Artemis Warrior Guide: GTM Fundamentals

November 19, 2025

By The Artemis Fund
The Artemis Fund believes technology can create prosperity for all. With offices in New York, Texas, Massachusetts, and Nevada, Artemis leads seed rounds for companies creating resilient families, individuals, and businesses across the US.
Seed-stage founders are often pressured to scale before they’ve nailed the fundamentals. At this stage, “fundamentals” means precision around four pillars: your ideal customer profile (ICP), your value proposition, your go-to-market motion, and your messaging. In an undercapitalized environment, clarity around GTM is existential. Capital is limited, customer acquisition is expensive, and your early hires carry outsized weight. Without clarity, every dollar spent is a guess.
This is the first chapter in our latest Warrior Guide. For this series, we sat down with some of the brightest GTM minds we know:
• Aileen Allen, GTM expert, VC at Mercury, and Artemis Fund LP
• Lindsey Fine, Amazon, Salesforce, Meta, and Dropbox alum
• Allie Danziger, CMO at Ascent
This guide covers how to define your ICP, establish your value proposition, select your motion, and refine your message. In parts two and three, we’ll cover hiring, budgeting, and sales compensation that actually works.

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Start with Your ICP: The Anchor of Every GTM Decision
The Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is a detailed description of the type of company or user most likely to buy, get value, and stick around long-term. Instead of chasing every possible lead, an ICP helps you zero in on those who truly need your product, are willing to pay for it, and will stay. This keeps your GTM efforts efficient and prevents wasted time on prospects who aren’t the right fit.
Start with your “beachhead” segment, a focused subset of the market that meets key criteria for early traction. The following is GTM strategist Maja Voje’s framework:
Acute pain point: A burning problem your product solves.
High willingness to pay: They value the solution enough to buy quickly.
Growth potential: Winning them leads to expansion or influence.
Accessible to you: You can realistically reach them with your resources.
Expandable market: They sit within a larger segment you can grow into.
Additionally, a static ICP is a liability. Your best customers today may not resemble your original assumptions. Companies that win are those that tune their customer definition based on real-world signals. If your best customers look nothing like your pipeline, or your win rates are sliding, it’s time to refine.
With a clear ICP, the next three fundamentals become significantly easier to get right: your value proposition, your motion, and your message.
Value Proposition: The Bridge Between ICP and Motion
Once you know who you’re targeting, the next step is articulating why you matter to that specific customer. A value proposition is a clear, concise statement that connects your product to the problem your ICP urgently needs solved. It’s not a vision, a tagline, or a feature list. It’s the promise you’re making and the proof that you can deliver it.
A strong value proposition at the seed stage answers four questions:
• What critical problem are you solving for this specific ICP?
• What meaningful change or outcome do you create for them?
• Why are you uniquely suited to solve it? (your wedge, mechanism, or advantage)
• What early evidence proves this? (data signals, workflows, ROI moments)
Importantly, your value proposition must be built for the segment you can win now, not the segment you hope to win later. A diluted or overly ambitious value proposition often signals an unclear ICP. A precise one helps you choose the right GTM motion and informs every message your sales, product, and marketing teams use.
When your value proposition resonates, it becomes a forcing function for alignment: your ICP sharpens, your messaging strengthens, and your GTM motion becomes easier to select and execute. It is the connective tissue between who you serve and how you bring them to the table.
Motions: How You Sell Shapes What You Fund
Depending on your market and product fit, most early-stage GTM motions fall into two camps.
Sales-Led Growth (SLG)
SLG requires a human touch: live demos, outbound sequences, and a CRM stack that supports pipeline visibility. Sales-first founders often see $500K–$1M in ARR as a signal to hire AEs and build pipeline velocity.
SLG budgets are front-loaded with sales headcount, demo tooling, and amplification infrastructure. These motions work, but only when sales and marketing align around consistent messaging, transparent processes, and a bias for collaboration. If marketing is generating leads with one narrative while sales pitches another, or if product can’t deliver on what sales promises, the motion breaks down.
Product-Led Growth (PLG)
Other founders stay closer to the sales process while investing in marketing experiments and engineering. That’s a PLG motion: product drives the acquisition, the onboarding, and often the upsell. PLG isn’t right for every product, but when it works, to quote Aileen Allen, it’s magic. CAC is lower. Iteration is faster. Users feel empowered to self-serve.
PLG budgets focus on activation, usage, and funnel optimization. Sales hires typically come later, once product-market fit is proven at scale. PLG can backfire if your product is complex, high-stakes, or requires heavy integration. The question is whether a new user can reliably find an aha-moment on their own. If not, you’ll need a sales-assisted model first.
Ultimately, neither motion is inherently better. Each requires different sequencing and budget logic, and both depend on strong messaging.
Messaging: The Non-Negotiable GTM Foundation
While positioning signals where you play in the market, messaging articulates what you promise and why it matters to your ICP.
“If your message is garbage, no one’s going to care. You’re just spending money.” -Aileen Allen
Before you invest in channels or headcount, your message has to land. Here is Aileen’s framework for building effective early-stage messaging:
Identify your top 3 customer pain points. Go beyond basic demographics — truly understand your ICP’s urgent motivations and triggers. What keeps them up at night, or what do they complain about in meetings?
Map your product features to those pains. This step forces you to distinguish between simply listing “what it does” versus explaining “so what?” — i.e., why a feature matters to the customer’s problem.
Translate features into customer outcomes. Avoid copy that just rattles off feature lists — always link back to an outcome that the customer cares about.
Tactical testing of your messaging. Before committing a message to a big campaign, test it in low-cost ways. A/B test different copy variants in small batches (LinkedIn posts, emails, or search ads) and see what gets the best engagement.
How do you get your message to land? By nailing copywriting, one of the most collaborative disciplines in GTM. Good copywriting draws from product, design, research, and even legal.
"Good copy gives your audience agency. Great copy taps into what they already believe." -Kira Klaas
PLG teams depend on messaging inside the product — clear CTAs and intuitive flows. SLG teams rely on messaging in decks, demos, sequences, and nurture campaigns. Regardless of your path, messaging must unify your internal toolkit and external narrative.
Once your message resonates, use your personal brand to amplify it. At the seed stage, a founder’s voice carries real weight. If being visible doesn’t come naturally to you, batch content monthly, schedule it out, and lean on peers to extend your reach. A strong founder presence builds credibility, attracts talent, and drives inbound interest long before a marketing team is in place.
When your ICP is sharp, your messaging is grounded in truth, and your motion fits how your customers actually buy, the entire organization moves with clarity. Your team knows what good looks like. Your dollars work harder. Your early customers become your loudest advocates. In the next installments of this Warrior Guide, we’ll go deeper into hiring, budgeting, and compensation frameworks that turn clarity into scale.
We believe once in a generation companies will be built by unexpected founders. If that sounds like you, pitch us here!

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