A founder I work with came in last year sure of his plan: digital outreach. He'd run it at a previous company and it had worked, so he ran it again.

Three months in: 2,000 emails sent. Two or three meetings booked. One customer a month — while the whole team burned hours on outreach and risked getting their accounts flagged, just to keep that one customer coming.

He had a strategy. It was internally consistent, drawn from real experience, and quietly wrong.

The fix didn't come from a better template or more volume. It came from one question:

Where is your buyer actually deciding?

Not where he was reaching them. Where the yes actually happened.

His buyers weren't deciding in their inbox. They were deciding in board meetings, at conferences, and through introductions from people they already trusted — in a category where cold outreach is structurally distrusted because of scams. His entire channel was the wrong channel. Not poorly executed. Wrong.

He stopped digital outreach completely and started showing up in person — two to four events a week. At the very first one, he met someone who sat on a relevant board and offered an introduction on the spot. Instant credibility, because he was in the room.

Within weeks: one customer a month became one a week. Then multiple a day. The bottleneck moved from sales to onboarding — the team pulling all-nighters not to close deals but to keep up with them. Growth hit 180% month over month.

Here's the part worth sitting with.

His first-draft strategy wasn't lazy. It was the kind of plan you'd get from any competent source today — including AI. Ask a model how to run B2B outreach and it gives you a clean, professional answer in ninety seconds: templates, sequences, cadences. A real first draft.

But no model could tell him the thing that actually mattered: that in this buyer's world, the inbox was the wrong room. That requires knowing the texture of a specific market — who your buyer trusts, where they actually decide, what makes them defensive. That knowledge doesn't live in a model. It lives in the gap between a first draft and a decision — and that gap is the only thing left that's worth anything.

The first draft is free now. Everyone has one. The second draft is the whole game.

Three questions to pressure-test your own strategy this week:

1. Where is your buyer actually deciding? Not where you're reaching them — where the yes happens.
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2. What does your channel assume about how your buyer trusts? If you're cold-outreaching a market that runs on referrals, no template fixes that.
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3. Who has seen your strategy besides you and a model? A plan you've only tested against yourself isn't a strategy. It's a hypothesis.

If question three doesn't have a real name in the answer, that's the gap to close first.

— Alessandro

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Alessandro Marianantoni Founder at M Studio Weekly notes on what actually moves a founder's GTM. ​Recent LinkedIn posts →​

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