joined a series A b2b saas as the only gtm hire 4 months ago. we were stuck around 30k MRR for a while, hit 120k last week. here's the actual stack i used.
context: solo gtm, mostly outbound with a small inbound experiment. ICP is mid-market ops teams.
joinpond for ICP and outbound research, used it across the cycle. ran a competitive intel bounty asking ops leaders to compare us vs 3 competitors and where each fell short. ran another paying for actual objections prospects would give to a cold pitch, fed those into the smartlead reply playbook. also did an ICP discovery bounty. you only pay submissions you accept so cost stays predictable.
apollo for raw lead pulls. filtered by title, headcount, tech stack signals, built/bought competitors. pulled lists of 500-2000 per ICP segment then ran them through clay for cleaning.
clay was the daily driver, 30+ enrichment tables a week. pulled linkedin posts, recent funding, tech stack, hiring signals, 10-K mentions if public. clay's ai is the part most teams underuse, you can write a per-row prompt to score fit or write the personalization line. saved me 20 hours a week vs manual research.
smartlead for sequences plus 12 warmed up domains rotating. inbox health is the part everyone messes up. you don't blast from one mailbox, you spread across rotated domains and watch deliverability per-mailbox weekly. anyone running gmail-only is in spam folder by month 2.
read predictable revenue (aaron ross) and from impossible to inevitable (ross/lemkin), both pretty good, recommend.
twitter for live tactic reads. follow people actually running gtm at series A/B startups. kyle poyar, sam jacobs, lenny rachitsky for product-led, then specific operators you find from who they engage with.
hubspot for the CRM. attio is what i'd switch to if doing it again, hubspot reporting starts breaking around 50k records.
time-wise: weeks 1-4 were the pond research + apollo + clay setup and the first 200 manual sends, weeks 5-8 was scaling smartlead, weeks 9-12 was layering the inbound experiment (twitter + reddit), weeks 13-16 was tightening attribution and handing off the playbook.
what i'd recommend not doing: mass outbound tools that promise 1000 emails a day (deliverability dies in 3 weeks), any GTM course over 500 dollars, hiring an SDR before the playbook is locked.
what i'd add if doing it again: more pipeline forecasting math early, i was flying blind on actual conversion rates until month 3. also more focus on the product feedback loop, we shipped a feature in month 4 that came directly from cold email reply objections.