u/Stunning-Extension80

Hi everyone,

I'm a 3rd-year BTech CSE student currently trying to build practical experience in product marketing and GTM.

I want to be upfront about where I stand: I don't have professional GTM experience yet, and I'm not going to pretend that a few personal projects make me an experienced GTM professional. What I do have is a foundation in product work and a strong interest in learning through actual execution.

I've previously done internships/volunteer work around product management, including:

Market and competitive research

Research around LLM-based products/apps

Working with specialists on feature development

Collaborating with engineering teams on feature implementation/integration

Over the past few months, I've been moving toward PMM/GTM and have been using real-world startups as case studies. I've worked on things like:

ICP and market research

Positioning & messaging

Competitive analysis

Customer lifecycle / time-to-value analysis

Identifying potential growth bottlenecks

Thinking through acquisition and GTM channels

Developing marketing/GTM strategies from publicly available data

The limitation I've repeatedly run into is that personal projects can only take you so far.

You can analyze a company's positioning from the outside, but you don't have access to its actual customer conversations, sales pipeline, conversion data, retention data, experiments, etc. And that's exactly the experience I'm trying to gain now.

So here's what I'm looking for:

I'm not specifically looking for a "GTM internship", because GTM covers a huge range of work.

I'd be interested in helping an active early-stage startup with whatever area actually needs attention: customer research, competitive research, positioning, messaging, acquisition experiments, channel research, conversion, or other marketing/growth work.

I'm also open to doing this unpaid initially.

The main thing I'm looking for is the opportunity to actually work on a real product, with real customers and real constraints, rather than continuing to work only through hypothetical case studies.

There are no big expectations from my side. Give me a real problem, let me put in the work, and we can see whether I'm actually useful.

If you're building something and could use an extra pair of hands on the product/GTM/marketing side, feel free to DM me. I'd be happy to share the projects I've worked on and see if there's a fit.

I'm a 3rd-year BTech student currently trying to move toward product marketing/GTM.

I've done some product-focused internships/volunteer work involving market research, competitive research, LLM/product research, feature development and working with engineering teams.

More recently, I've been teaching myself PMM/GTM through practical projects on real SaaS products, looking at ICPs, positioning, messaging, competitive landscapes, customer lifecycle, time-to-value and potential acquisition/growth problems.

But I've hit a point where I'm realizing the limitation of doing everything as a personal project:

I can analyze a product from the outside, but I can't replicate actually working inside a startup.

I don't have access to things like customer conversations, sales pipelines, conversion data, retention data, experiments, or the day-to-day constraints behind GTM decisions.

For people who started in GTM without much prior experience:

How did you get your first opportunity to work on a real product?

Did you start through internships, volunteering, helping an early-stage founder, freelancing, personal projects, or something completely different?

I'm particularly interested in hearing from people who started with very little formal GTM experience and eventually got their hands on real work.

I'm trying to figure out the most realistic next step rather than collecting another dozen courses or theoretical frameworks.

Hi everyone,

I'm a 3rd-year BTech CSE student currently trying to build practical experience in product marketing and GTM.

I want to be upfront about where I stand: I don't have professional GTM experience yet, and I'm not going to pretend that a few personal projects make me an experienced GTM professional. What I do have is a foundation in product work and a strong interest in learning through actual execution.

I've previously done internships/volunteer work around product management, including:

Market and competitive research

Research around LLM-based products/apps

Working with specialists on feature development

Collaborating with engineering teams on feature implementation/integration

Over the past few months, I've been moving toward PMM/GTM and have been using real-world startups as case studies. I've worked on things like:

ICP and market research

Positioning & messaging

Competitive analysis

Customer lifecycle / time-to-value analysis

Identifying potential growth bottlenecks

Thinking through acquisition and GTM channels

Developing marketing/GTM strategies from publicly available data

The limitation I've repeatedly run into is that personal projects can only take you so far.

You can analyze a company's positioning from the outside, but you don't have access to its actual customer conversations, sales pipeline, conversion data, retention data, experiments, etc. And that's exactly the experience I'm trying to gain now.

So here's what I'm looking for:

I'm not specifically looking for a "GTM internship", because GTM covers a huge range of work.

I'd be interested in helping an active early-stage startup with whatever area actually needs attention: customer research, competitive research, positioning, messaging, acquisition experiments, channel research, conversion, or other marketing/growth work.

I'm also open to doing this unpaid initially.

The main thing I'm looking for is the opportunity to actually work on a real product, with real customers and real constraints, rather than continuing to work only through hypothetical case studies.

There are no big expectations from my side. Give me a real problem, let me put in the work, and we can see whether I'm actually useful.

If you're building something and could use an extra pair of hands on the product/GTM/marketing side, feel free to DM me. I'd be happy to share the projects I've worked on and see if there's a fit.

I'm a CS student who's recently started learning GTM after spending some time on PMM fundamentals (positioning, messaging, etc.).

Since I don't have access to a startup or real company data, my current learning approach is to pick an early-stage B2B SaaS product and build a GTM strategy as a personal project using only public information (website, founder content, reviews, competitors, Reddit, case studies, etc.).

Once I'm done, I turn it into a deck and try to share it with someone from the company's team (founder, PMM, GTM, product, customer success) to get feedback. So far, that's been the hardest part. Cold emails have mostly gone unanswered, and without an existing network, getting meaningful feedback is difficult.

For those already working in GTM or PMM:

- Is this a good way to build practical GTM skills?

- If you were starting from scratch today, what would you do differently?

- Any advice on getting feedback, building a network, or finding mentors without industry experience?

I'd really appreciate any honest advice. Thanks!

I'm a CS student who's recently started learning GTM after spending some time on PMM fundamentals (positioning, messaging, etc.).

Since I don't have access to a startup or real company data, my current learning approach is to pick an early-stage B2B SaaS product and build a GTM strategy as a personal project using only public information (website, founder content, reviews, competitors, Reddit, case studies, etc.).

Once I'm done, I turn it into a deck and try to share it with someone from the company's team (founder, PMM, GTM, product, customer success) to get feedback. So far, that's been the hardest part. Cold emails have mostly gone unanswered, and without an existing network, getting meaningful feedback is difficult.

For those already working in GTM or PMM:

- Is this a good way to build practical GTM skills?

- If you were starting from scratch today, what would you do differently?

- Any advice on getting feedback, building a network, or finding mentors without industry experience?

I'd really appreciate any honest advice. Thanks!

I'm a CS student who's recently started learning GTM after spending some time on PMM fundamentals (positioning, messaging, etc.).

Since I don't have access to a startup or real company data, my current learning approach is to pick an early-stage B2B SaaS product and build a GTM strategy as a personal project using only public information (website, founder content, reviews, competitors, Reddit, case studies, etc.).

Once I'm done, I turn it into a deck and try to share it with someone from the company's team (founder, PMM, GTM, product, customer success) to get feedback. So far, that's been the hardest part. Cold emails have mostly gone unanswered, and without an existing network, getting meaningful feedback is difficult.

For those already working in GTM or PMM:

- Is this a good way to build practical GTM skills?

- If you were starting from scratch today, what would you do differently?

- Any advice on getting feedback, building a network, or finding mentors without industry experience?

I'd really appreciate any honest advice. Thanks!

​

At first, I thought the job was just to identify the ideal customer profile.

Then I realized that's only the starting point.

In B2B, your ICP is often a company, not a single person.

Inside that company are multiple people looking at the same product from completely different angles.

The operations lead wants fewer manual tasks. The founder cares about ROI and growth. The person actually using the tool just wants their day to be less painful.

That means one message isn't enough. One channel isn't enough either.

On top of that, the person who feels the pain isn't always the person signing the contract.

It sounds obvious once you see it, but I genuinely hadn't appreciated how much GTM is about understanding organizations and decision-making, not just markets.

Still very much learning, but this was one of those moments where a project taught me something that reading definitions never did.

​

When I first started learning GTM, I thought the hard part was finding the ideal customer profile.

Turns out, that's only the first layer.

In B2B, your ICP is usually an organization, not a single buyer.

And that's where the complexity begins.

Within the same ICP, there are multiple personas.

Each has different responsibilities.

Each has different incentives.

Each experiences the same problem differently.

Which means each needs different messaging.

If your goal is customer acquisition, you can't stop at knowing who you're selling to.

You also need to understand:

Where each persona spends time.

What success looks like for each of them.

What pain they're trying to eliminate.

What type of content actually earns their attention.

Then comes another layer.

The buying committee.

The person using the product isn't always the person approving the budget.

The person championing the solution internally isn't always the final decision-maker.

So your GTM strategy isn't just about reaching one customer.

It's about aligning multiple stakeholders with different motivations around the same product.

The deeper I go into GTM, the less it feels like marketing.

It feels like understanding people, organizations, and decision-making systems.

That's a level of complexity I didn't fully appreciate when I started.

​

When I first started learning GTM, I thought the hard part was finding the ideal customer profile.

Turns out, that's only the first layer.

In B2B, your ICP is usually an organization, not a single buyer.

And that's where the complexity begins.

Within the same ICP, there are multiple personas.

Each has different responsibilities.

Each has different incentives.

Each experiences the same problem differently.

Which means each needs different messaging.

If your goal is customer acquisition, you can't stop at knowing who you're selling to.

You also need to understand:

Where each persona spends time.

What success looks like for each of them.

What pain they're trying to eliminate.

What type of content actually earns their attention.

Then comes another layer.

The buying committee.

The person using the product isn't always the person approving the budget.

The person championing the solution internally isn't always the final decision-maker.

So your GTM strategy isn't just about reaching one customer.

It's about aligning multiple stakeholders with different motivations around the same product.

The deeper I go into GTM, the less it feels like marketing.

It feels like understanding people, organizations, and decision-making systems.

That's a level of complexity I didn't fully appreciate when I started.

​

When I first started learning GTM, I thought the hard part was finding the ideal customer profile.

Turns out, that's only the first layer.

In B2B, your ICP is usually an organization, not a single buyer.

And that's where the complexity begins.

Within the same ICP, there are multiple personas.

Each has different responsibilities.

Each has different incentives.

Each experiences the same problem differently.

Which means each needs different messaging.

If your goal is customer acquisition, you can't stop at knowing who you're selling to.

You also need to understand:

Where each persona spends time.

What success looks like for each of them.

What pain they're trying to eliminate.

What type of content actually earns their attention.

Then comes another layer.

The buying committee.

The person using the product isn't always the person approving the budget.

The person championing the solution internally isn't always the final decision-maker.

So your GTM strategy isn't just about reaching one customer.

It's about aligning multiple stakeholders with different motivations around the same product.

The deeper I go into GTM, the less it feels like marketing.

It feels like understanding people, organizations, and decision-making systems.

That's a level of complexity I didn't fully appreciate when I started.

​

When I first started learning GTM, I thought the hard part was finding the ideal customer profile.

Turns out, that's only the first layer.

In B2B, your ICP is usually an organization, not a single buyer.

And that's where the complexity begins.

Within the same ICP, there are multiple personas.

Each has different responsibilities.

Each has different incentives.

Each experiences the same problem differently.

Which means each needs different messaging.

If your goal is customer acquisition, you can't stop at knowing who you're selling to.

You also need to understand:

Where each persona spends time.

What success looks like for each of them.

What pain they're trying to eliminate.

What type of content actually earns their attention.

Then comes another layer.

The buying committee.

The person using the product isn't always the person approving the budget.

The person championing the solution internally isn't always the final decision-maker.

So your GTM strategy isn't just about reaching one customer.

It's about aligning multiple stakeholders with different motivations around the same product.

The deeper I go into GTM, the less it feels like marketing.

It feels like understanding people, organizations, and decision-making systems.

That's a level of complexity I didn't fully appreciate when I started.

One thing I realized while building a GTM strategy for a

SaaS product: I started with the wrong question.

My first instinct was to identify the best acquisition

channels.

Where does the ICP spend time? Should we prioritize

Reddit, Linkedin, webinars, SEO, YouTube, or

communities?

I spent hours mapping channels.

Then I realized something.

Channel strategy comes after understanding the

company's biggest growth bottleneck, not before.

The same acquisition strategy won't work for every startup because every startup is trying to solve a different problem.

A useful question to ask first is:

"If this company could fix just one thing to significantly

accelerate growth, what would it be?"

That completely changes the research.

Instead of immediately choosing channels, investigate

where the bottleneck actually is:

• Acquisition - Not enough qualified prospects are

entering the funnel.

• Conversion - Plenty of people visit, but very few become

customers.

• Activation - Users sign up but never experience the

product's value.

• Retention - Customers leave aftera few months.

•Expansion - The product has found product-market fit,

but scaling further has become the challenge.

Only after identifying the bottleneck does channel

prioritization start to make sense.

For example, an early-stage SaaS struggling with

awareness will need a very different GTM motion than a

company with thousands of customers that's trying to

convince enterprise buyers to switch from competitors.

​

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One thing I realized while building a GTM strategy for a

SaaS product: I started with the wrong question.

My first instinct was to identify the best acquisition

channels.

Where does the ICP spend time? Should we prioritize

Reddit, Linkedin, webinars, SEO, YouTube, or

communities?

I spent hours mapping channels.

Then I realized something.

Channel strategy comes after understanding the

company's biggest growth bottleneck, not before.

The same acquisition strategy won't work for every startup because every startup is trying to solve a different problem.

A useful question to ask first is:

"If this company could fix just one thing to significantly

accelerate growth, what would it be?"

That completely changes the research.

Instead of immediately choosing channels, investigate

where the bottleneck actually is:

• Acquisition - Not enough qualified prospects are

entering the funnel.

• Conversion - Plenty of people visit, but very few become

customers.

• Activation - Users sign up but never experience the

product's value.

• Retention - Customers leave aftera few months.

•Expansion - The product has found product-market fit,

but scaling further has become the challenge.

Only after identifying the bottleneck does channel

prioritization start to make sense.

For example, an early-stage SaaS struggling with

awareness will need a very different GTM motion than a

company with thousands of customers that's trying to

convince enterprise buyers to switch from competitors.

Where does the ICP spend time? Should we prioritize Reddit, LinkedIn, webinars, SEO, YouTube, or communities?

I spent hours mapping channels.

Then I realized something.

Channel strategy comes after understanding the company's biggest growth bottleneck, not before.

The same acquisition strategy won't work for every startup because every startup is trying to solve a different problem.

A useful question to ask first is:

"If this company could fix just one thing to significantly accelerate growth, what would it be?"

That completely changes the research.

Instead of immediately choosing channels, investigate where the bottleneck actually is:

• Acquisition – Not enough qualified prospects are entering the funnel.

• Conversion – Plenty of people visit, but very few become customers.

• Activation – Users sign up but never experience the product's value.

• Retention – Customers leave after a few months.

• Expansion – The product has found product-market fit, but scaling further has become the challenge.

Only after identifying the bottleneck does channel prioritization start to make sense.

For example, an early-stage SaaS struggling with awareness will need a very different GTM motion than a company with thousands of customers that's trying to convince enterprise buyers to switch from competitors.

The lesson for me was simple:

Choosing channels is easy. Choosing the right problem to solve first is the real GTM work.

So, when you're evaluating a company's GTM strategy, what's the first question you ask before thinking about channels?

I picked a scheduling SaaS product called CozyCal, small name, crowded category, sitting between Calendly and Acuity and ran a full positioning analysis on it.

Not because I use it. Because it looked like exactly the kind of product that has genuine differentiation but no idea how to say it.

The homepage opened with "Delightfully Simple Scheduling." Generic. Forgettable. Sounds like every other tool in the category. My first assumption was straightforward, the product probably needs stronger feature differentiation to stand out.

That assumption didn't survive the research.

When I went deeper : customer stories, Capterra reviews, G2 reviews, competitor comparison, the feature set wasn't the problem. The product had embedded booking, branded scheduling pages, white-label notifications, payment collection, intake forms. Real capabilities. Real differentiation sitting right there in the product.

But here's what I actually found in the reviews: customers weren't talking about any of that. They weren't praising analytics or workflow depth. The words that kept appearing were clean, seamless, professional, my clients actually use it. A wedding studio reported 80% more bookings. A law firm said it freed their team to focus on actual legal work. A solo consultant said it was something they were proud to send clients to.

They weren't buying scheduling software. They were buying a more professional client experience and the product was positioning itself like a scheduling utility.

That gap became the entire project.

From there I built a complete repositioning strategy: ICP definition from actual customer patterns, competitive framing against Calendly and Acuity, a full messaging architecture, rewritten homepage copy, and GTM activation direction.

The final strategic position:

CozyCal doesn't win by becoming another Calendly. It doesn't win by becoming a smaller Acuity. It wins by owning professional client booking for independent businesses without the complexity they don't need.

The full deck covers the research process, the insight, the competitive analysis, the messaging output, and the homepage transformation end to end.

[ https://drive.google.com/file/d/119MQTS4dV1ZBtQ6HWdj5wKgiKN52BpLo/view?usp=drivesdk ]

I'd genuinely value feedback from PMMs, founders, and anyone who has worked on positioning projects, especially where you'd push back on the strategy or take it in a different direction.

I picked a scheduling SaaS called CozyCal, small name, crowded category, sitting between Calendly and Acuity and ran a full positioning analysis on it.

Not because I use it. Because it looked like exactly the kind of product that has genuine differentiation but no idea how to say it.

The homepage opened with "Delightfully Simple Scheduling." Generic. Forgettable. Sounds like every other tool in the category. My first assumption was straightforward, the product probably needs stronger feature differentiation to stand out.

That assumption didn't survive the research.

When I went deeper : customer stories, Capterra reviews, G2 reviews, competitor comparison, the feature set wasn't the problem. The product had embedded booking, branded scheduling pages, white-label notifications, payment collection, intake forms. Real capabilities. Real differentiation sitting right there in the product.

But here's what I actually found in the reviews: customers weren't talking about any of that. They weren't praising analytics or workflow depth. The words that kept appearing were clean, seamless, professional, my clients actually use it. A wedding studio reported 80% more bookings. A law firm said it freed their team to focus on actual legal work. A solo consultant said it was something they were proud to send clients to.

They weren't buying scheduling software. They were buying a more professional client experience and the product was positioning itself like a scheduling utility.

That gap became the entire project.

From there I built a complete repositioning strategy: ICP definition from actual customer patterns, competitive framing against Calendly and Acuity, a full messaging architecture, rewritten homepage copy, and GTM activation direction.

The final strategic position:

CozyCal doesn't win by becoming another Calendly. It doesn't win by becoming a smaller Acuity. It wins by owning professional client booking for independent businesses, without the complexity they don't need.

The full deck covers the research process, the insight, the competitive analysis, the messaging output, and the homepage transformation end to end.

[ https://drive.google.com/file/d/119MQTS4dV1ZBtQ6HWdj5wKgiKN52BpLo/view?usp=drivesdk ]

I'd genuinely value feedback from PMMs, founders, and anyone who has worked on positioning projects, especially where you'd push back on the strategy or take it in a different direction.