I haven't written in a while. I've been busy building, transforming marketing and sales departments into GTM engines and placing GTM engineers inside companies. But I’m back and ready to share again. Expect a lot more from me. I want to share what I've been building and what I think is going to happen next.
To get things started, I’ve just published something that had been simmering for weeks. Even though it feels like I've been working up to a piece like this for years
I’ve witnessed one key change. And here’s my posotion: The build era of go-to-market has started.
To back up this claim here is a position paper, written with my two co-founders Walid Boulanouar and Adel Dahani. The Build Era of Go to Market Has Started. Eleven public company builds, a three year cost comparison, about sixty sourced references and the whole argument in one place.
Starting tomorrow I am going to walk through it here, one piece a day, for seven days.
The short version, before the long one. For fifteen years the answer to build or buy in go to market was buy. Every time. That made sense when building meant borrowing engineers from product and waiting months for a first version.
That is not true anymore. Agentic development cut what it costs to build the layer that decides who gets contacted, which use case applies, which ads run, which campaign level fires, what content gets written, which ABM plays go out, what gets sent and when to stop. A team that can operate software can now test owning that layer instead of renting it.
So renting the code that decides who gets called, what gets sent and what a lead is worth stops making sense once you can own it for close to the same price.
This is what the strongest GTM teams look like right now. No vendor lock-in. No dependence on a single AI model provider. The flexibility to build as they go and swap in whatever works best. Lean, highly efficient and running on the cutting edge of what is possible.
Here is what the next seven days cover.
Day 1, my own numbers, twenty three years of building GTM engines and what I have seen work.
Day 2, the beliefs behind GTM OS, nine claims laid out one at a time.
Day 3, why marketing departments are becoming engineering departments and what that means for the people doing the work.
Day 4, why you should own your GTM infrastructure, the code and what stays rented around it.
Day 5, the 80 percent every company rebuilds the same way.
Day 6, the best arguments against all of this, answered in public.
Day 7, GTM OS itself, the thing I built because I could not buy it.
Read the paper now if you want it all at once. Or follow along this week, either way works.
Two more pieces worth reading if you want the fuller picture. What Is a GTM Engineer? Role, Skills, Salary and Org Design, on the role itself and on marketing becoming an engineering department. And What Is a Forward Deployed Engineer? Role, Origin, GTM Version, on the adjacent role this pattern borrows from.
David
Tomorrow: Why You'll Never Buy SaaS Again
By the way, if you need help building your GTM engine, reach out on the collab page. If you are ready to start building, I have GTM engineers ready to embed in your team.
