The most important realizations don't announce themselves. They sneak up on you when you're doing something mundane like checking client emails on a Saturday morning while nursing your third coffee.

My revelation

"Hi Othmane, just wanted to let you know, we've been booking consistently 2-3 meetings per day. We did right to push through the first 2 months and test this amount of hypotheses. Honestly more than the leads I truly appreciate the time we saved (and runway)."

When I read this, something clicked. We weren't just a lead generation agency. We were building systems of intelligence, methodically testing hypotheses, deriving insights, and saving founders from expensive mistakes.

We were doing GTM engineering.

I had been blind to it, perhaps because I was too close to our own work. Before that day, I was convinced we were just a lead gen agency doing LinkedIn allbound funnels. I really thought GTM engineering was about being a technical engineer.

I over-complexified it. But the truth is: a GTM engineer is someone who can derive intelligence to build systems that are scalable, coherent, and data-driven to do more with less.

The Evolution

Looking back, we were doing GTM engineering for more than a year already, pulling some crazy LinkedIn campaigns. We just weren't using the right words to describe it. We were identifying clear hypotheses, working around them, tracking data, deriving insights, validating them with founders, and building up to hitting the jackpot with the right campaign mix of content, outbound, and ads.

What pushed us in this direction? Three pivotal realizations:

1. We focus on early-stage startups and scaleups that don't necessarily have product-market fit. With AI, PMF means nothing—you need to reinvent yourself every three months.

2. Lead generation isn't linear, not just in terms of tools, but in terms of client context. You need to constantly iterate on multi-dimensional variables to make it work.

3. The value we provide isn't just in the leads. If the founder has bad assumptions, it's not our fault there are no leads. That's why we do thorough work identifying the best hypotheses to pursue and engineer approaches to test and validate/invalidate them.

The Difference Between Lead Gen and GTM Engineering

Most agencies sell tactics. We sell clarity.

The metrics aren't necessarily different, both need to generate leads. But the initial approach and intention diverge significantly. GTM engineering isn't just about building systems but thinking beforehand of the multiple variables that could be tested. The GTM engineer has a duty to identify what positioning is best for the client.

The misconception is common. About 90% of founders we've worked with (even YC-backed ones) come to us for lead gen. After just three questions, we see there's way more work needed.

The roots of lead generation are in understanding your market, the interactions between champions and decision makers, the pain you solve, the painkiller versus vitamin dilemma, and more.

One of our longest-standing clients had worked with two lead gen agencies before us. He was afraid of failed campaigns and had preconceived notions. We audited why previous agencies failed and mapped, for free, the GTM funnel we would put in place. This demonstrated we weren't just following a process but taking data, research, and best practices to ensure delivery on our promise.

What's missing from traditional agencies? Three critical elements:

• Poor onboarding (garbage in, garbage out)

• Poor communication (insights lost in translation)

• Poor reporting (data without intelligence)

These are the elements that will prevent you from getting the right information to unlock a successful campaign.

The Retention Evidence

Our current retention rate exceeds six months. Lead gen agencies have the highest churn because most fail. We don't just do lead gen, we engineer the best strategies for our clients to go to market.

We nearly lost a client once because they thought they could replicate what we were doing. They paused our collaboration for a month, then returned because they realized our value went beyond leads.

We knew how to think, use data, and make it work. That's what people want: skin in the game. The GTM engineer can justify and explain why something doesn't work and quickly define and iterate to find what does.

We've stopped working with short-term focused clients for one reason: if you want 20 leads now, go ahead, send 20,000 emails. Burn your total addressable market. Then see for yourself if these leads are as qualified as if we had taken the time to build a GTM strategy that takes all KPIs into account—not just booking rate but closing rate, qualification, and ease of closing. And second, see if you didn't just burn your market.

How many prospects will remember that you harassed them with a 7-sequence email asking for their time with nothing valuable or contextual in exchange?

The Philosophical Stance

I think GTM is the greatest asset for companies to iterate on their product. Fast GTM means fast idea-to-call conversion, thus gathering inputs to define whether a product direction is validated by market data. GTM isn't just about leads—it's about capturing data and ensuring you're heading in the right direction in the shortest amount of time with the best possible approach.

What's fundamentally misunderstood about customer acquisition? Allbound. It doesn't make sense to judge channels in silos. You want to be visible everywhere, all the time. You want prospects to see you multiple times per day—in their inbox, with organic content, and with ads. That's the power of GTM. Marketing shouldn't work with sales. Marketing is sales. And sales is marketing. You can't change this. I am utterly convinced of overall attribution with macro testing and tracking.

The Future of Market Entry

My most controversial prediction? Companies will all use content creation, branding, free value, AI, and automations to win. The boundaries between product development and GTM are artificial. Fast GTM is fast feedback on product direction. Every customer conversation is product data. Every failed outreach attempt contains market intelligence.

The most dangerous assumption in business is that product-market fit is static. In the age of AI, you need to reinvent yourself quarterly. Your GTM approach must be built for constant iteration, not stable execution.

The winners won't be those who execute the most activities but those who derive the most intelligence from their market interactions. They'll use these tools not as separate channels but as an integrated system of market intelligence.

I was wrong about what we were building. I thought we were constructing lead generation machines. In reality, we were building intelligence systems that happen to generate leads.

That email wasn't remarkable because it reported good numbers. It was remarkable because it revealed the true nature of our work: we weren't just fishing; we were mapping the ocean.

And that, I realized on that Saturday morning, three coffees in, is the essence of GTM engineering.