Plan Pricing and Distribution

A go-to-market strategy is a concrete answer to "how will the first 50 buyers find out you exist and decide to pay you?" — not a TAM slide, not a positioning deck. The actionable version is a go-to-market plan with three pieces: a willingness-to-pay band anchored against named competitors, three ranked distribution channels where the buyer already gathers, and one specific first test per channel that produces a real signal in 1-2 weeks. This tool is a free go-to-market strategy assistant that produces all three in 3 minutes — pricing strategy, channels, and first tests, with the channels you ruled out and why.

Specific places, not categories. "r/devtools", "Bytes.dev newsletter", "Vercel community Discord", "the SaaS Marketing Slack" — those are channels. "Reddit", "newsletters", "Discord", "social", "ads" are not. The picking rule: where does the buyer already spend time, in groups of 50+, talking about the problem you solve. Three of those, ranked by how cheap each one is to test, beats ten "maybe" channels you'll never run. The reject-list — what you're explicitly not doing — is part of the output.

Because for a pre-revenue founder it's theatre. The math is downstream of channel reality — if you can't name the three places your first 50 buyers live, the TAM number is decorative. I'd rather you leave with a willingness-to-pay band, three ranked channels, and a first test per channel. That's a plan you can ship next week. If an investor asks for TAM later, you can build it from the bottom-up evidence you collected here. Pair the channel plan with Competitive Analysis to argue why those buyers will pick you.

A specific place where your buyer already spends time. "r/devtools", "Bytes.dev newsletter", "Vercel community Discord", "the SaaS Marketing Slack" — those are channels. "Reddit", "newsletters", "Discord", "social" are not. The agent applies the Run-ads-is-not-a-channel rule and refuses the generic version until you name the actual community, list, or partner.

A band like "$15-30/mo, anchored against [competitor A] at $19 and [competitor B] at $39" is defensible. A single point — "$29/mo" — is a guess until a buyer pays. The band keeps you honest about what you actually know. Treat willingness to pay as a hypothesis with a range, not a target with a decimal — once you have ten paying customers, the band collapses to a number and you're done with this exercise.

Bottom-up. Start with the price band you arrived at above, then count the buyers in your three named distribution channels — how many people are in r/devtools, on the Bytes.dev list, in the SaaS Marketing Slack. Multiply realistic conversion rates against your band. That's a defensible market size grounded in reach you can actually attempt this quarter, not a $50B industry number scraped from a research report. If an investor later asks for TAM, you build it from this floor up rather than from an industry ceiling down — the ceiling is decorative, the floor is real.

A condition that has to be true for a channel to actually work. "r/SaaS allows self-promo on Saturdays", "the newsletter author replies within a week", "we can produce one teardown per week without breaking shipping". Trip-wires turn vague "we'll try X" plans into specific verify-this-first checks. If a trip-wire fails, you swap the channel before burning a month on it.

Because you can't run ten well, and pretending you can is how go-to-market plans die. Three ranked channels with one focused test each beats ten unranked. The other seven go on the reject-list with a one-line reason — that list is part of the output, not a failure mode.

The willingness-to-pay band sets the unit economics. If your band is $15-30/mo and your first channel costs $4K to test, you need ~150 paying customers from that channel for it to clear. The math has to survive a 3-minute napkin sanity check before you write code. From here you can move to Build Cost and see if the development investment matches the realistic year-1 reach.

That's a signal worth taking seriously. If the buyer doesn't gather anywhere — no subreddit, no newsletter, no Discord, no industry list — you're fighting distance, and the channel plan becomes "find them one at a time" through cold outbound or partnerships. That's a valid plan, but it changes the math and the unit economics. Sometimes the right move is reconsidering the segment before reconsidering the channel — picking a buyer who does cluster somewhere reachable.