Necro-analysis of GTM: learning from failed go-to-market trajectories

[1] Inherited waste

As discussed in Why wasteless growth is possible, even the simplest value proposition can be accepted only under one condition: the presence of inherited waste.

Inherited waste consists of constraints introduced not by the buyer’s original need, but by prior systems, vendors, and workflows—often belonging to businesses that no longer exist. This waste accumulates as product debt and shapes how demand is recognized.

Buyers do not typically seek new value in isolation. They seek to remove blockers — constraints that obstruct flow: cost, time, coordination, skills. These constraints are rarely primordial; they are introduced externally. And it is the need to remove these inherited constraints that ultimately drives purchase decisions.

[2] The founder cannot know

Startup founders do not directly know what customers want and this is not incidental.

They operate from the supply side, under conditions of:

• financial intent
• narrative commitment
• cognitive investment

This position limits their ability to evaluate their own assumptions.

Founders actively look for problems. Customers rarely do. Customers tolerate many inefficiencies without attempting to resolve them. Founders, by contrast, must identify and articulate problems in order to justify building.

This leads to a familiar loop:

“Is this a problem?” — Yes.

“Would you pay to solve it?” — Possibly.

Such exchanges do not reveal demand. They extract fragments of discourse, detached from actual buying behavior.

I call this cut-off waste: founders cannot become buyers, so they rely on interviews and sales calls to isolate partial signals and reconstruct them into artificial demand narratives.

[3] The fake productivity bias

Founders tend to enact a role rather than observe reality. They operate according to an implicit script:

1. identify a large problem
2. validate it
3. build a large solution.

This is not derived from customer behavior. It is derived from an imagined model of what a founder is supposed to do.

In practice, customers live with numerous unresolved problems without seeking solutions. The presence of a problem does not imply demand for resolution.

However, the “problem–solution” framework imposes a direct mapping: larger problem → greater solution → higher productivity gain.

This assumption generates unnecessary work. Entire systems are built to solve problems that were never actively resisted by the customer.

[4] Founder as a structural constraint

The majority of founder-led startups are structurally constrained by the founders themselves.

This is not a matter of execution. It is a founder block: the same cognitive and narrative commitments that enable creation also restrict adaptation.

Products are pushed forward under this constraint, often toward predictable outcomes. Metrics, growth narratives, and GTM activity obscure a simpler reality:

The dominant objective is not sustainable operation, but exit to transfer the product to another owner or to the market. This sustains the process, but does not resolve the underlying constraint.

[5] On survival

Cognitive bias in this context is not meaningfully reversible. A founder cannot easily detach from:

• emotional investment
• intellectual commitment
• financial exposure

To do so would require abandoning the founder role and adopting the position of a buyer. These positions are structurally incompatible.

Some companies do survive. When they do, it is often because a real constraint is clearly articulated by a buyer—and, crucially, recognized.

This is not systematic. It is contingent on:

• the buyer expressing a real blocker
• the founder being able to perceive it

In practice, this occurs rarely. Survival, therefore, is often a matter of timing and exposure rather than method.

[6] Necro-analysis

If direct access to unfiltered customer experience is not feasible, then another method is required. That method is inductive.

Most startup products fail:

• within 18–24 months during initial GTM
• or within ~48 months after attempted repositioning

“Exits” frequently represent a delayed form of failure when post-acquisition performance is considered.

Taken together, this produces a consistent landscape: the majority of observable GTM attempts do not lead to durable outcomes

Necro-analysis proceeds from this observation.

Rather than asking what works, it asks: what patterns precede failure?

By studying failed trajectories—decisions, signals, misalignments—we gain indirect access to the structure of demand.

Necro-analysis is therefore not a retrospective critique. It is a method for reconstructing customer reality through the accumulation of observed errors.