#284: Unlock Growth by Finding Your Go-to-Market Fit with Tae Hea Nahm

Tae Hea Nahm is a venture capitalist who has invested in over 200 B2B companies leading to 11 unicorns like Marketo, TalkDesk, and Workato. Tae Hea is also the founding CEO of software startup, Airspace (who sold to Cisco for $450 Million) and the co-author of Survival to Thrival.

In Today’s show Tae Hea talks about his four steps for nailing your go to market fit so you can unlock your growth and scale your company. He uses a great metaphor of a surfer to hit the point home. We pick apart the steps from Nailing the Customer Journey and solving your customer’s urgent pain (the wave), building the go to market playbook (the surfboard), Operationalizing the playbook and allowing marketing and sales to work together all being backed by clear metrics or magic numbers (continuing to ride the wave). If you are a believer in frameworks for scale, this episode is for you!

What You Will Learn

What it means to “catch an emerging wave” when starting a business
Founder-led growth vs repeatable process-led growth
What “go-to-market fit” is, and how it’s all derived from repeatable processes
Tae Hea’s surfer metaphor for directed towards B2B CEO’s
Why it’s so important to focus the entire customer journey on transforming your customer to a hero
The four steps to take when going to market from Tae Hea’s book, Survival to Thrival
Why it’s important to clearly identify when your customer receives their first piece of value
Where marketing and sales hand off responsibilities in the customer pipeline
Why it’s so important, as an investor, to see the business from the founder’s eyes in order to provide guidance effectively

// USE YOUR FINANCIALS TO CLARIFY A PATH TOWARDS A MORE VALUABLE BUSINESS: Intentional Growth Financial Assessment

Bio:

Tae Hea co-founded Storm Ventures, an early stage VC fund based in Silicon Valley and investing worldwide. Storm has invested in nearly 200 B2B software companies leading to 11 unicorns, including Marketo, Pipedrive, Solarisbank, Talkdesk and Workato. At Storm, Tae Hea was the founding CEO of Airespace, a B2B startup, which was later sold to Cisco for $450m.

Based on his experience, Tae Hea also co-authored Survival To Thrival to help founders unlock growth by finding go-to-market fit.

Tae Hea majored in applied math at Harvard and has a JD from University of Chicago Law School. He was born in Seoul, Korea.

Quotes:

07:29 - “The first thing we looked at is, ‘Is there an emerging wave?’ And creating your own wave is almost impossible.” - Tae Hea Nahm

08:05 - “People are only founders, generally, if they’re really passionate about something.” - Tae Hea Nahm

12:00 - “You need product/market fit to have that product-happy customer and the best indicator is retention.” - Tae Hea Nahm

12:50 - “In B2C, you only need the product/market fit but for B2B you need both: product/market fit and go-to-market fit.” - Tae Hea Nahm

15:39 - “That’s how we want to give people the visual feeling of how to unlock growth, is to go from paddling to surfing and become a surfing unicorn.” - Tae Hea Nahm

19:24 - “The most important thing in catching the wave is to identify the urgent pain for your ideal customer profile.” -Tae Hea Nahm

24:07 - “The first step, we say, is you have to nail your customer journey. Where you start, where you end, and every step along the way.” -Tae Hea Nahm

31:27 - “One very good go-to-market is (if you can), is you land with product-led and you expand with sales-led.” -Tae Hea Nahm

37:40 - “The next thing is, you have to figure out who does what. And that’s the key to riding the wave: operationalizing that playbook.” -Tae Hea Nahm