How to write a go-to-market plan for a Nigerian startup

The first section of the plan is the buyer, and the most common failure is writing it too wide. "Nigerian SMEs" is roughly forty million entities with nothing in common. You cannot build a channel to reach them, you cannot write a message that lands with them, and you cannot tell whether a bad week was the market or the pitch.

Narrow it until you could write down where to find a hundred of them this week. Type of business, rough size, the city or the sector, and the specific role of the person who signs. "Operations managers at Lagos pharmacies with three or more branches" is a buyer you can go and stand in front of.

Then write the trigger: what has to be true for that person to act this quarter rather than next year. Software gets bought when something is on fire, not when a feature list is admired. If you cannot name the fire, you are selling a vitamin and your sales cycle will tell you so.

Channels get listed as nouns: social media, partnerships, SEO, referrals. A list of nouns is not a plan because none of them says what happens on Monday.

Write each channel as a route with a beginning and an end. Not "partnerships" but "the three pharmacy wholesalers who already visit these branches monthly introduce us, we demo on their visit, they get a share of the first year". Written that way, the plan can be tested, and its cost can be estimated before you spend anything.

One route, working, beats five routes half-built. Founders spread across five because it feels like reducing risk. It is the opposite: five half-routes produce five sets of numbers too small to learn from.

In almost every early Nigerian startup, the founder sells. That is fine and often necessary, but the plan has to say it, and it has to count the cost.

It matters because the whole point of a go-to-market plan is repeatability. A route that only works when the founder is in the room is not yet a route. Somewhere in the plan there should be a sentence about what has to be written down, recorded or systemised before a second person could run it.

Investors are buying that transition. A founder who sells brilliantly and cannot say how is a business that stops growing the day they get on a plane.

Four numbers make a plan credible: what it costs to win a customer, what a customer is worth, how long the money takes to come back, and how many of them exist.

You will not know all four accurately at the start, and pretending you do is worse than saying so. Write down what you measured, over what period, from how many customers. "Our CAC across the last eleven customers was about ₦48,000, mostly my time at ₦12,000 a day" is a stronger sentence than a confident number with no working behind it.

The number founders skip most often is the cost of their own time. Leave it out and your CAC looks excellent right up until you hire a salesperson and it triples overnight.

The last section of a good plan is the one nobody writes: the condition under which you abandon this route.

Set it before you start, because you will not set it fairly afterwards. "If forty demos produce under four paying customers, this channel is closed and we move budget to the next one." Without that line, a channel that is quietly failing absorbs money for months, because each individual week looks like it might turn.

Investors who have watched a lot of companies notice founders who kill things on schedule. It reads as judgement, not defeat.

The GTM profile asks these as structured fields rather than as a document: target customer, sales channels, GTM strategy, CAC, LTV, use of funds. The reason is comparability. A paragraph cannot be filtered, ranked or matched against an investor's stated criteria. A field can.

The scoring is arithmetic over those fields and nothing else. A blank field scores zero rather than an imputed average, so the profile shows you exactly which unanswered question is costing you the most.

• Go-to-market (GTM) — The plan for how a product reaches buyers and turns them into revenue.
• ICP (ideal customer profile) — The specific kind of buyer your product fits best, described precisely.
• CAC (customer acquisition cost) — What it costs you, all in, to win one paying customer.
• Product-market fit — The point where the market pulls the product out of you.

This guide is general information about how investors read a business and how to present one. It is not investment advice, not legal advice, and not tax advice. For anything specific to your company, take professional advice from someone who knows your situation.