Low-cost GTM strategies that actually work

As INBOUND 2025 kicks off today in San Francisco, thousands of marketers, salespeople, and business leaders are gathering to discuss the future of go-to-market strategies and tactics.

I attended, virtually, a few years ago and came away with all kinds of GTM ideas for my products.

While the conference is a powerhouse of ideas and strategies, it's was also a reminder that not everyone has the budget for a major event or the big-ticket go-to-market campaigns that are often discussed on the main stage.

The reality is that GTM strategies require one of two resources - money or time.

If you are a well-funded startup or enterprise business you have the money for outbound marketing.

If you are an early-stage startup you’ll have to put your time into other strategies.

For startups, small businesses, and solopreneurs, the challenge becomes: how do you get your product in front of the right people without a massive marketing budget?

The answer - inbound marketing.

Examples of inbound marketing success

The good news is, a high-cost strategy isn't a prerequisite for success. In fact, some of the most effective go-to-market approaches are the ones that are creative, scrappy, and, most importantly, low-cost.

Hubspot is the poster-child for leveraging inbound marketing. From the beginning, they provided an immense amount of free, high-quality educational content—blogs, ebooks, and free tools—that taught people about marketing and sales. They built a massive audience by positioning themselves as the authority on the very topics they were selling software for.

A startup called Groove, a productivity and help desk software company, used a transparent, content-driven approach. Their blog series, "Groove's Journey to $100k a month," documented their growth, sharing the challenges, failures, and successes along the way. This authentic, insider look resonated with their target audience of other entrepreneurs and startups, building trust and a loyal following that drove sign-ups. It’s a similar playbook to the “Build in Public” movement that is prevalent on X.

Low-cost GTM strategies that actually work

Low-cost GTM strategies can be just as effective, sometimes more so, than expensive variants.

The keys are 1) whether or not your ICP is actively looking for solutions for their problems; 2) if you can break through the noise (because there is a lot of content out there these days); 3) if you have a clear USP that demonstrates enough value to win.

Here are a few proven low-cost GTM strategies that work.

1. Network marketing - no, not the MLM kind. I’m talking about leveraging your network to acquire customers. What’s lower cost than your first 100 or so customers coming from your personal network?
2. Content marketing - yes, its a crowded content world out there. Still, there is room for more with one caveat - you need to be adding value. For example, for parabo1ic I produce free GTM analysis reports for the companies I am targeting. Not only do I ship those reports to our prospects, but I also turn that information into content (with the companies name redacted). The most popular version of content marketing is writing a blog or newsletter, like this one. But, there are other avenues that are popular such as hosting a podcast.
3. Online communities/forums - you don’t always have to be the one hosting the content for it to be impactful. There are a lot of online accounts who built a large following by simply interacting with other people’s content. In fact, some of my most viewed content has been responses to other people’s posts instead of my own original content. Online communities and forums are a great place to do this. Sites such as Reddit, ProductHunt, X, and LinkedIn are popular for building an audience and then converting that audience into customers. When Emily Weiss launched Glossier, she focused her GTM strategies on the distribution channels where her ICP already existed and spent time in Reddit forums like r/SkincareAddiction and r/MakeupAddiction.
4. Partnerships - sometimes you can ride the distribution rails of an existing product to speed up your GTM efforts. When Stripe was founded in 2010, the online payments space was already dominated by large, established players like PayPal. Building a direct sales force to win over individual businesses would have been slow and incredibly expensive. Instead of going after millions of small merchants one by one, Stripe formed a strategic partnership with Shopify, which was at the time a rapidly growing e-commerce platform. The partnership was so deep that Stripe became the native payments engine for Shopify Payments**.** This strategy is not entirely unlike how Paypal become such a dominate player, when it partnered with eBay.

TDLR

Go-to-Market strategies don’t have to be costly. If you have the ability to deploy capital towards outbound efforts, that could make sense, assuming your ICP responds to outbound. For example, its common to use SDRs for selling enterprise-level accounts. My company has a large sales force that is responsible for attracting and winning new customers and maintaining those relationships.

When you don’t have the resources for capital-intensive GTM efforts, inbound marketing is going to give you the best bang for your lack of a buck. Yes, it can be time-intensive, but thats the only other lever most early-stage startups have that they can pull.

Curious how your go-to-market strategies measure up? Take my GTM assessment and learn where you can improve your GTM plans.

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