No 'Strategist' at Your Company? Then Revenue Is Just Luck

Opening

Reader, have you ever searched “GTM” on LinkedIn?

Search it from California, and over 17,000 positions come up (as of March 2026) — Stripe, Anthropic, Google, DoorDash, of course, but also VCs like Andreessen Horowitz, insurance companies, even Nike. It cuts across every industry. Now switch the location to Seoul, Korea. The openings barely fill one hand. And nearly all of them are at foreign multinationals.

A job that tens of thousands of people hold in the US barely exists in Korea. This isn’t simply a story about “Korea being behind.” It touches the root cause of what Korean startups are struggling with right now — failing to find PMF¹, failing to scale up, failing to generate recurring revenue.

Today I want to talk about what the GTM (Go-To-Market) strategy role actually is, why Korea needs it now, and the ‘structure of recurring revenue’ this role creates.

GTM Is Not ‘Marketing’ or ‘Sales’

Most people react the same way the first time they hear “GTM”: “How’s that different from marketing?” or “Isn’t that just sales?” No. It’s an entirely different discipline.

GTM is short for Go-To-Market Strategy. Literally, the concept starts from the question “have you actually gone to market?” Here’s the core of it: building and executing a strategy that makes a specific product sell into a specific market in a repeatable way. The most important word here is ‘repeatable’. Selling once and calling it done is just luck — the same as winning one hand of blackjack. But making revenue happen again and again, on repeat, is strategy.

Here’s what GTM does, in four lines.

• Decide where to fight — choosing the market, segment, and channel
• Decide what to win with — value proposition, packaging, pricing design
• Decide how to execute — partnerships, marketing channels, sales motion
• Set the criteria for success and failure — defining metrics, building feedback loops If sales is “the person who closes the deal” and marketing is “the person who brings in the customer,” GTM is the person who gets every one of these teams looking in the same direction. Like the checks and balances of separation of powers, GTM does the strategic coordination between the product, sales, and marketing teams.

Even abroad, the job title for GTM keeps shifting. Some call it GTM Engineer, focused more on systematizing the process; others call it Revenue Optimizer or RevOps, focused on managing and optimizing revenue.

That’s why where GTM sits in the org chart matters so much. It needs to report directly to the CEO or sit under the CSO² to actually do its job. The moment it gets buried under the sales or marketing team, it’s highly likely to be reduced to a support role that just pulls data on request.

What Gamma Proved: It’s Not the Technology, It’s ‘Who You Sell To’

Let’s look at a concrete case of the actual difference this role makes.

There’s an AI presentation tool called Gamma. In November 2025, it raised a $68 million Series B led by Andreessen Horowitz at a $2.1 billion valuation (~₩2.9 trillion). It has 70 million users and over 600,000 paying subscribers. With about $87 million in cumulative funding, it’s a profitable company that has crossed $100 million in ARR³. Team size: roughly 50 people.

What’s interesting is that Gamma’s technology wasn’t the industry’s best. Genspark, Canva, Figma — everyone was rolling out AI slide features, and plenty of competitors looked flashier in terms of design quality. Most AI slide tools work by rendering an HTML web page to look like a slide. Visually pretty, but not something worth paying for.

What Gamma did differently was pick its customers with precision. It first identified which group placed the highest value on slides. The answer: strategy consulting firms and government/public institutions.

For these buyers, flashy design isn’t what matters. What matters is format compliance, information structuring, and ease of offline sharing. The key question is whether data can be plugged precisely into their own templates, and whether it can be downloaded and circulated internally. Gamma built exactly to that need.

Here’s the result: Gamma raised its prices and customers didn’t leave. It added a Team plan and an Ultra plan ($90/month), and both sold out. Why? Because that price was perfectly reasonable to this customer base. A consulting firm spending $90 a month on a presentation tool is nothing.

In its early days, Gamma had no marketer. Only GTM existed. That’s the key point. It designed “who to sell to, what to sell, and how to sell it” first, and only then went to market.

Three Traps Created by ‘Conference Room Disease’

There’s a common trap that companies fall into when they launch products without a GTM strategy. I call it ‘conference room disease.’

Trap one: misidentifying the customer. The team gets excited internally — “our product is amazing!” — but launches without ever defining who will actually pay to use it. Take an AI meeting-recording summarizer as an example. It looks convenient. But recording a meeting without every participant’s consent creates a privacy problem. So who would actually pay for this? Fields where record-keeping is legally mandated — like the National Assembly’s official stenographic transcripts. Get the target customer wrong, and no amount of great technology will work in the market.

Trap two: price mismatching. This is a trap Korean startups fall into especially often — find PMF first, worry about pricing later. But the actual order is reversed. Setting a price first and checking whether it sells at that price is the fastest way to validate PMF. ChatGPT didn’t launch at $20 and Gemini didn’t land in a similar price range because either “had found perfect PMF.” They staked out the market first, benchmarked against competitor pricing, then adjusted the fit afterward.

Trap three: relying on 3F customers — Friends, Family, Followers. The moment a product launches, it goes up on Instagram, and everyone nearby gets a “please download it” ask. They download it. But they never come back. All they leave behind is a retention number that craters, then they disappear. Feedback from friendly users who were never paying customers is, more often than not, just noise.

Coupang, Slack, Zoom — Companies That Engineered Recurring Revenue

Let’s look at well-known cases of what happens when GTM strategy actually works.

Coupang started out as a social commerce site called Coupon Ppangppang, playing on the same field as Ticket Monster and WeMakePrice. But by shifting to fulfillment⁴-based Rocket Delivery, it changed the entire axis of competition. Instead of “price,” it staked its value on “delivery speed.” The experience of “order before midnight, it arrives before dawn” resolved a deep human anxiety — ‘when will it get here?’ Coupang raised its Wow Membership price by 58%, and membership actually grew. Once you’ve been trained into that kind of convenience, it’s hard to cancel.

Slack is a textbook case of bottom-up strategy. It got frontline employees using it first, let it spread across the organization, then converted that into enterprise contracts. Even though most companies already had Teams for free through their Microsoft contracts, Slack created enough of a value gap that companies were willing to pay for both.

Zoom had designed its core value — “one-click join” — before COVID even hit. It observed that online meeting participants don’t go looking for the link until a minute before the meeting starts, and built a product that let people join instantly through a single link, no installation required. It then segmented pricing by breaking permissions apart between participant and admin features, and that segmentation fed directly into a sturdy revenue structure.

These companies share exactly one thing in common. It wasn’t the technical superiority of the product — it was that they designed “who to deliver what value, and how” first. And at the center of that design was GTM strategy.

Oz’s Lens

I look at this topic through two lenses: as a data professional, and as a GTM consultant.

As a data professional, the first thing I want to point out is that the concept of “repeatable revenue” is really a measurement problem. MRR and ARR aren’t just financial metrics — they’re behavioral metrics measuring whether customers keep choosing your product. A lot of startups obsess over MAU (monthly active users) or download counts, but as we saw with Watcha’s case (a Korean streaming service), those are entirely different metrics from actual willingness to pay. If the tens of thousands of people who commented “this was such a good service, what a shame” when it announced shutting down had actually been paying subscribers, that company would have survived.

From the vantage point of a GTM strategy consultant, Korea is, paradoxically, an ideal environment for starting GTM work. A single ethnicity, a single language, a single culture, similar sensibilities — the marketing variables compress down to roughly “age, gender, interests, region.” The San Francisco Bay Area alone mixes more than seven ethnicities, with entirely different cultures, languages, and sensibilities layered on top. If Korea is a first-degree equation, the global market is an Nth-degree one.

So here’s my view: a product that can’t build a recurring revenue structure in Korea has an extremely low chance of succeeding globally. Conversely, a strategy that properly validates GTM inside Korea — treated as a “controlled laboratory” — before expanding overseas is far more realistic.

I sense two diseases spreading through Korea’s startup ecosystem right now. One is “vision disease” — selling dreams while generating no revenue. The other is “conference room disease” — debating only internally, never actually going to market. GTM is the prescription for both. Because the work isn’t flashy technology — it’s cold-eyed market validation and building a structure for recurring revenue.

Closing

Here are today’s three key takeaways.

GTM is neither marketing, nor sales, nor growth hacking — it’s the “strategic architect of recurring revenue.” It’s the role that designs “who to sell to, at what price, through which channel” before the product ever goes to market.

Technical superiority alone doesn’t win the market. Gamma wasn’t the strongest technology, but by picking its customers precisely it became a profitable unicorn; Coupang shifted the axis of value by moving from social commerce to fulfillment, and dominated the market that way.

For Korean startups to reach the next stage, what’s needed isn’t “a better product” but “a more precise market strategy.” And the person who builds that strategy is GTM.

If you’re currently stuck on the question “our product is good, so why isn’t it selling?” — try asking this instead: “Have we actually gone to market?”

References & Further Reading

• Gamma official blog, “How We Built a $100M Business Differently”, 2025. : The growth story written directly by Gamma’s founder. The best resource for understanding a real-world application of GTM strategy.
• Sarah Wang (a16z), “Investing in Gamma”, Andreessen Horowitz, 2025. : Shows how an investor evaluated what set Gamma’s GTM apart.
• Go-to-Market Alliance, “Go-to-market manager salary trends: What you need to know”, 2024. : A systematic rundown of global compensation trends for the GTM role.
• Lenny Rachitsky & Vercel CTO, free GTM course : Free access to practical insights from GTM experts who came out of Vercel, Stripe, and Google.
• Peter Thiel, Zero to One, Crown Business, 2014. : A book that provides a foundational framework for thinking about monopoly and recurring revenue structures.

This is the original video for today’s newsletter, sharing a seminar built on personal experience. You can go deeper into the cases and Q&A through the video.

https://www.youtube.com/live/s5-hC9rtZEs?si=kbVFblSsLMUpD2q2

https://www.youtube.com/live/ZA_mX2UhB04?si=NKoh8ekmlE-fySBQ

The author, Kwangseob Ahn, is a professor of business administration at Sejong University and lead consultant at OBF (Oswarld Boutique Consulting Firm). He teaches statistics and data analysis — business data management and business analytics — while leading GTM and AI strategy consulting in the field, designing the seam between technology and business. He has published academic research on a memory architecture for AI dialogue systems (HEMA) and runs Daily Arxiv, a daily curation of global AI papers. He holds a master’s from Korea University’s Graduate School of Technology Management and a KMBA. He is the author of Homo Brainless: The People Who Outsource Their Thinking.

Footnotes

1. PMF (Product-Market Fit): a state where a product fits the market’s needs precisely. In simple terms, it’s the validation of “do people actually want this product?” ↩

2. CSO (Chief Strategy Officer): the executive who sets a company’s long-term strategic direction and oversees its execution. ↩

3. ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue): the revenue that recurs every year in a subscription-based business. A core health metric distinguished from one-time revenue. ↩

4. Fulfillment: the integrated management of the entire logistics process, from order intake through packing, delivery, and returns. This is the core infrastructure that let Coupang run its own logistics centers and enable dawn delivery. ↩