For most of the last two decades, the first go-to-market hire at an early-stage software company was a salesperson. The founder had built something customers wanted and had closed the first deals personally, and the new hire's job was to take selling off the founder's plate. That person inherited the founder's pitch, carried a quota, and was measured on closed revenue.
I think that definition no longer fits the job. Now that AI lets small teams build and ship faster than ever, a new product needs what I call GTM1: the first person, other than the founder or executive sponsor, who owns its path to market. That includes the narrative, the first repeatable customers, and the loop that carries what buyers say back into the product. The product may belong to a young company or be a new line inside an established one.
What changed
Building software used to be the hard part. A founder who could put a working product in front of customers had already cleared the steepest climb, and the go-to-market work that followed was mostly a matter of repeating what had worked.
Then the cost of building fell. Small teams now ship in weeks what used to take quarters, and so do their competitors. Buyers face a shelf of products that look alike and promise alike, and when products look alike, buyers compare features and the conversation tends to drift toward price. Some buyers stop shopping altogether, because the same tools that make products cheap to build are available to them, and some of the largest customers have begun building their own.
Inside the company, the product often changes every few weeks. A salesperson hired to repeat the founder's pitch can find themselves selling a version that no longer exists. The founder still holds the story, the customer relationships, and the judgment about what to build next, and all three now compete for the same hours.
So the founder hires a closer. The closer needs a repeatable motion that has not been built yet and a category story that has not been written. Within a year, the hire has often moved on, and the company has spent time it did not have.
What GTM1 does
GTM1 has three jobs, and all three run at the same time. The first is to name the product's place in the market: a category story that explains the problem the buyer has, why it matters now, and why this company solves it differently.
The second is to prove that story with customers. GTM1 closes early deals personally, learns which buyers convert and why, and turns that pattern into a motion others can repeat.
The third is to carry buyer feedback back into the product. Every lost deal and every objection is evidence about what to build, and GTM1 brings that evidence to the product team in a form they can act on.
GTM1 is not a VP of Sales hired to build a team before there is a motion to scale. It is not a product marketer handed a finished product and asked for collateral, and it is not a junior hire sent to test a market alone. Each of those roles has its place later, but none of them can do this job first. Inside an established company, it is also not a product manager asked to launch a new line alongside existing duties, or an account executive handed a second product to carry.
The idea has roots. In 2015, Sequoia published a short book in which Mark Leslie recommended that a company's first sales hires be generalists who work as easily with product and engineering as with customers, and Jim Goetz described Don Templeton, a sales engineer who worked as a forward scout and helped shape the products he sold. What has changed is the scope of the role. It now has to reach buyers before the demo, keep the product ready to sell as it changes every few weeks, and answer questions about trust from several buyers at once.
Inside established companies
The same gap opens inside companies that are already successful. Legal tech vendors that built their business on one product are now building AI products in neighboring categories, or making strategic acquisitions meant to open a new revenue stream or change how they go to market. Those products start where a startup starts: a story the market has not heard, a first group of customers still to be found, and pricing and packaging still being worked out.
A new product inside an established company has advantages a startup lacks, including a known brand, existing customers, and a sales team already in the room. Each advantage comes with a complication. The sales team is paid to sell the core product and has little reason to spend a quarter learning a new one. Existing customers know the company for something else, so the new product has to earn its own place in their thinking. And when the product was acquired, its founder may move into a different role or leave, and much of what explains why the first customers bought can leave with them.
In that setting GTM1 does the same three jobs, and each one carries a second layer. The story has to name the new product's category and also connect it to the category the company already stands for, so that buyers, and the company's own sellers, can see why one company offers both. The first job also includes setting the new product's pricing and packaging. And there is one more: getting the rest of the company to sell it. That means understanding what shapes a sales team's choices, such as how quickly each product retires quota, how commission is paid, and which deals are easiest to close, and making the case for changes when those incentives work against the new product. A connecting story helps here as much as anywhere. When the new product fits the company's main message, reps find it easy to raise, buyers have already heard of it, and customers ask to see it. The role works best when it reports to the executive sponsoring the product, answers for that product's results rather than a share of the core quota, and has a real voice in what the product team builds next.
Why legal AI shows it first
Legal AI is where this shift is easiest to see, because two forces are at work at once. The first is a crowded market. With venture funding flowing into the space, many companies now pursue the same buyers with similar promises about research, drafting, and review.
The second is the buyer building for itself. Some of the largest law firms have decided to build their own AI capabilities rather than buy them. Kirkland & Ellis has announced a $500 million investment in a proprietary model, and DLA Piper is moving toward an enterprise platform built on its own data and scale. Other large firms, such as Ropes & Gray, have concluded that buying is the better course while the technology changes this quickly, and firms outside the largest few dozen generally lack the scale to build at all (Bloomberg Law). Where building does happen, the vendor's toughest competitor is often the customer's own innovation team.
Behind both forces sits the client. Corporate legal departments are pressing their outside firms to show what AI is worth to them. In a 2026 Deloitte survey of senior legal leaders, 78 percent named cost reduction as the main benefit they want from their firms' use of AI, and respondents expected hourly billing to fall from about 72 percent of work to 44 percent within two to three years (Deloitte). A law firm that adopts AI now has to prove its value to its own clients, often under fixed or outcome-based fees, and it expects the same proof from its vendors.
The buyers themselves are lawyers, legal operations leaders, and general counsel. Their professional obligations tend to make them careful with new technology, and many are trained to test a claim before accepting it. A single purchase can involve partners, IT, security, and procurement, each with a different question.
Build versus buy also splits the market into different sales. With the largest firms, the product often has to fit inside a platform the firm is building, as an integration, a data layer, or a capability its own developers cannot easily reproduce. With mid-sized firms, it is still a full product sale. With corporate legal departments, it is a case for bringing work in-house and relying less on outside counsel. Choosing which of these to pursue first is one of the earliest decisions a GTM1 makes, and the value case has to help the law firm show its own client what the AI delivered.
The established vendors are moving as well. Clio completed its $1 billion acquisition of vLex in November 2025 (Legal Technology), and Legora bought Wexler in July 2026, its fifth acquisition of the year (Legal Technology). When a deal like that is strategic, meant to add a revenue stream rather than technology or data for an existing product, the new product needs its own path to market inside a company organized around the first.
A founder in this market, or an executive launching a new product, needs someone who can discuss defensibility with a litigation partner in the morning and the roadmap with a product team in the afternoon. That person has to understand how lawyers work, how firms and legal departments buy, and how to describe the product in terms the buyer already trusts. That combination is uncommon, and it is the profile of GTM1 in legal tech.
When to hire GTM1, and when not to
The role fits a particular moment. The product works for a first group of customers who use it and pay for it. The founder or executive sponsor is still the only person who can explain why those customers bought. Their time has become the limit on both new deals and product decisions. The company can give the role two or three quarters to produce a repeatable motion. And the founder is ready to hand over part of the story and some of the customer relationships.
Some companies are better served by something else. If no customer is yet using the product to solve the problem it was built for, the company needs more discovery first, and that work belongs to the founder. If the motion already repeats, so that reps who have never met the founder close deals at a predictable rate, the company needs a sales leader to scale it and more pipeline to feed it. And if the founder intends to keep every important customer conversation, a GTM1 hire will struggle to do any of the three jobs.
The same test applies to a new product inside an established company. The sponsor should be able to name the first customers and say why they bought, and the company should be willing to give the role a real say in the product's story, its pricing, and the case for changing sales incentives. If the new product is meant to become a feature of the core platform, the existing team should sell it.
What happens after GTM1
GTM1 describes a stage of the work. The role has done its job when the motion can be taught: a rep who has never met the founder can tell the story, handle the main objections, and close at a predictable rate, and the product team acts on what buyers say without waiting to be told.
From there, a few paths make sense, depending on the company and the person. GTM1 can hand selling to a sales leader built to scale it and take a broader role, such as running the product line as a general manager or leading operations. Inside a company with more products coming, the same person can take on the next one, where the first job starts again.
The handoff deserves planning from the first month. By the time it comes, the category story should be in writing, along with the objection list and what was solved or set aside, a profile of the customers who buy, the talk track and demo, and a record of what buyers asked for and what the product team did about it. A company that has all of that can hire a sales leader to scale a motion that already exists.
Is your company ready?
Two free tools can help you decide. The GTM1 Readiness Assessment asks a few questions about where your company stands, for a startup or a new product inside an established company, and suggests whether this is the right time for the role. The GTM1 ROI Calculator estimates what the role is worth using your own burn, pipeline, and hiring plan.