Founders tell us "we need a go-to-market strategy" when what they mean is "we cannot get this in front of anyone." They tell us "we need a route to market" when they mean "nobody wants this yet." The two phrases get used interchangeably, and treating them as one problem is how you end up solving neither.
Go-to-market and route to market get used as if they are the same question. They are not. Go-to-market asks whether the market wants what you are selling and at what price. Route to market asks which channels get it in front of the buyer, and what each one costs you in margin and control.
Across twenty years, in corporate, in scale-ups and now as a consultant, the second of those questions, channels, intermediaries and margin, has usually been mine to get right. It rarely announces itself as a channel problem. It arrives dressed as a marketing problem, and by the time it reaches us the deck has already been rewritten twice.
Two different questions
Go-to-market is the whole entry question. Who you are selling to, what you are selling them, why it is worth the price you have put on it, and what proves that to a sceptical buyer. It is a proposition question, and no channel will rescue a weak answer.
Route to market is narrower and more concrete. It assumes the proposition works and asks how it physically reaches the person who buys it: direct, wholesale, distributor, marketplace, retail buyer, some blend of the five. Each option takes a cut, in cash margin, in control over how the brand is presented, or in the time it takes to reach a shelf. Get the proposition right and choose the wrong route, and you can still starve a good brand of the volume it needed to prove itself.
Founders conflate the two because both show up as the same symptom. Not enough is selling.
The fix, though, is opposite in each case. One is a positioning and pricing exercise. The other is a distribution and channel-economics exercise. Run the wrong one and you burn a quarter sharpening a proposition nobody was ever going to see, or negotiating channel terms for a product the market was never going to buy at any price.
What a go-to-market problem looks like
- You cannot say who buys this and why in one sentence, and neither can anyone else on the team, in the same words.
- Pricing was set by matching a competitor, without testing what the value is actually worth to the buyer.
- Every pitch sounds slightly different depending on who gives it, because there is no single agreed proposition underneath.
- The product is finished, but nobody outside the founder has watched a real buyer choose it over the obvious alternative.
- Marketing spend moves across channels looking for one that works, and none of them do, because it is the message that is not landing.
What a route-to-market problem looks like
- The proposition tests well. People who see it want it. Not enough people ever see it.
- Margin is disappearing somewhere between what the product costs to make and what it sells for, and nobody has mapped where.
- A retail buyer or distributor controls access to the customer, and getting listed is the actual blocker.
- Direct, wholesale and marketplace are all live at once, quietly competing for the same customer and undercutting each other on price.
- Growth is capped by reach and not by desire: the founder can point to genuine repeat buyers, just not enough of them, because the channel serving them cannot scale.
Why the wrong diagnosis costs you a quarter
The two get treated as one because a founder under pressure reaches for whichever fix feels most within reach. Rewriting a deck feels achievable in a week. Renegotiating a distribution agreement does not. So the deck gets rewritten again while the actual constraint, a retail buyer who has not said yes, sits untouched.
The reverse happens too. A founder spends months courting distributors and stockists for a product whose proposition was never sharp enough to earn the shelf space it was chasing, and the channel work simply fails slower and more expensively than a proposition test would have.
Neither mistake is really about effort. It is about diagnosis. Get the question right first and the fix that follows is usually smaller than either one feared.
Which one do you have?
Ask the team these four separately, then compare the answers rather than debating them in the room.
- If we handed this to ten strangers who match our buyer, would most choose it over what they use now, unprompted?
- Do we know, to the pound, what each channel costs us once margin, returns and listing fees are counted?
- When something is not selling, is the honest answer "they don't want it" or "they never saw it"?
- Is the person blocking growth a customer who said no, or a buyer, distributor or retailer who has not said yes?
If the honest answers point at the offer itself, that is a go-to-market problem, and it is proposition and pricing work. If they point at who controls the shelf and what it costs to get there, that is a route to market problem, and it is channel and commercial work. Some founders have both at once, in which case my strong preference is to settle the proposition first, because channel terms agreed early tend to lock in around a product that still needs to change.
Frequently asked questions
Is go-to-market just another way of saying route to market? No. Go-to-market covers the proposition, the pricing and the buyer you are aiming at. Route to market covers the channels and intermediaries that physically get the product to that buyer. A business can have a strong go-to-market and a weak route to market, or the reverse, which is exactly why the two need separate diagnosis.
Which should we fix first if we suspect we have both? Go-to-market, in almost every case I have seen. There is little point building a channel for a proposition the market has not yet agreed to want, and fixing distribution before the offer is settled tends to lock in the wrong terms with the wrong partners.
Can the same person own both problems? They can, though rarely well at the same time, because the two need different instincts: one is closer to positioning and pricing judgement, the other to negotiation and channel economics. In a founder-led business one person usually carries both by default, which is often how the two get conflated in the first place.
Does this apply if we sell direct only? Yes, and the route-to-market question is easier to miss when there is only one channel. Direct still has channel economics: paid acquisition cost, the transaction and platform fees on your own store, delivery and returns. A brand can have a strong proposition and a route to market that quietly costs more per sale than the margin allows.
We are already selling. Does go-to-market still apply, or is that only for a launch? It still applies. A go-to-market problem reappears every time you enter a new segment, raise a price, or watch a category shift under you, and the symptoms look the same as they do on day one. Nobody describes the offer the same way twice, and the pitch changes depending on who gives it.
Where to take this next
A conversation is the fastest way to get an honest read on which of these two you actually have, as opposed to the one that feels more urgent this week. Tell us what is stalling, and we will tell you plainly whether it is the offer, the channel, or both. Start a conversation.
Author: Kirsty Newman, founder of The Boutique Consultancy. Her career spans twenty years in beauty and wellness, much of it at L'Oréal Group and Coty, in roles ranging from media investment to running multi-million pound P&Ls and teams of up to 16 across YSL Beauty, Giorgio Armani Beauty, Lancôme and Rimmel. She now brings that corporate discipline to founders in startups and scale-ups, including direct work with venture capital on funding and expansion.