GTM Sprints
A fixed-scope answer in three to six weeks. Three sprints, same shape: interviews and data first, a working draft by the midpoint, tested and handed over at the end. Buy one, or all three in sequence as the 90-Day GTM Foundation.
GTM sprints and fractional growth leadership for B2B deep tech and AI companies
Get the growth system
between product-market fit
and scale.
I help B2B founders with product-market fit, funded or bootstrapped, turn a product customers love into a pipeline that doesn't depend on their network. Built three times inside the company, with two exits. One senior operator and an AI stack, not an agency.
Free, no pitch: where you stand, what to fix first, what a roadmap could look like.
- Who
- B2B deep tech and AI founders with product-market fit, funded or bootstrapped
- What
- Fixed-scope GTM sprints, a fractional Head of Growth, or an AI-native marketing setup
- Result
- A foundation to scale: the pipeline that carries you to the next round, or to profitability
- Why me
- Built it three times, two exits, and I run it today with one person and an AI stack
Built, led and advised at
Acquired by LumApps
Acquired by TripleLift
Acquired by Swiss Post
Acquired by Swiss Post
Creator of the Business Model Canvas
YC 2026 batchMost B2B companies don't have a marketing problem. They have a growth problem hiding behind founder-led sales.
Founders close the first customers on hustle and relationships. Then the company raises a round, hires sales reps and expects pipeline to show up. It doesn't. Attribution is guesswork, CAC creeps up and marketing gets judged on activity instead of revenue.
Most teams respond by adding headcount and channels. Budgets grow, the board asks harder questions and growth still depends on a few people's networks. That's how good products stall between product-market fit and scale.
Product-market fit is not the finish line. The next test is product-channel fit: which channels bring the right customers at a cost the business can carry, repeatably. You don't find that in a strategy deck. You find it by naming your riskiest assumptions, running cheap and fast experiments against them, and keeping only what the evidence supports.
There's a trap at this stage: automating before you know what works. AI makes it easy to produce ten times more of the wrong thing. The order matters.
questiondeletesimplifyaccelerateautomate
Doing the right thing comes first. Doing it faster comes last. I build the system in between: positioning that sales can actually use, demand generation tied to pipeline, and the RevOps, attribution and SLAs that make marketing and sales argue about the same numbers.
Three ways to work with me
Each door answers one sentence a founder says out loud. Pick the one you're saying.
Fractional Head of Growth
I join your leadership meeting and own growth with the co-founders and, where there is one, your sales leader. Strategy and hands-on execution, agencies managed, first marketer hired and onboarded, weekly pipeline reporting to founders and board. Coaching your first marketing hire is part of it, not an extra.
AI-Native Marketing Setup
This is how I've run growth for a global company as a team of one. I set it up in your company so it keeps working after I leave.
- Marketing Brain: ICP, personas, positioning, voice and approved claims in one source of truth your tools and your AI read from.
- Connected stack: Claude wired into HubSpot, Webflow, Notion and Clay.
- Team training: one hands-on day on your weekly workflows, plus a playbook.
- Website: move your site to an AI-native process on Webflow, built for conversion.
The three sprints
The Growth Engine Sprint fixes process and data. The AI-Native Setup fixes tooling and team capability. They stack well; they are not the same thing.
Message That Sells Sprint
For teams who can't say in one sentence who they're for and why they win.
Customer and win-loss interviews, the Value Proposition Canvas and April Dunford's method.
You get: a positioning document, homepage copy ready to ship, and a one-liner your reps will say.
Channel Validation Sprint
For teams who don't know where the next 20 customers come from.
Bullseye prioritisation, two or three live tests on a small budget, and the Channel Canvas.
You get: ranked channel bets backed by evidence, a cost-per-qualified-lead baseline, and a clear no-list.
Growth Engine Sprint
For teams where leads come in and nobody knows what happens next.
Funnel audit, CRM and RevOps setup, attribution, sales SLAs and a weekly pipeline report.
You get: a system that reports pipeline by source every Monday and tells you what to test next.
Who this is for
A fit when
- You're B2B with a technical product: deep tech, AI, hardware-enabled software, scientific or industrial software.
- Product-market fit is there, a repeatable acquisition system is not. Funded, seed to Series B, or bootstrapped.
- You're a founder or revenue leader without the budget or the timing for a full-time marketing leader yet.
- You have one marketer or none, and you want a system your team keeps running, not a dependency on an agency.
- You're going global. Most of my clients start in Switzerland or Europe and expand across Europe and into the US. I'm based in Zurich and work in English, French, Portuguese and Spanish.
Not a fit when
- You sell to consumers.
- You're still searching for product-market fit. Finish that first; I can tell you in 30 minutes whether you have.
- You want an agency to run ads without owning the strategy.
What I believe about growth
Systems beat tactics.
A tactic wins a quarter. A system compounds. If growth depends on one founder's network or one channel's algorithm, you don't have growth, you have luck.
Fundamentals before scale.
A value proposition customers repeat back to you. A channel that worked once on purpose. A funnel you can measure. Skip them and every franc you add to the budget amplifies noise.
Evidence before budget.
A two-week experiment with real buyers beats a quarter of planning. Scale what the evidence supports. Kill the rest without a meeting.
Automate last.
AI makes it cheap to do ten times more of the wrong thing. Question it, delete it, simplify it, speed it up. Then automate.
Marketing and sales should argue about the same numbers.
One pipeline definition, one attribution model, one weekly report. Most alignment problems are measurement problems.
My job is to make myself unnecessary.
Every engagement ends with a system your team runs without me. Dependency is a tax, not a business model.
The alternatives, and why they stall
| Option | What usually happens |
|---|---|
| Hire a full-time CMO or VP Marketing | Six months to find, a high salary plus equity, and often the wrong profile for a company that still needs hands on the keyboard. |
| Hire a junior marketer | Cheap and eager, but nobody to set direction. Activity goes up, pipeline doesn't. |
| Hire an agency | They execute what you brief. If positioning and channels aren't settled, you pay to amplify the wrong thing. |
| Buy AI tools | Ten times more output of whatever you were already doing. Tools don't know what the right thing is. |
| Keep founder-led sales | Works until the founders' calendar and network run out. Then growth flattens. |
I sit in the gap between those options: senior enough to set direction, hands-on enough to build it, and cheaper than a full-time executive. Every engagement is enablement. The goal is that your team and your tools run the system without me.
Transformations I led
Three leadership teams, three acquisitions, one growth function run as a team of one.
Beekeeper acquired by LumApps
Joined as one of the first fifty employees and built inbound into the company's number one pipeline channel through Series A and B. Hired and led the digital marketing team in Zurich and San Francisco, across paid, organic, content and social.
SpotMe and Onomi acquired by Swiss Post
Repositioned the brand, built RevOps and attribution from scratch, launched the Onomi life sciences brand in weeks, and helped earn the Forrester Wave Leader and G2 Leader recognition enterprise buyers asked for. Executive team member through the acquisition.
Strategyzer
Ran growth alone for the company behind the Business Model Canvas, rebuilt marketing operations on AI agents, and led the go-to-market of its fastest-growing product, from positioning to pipeline.
1plusX acquired by TripleLift
Growth Protocol engagement: a 90-day upskilling programme that moved a traditional marketing team to a growth marketing practice, from training and bootcamp to implementation, in the run-up to the acquisition by TripleLift.
Constor YC 2026 batch
Advisor on go-to-market. Growth Protocol has also run repositioning and channel work for early-stage B2B startups across Europe.
LogicFlow.ai
Website and conversion revamp delivered in weeks, built around positioning and conversion fundamentals.
"David was instrumental in scaling Beekeeper from startup to scale-up. He built our digital capabilities across paid, organic, content and social channels, driving traffic and conversions well beyond our initial expectations. An exceptional team player, proactive, and someone who always puts the company first."
"Thanks to Growth Protocol, we revamped our website in a couple of weeks and relaunched it with conversion optimisation best practice at its core, and with excellent UX and design. I recommend Growth Protocol to anyone looking for a growth partner that delivers excellent results."
"David's leadership and teamwork are like no other. They shine through his excellence and experience in digital and growth marketing, and through his ability to keep absorbing new knowledge and feedback. He has vast knowledge of SaaS and a real passion for startups."
Recognition: Forrester Wave Leader (2023) and G2 Leader in multiple categories at SpotMe. Certified in Product Marketing for Technology Companies, Product Messaging & Copywriting, and AEO for AI Search (CXL).
Free tools
Two canvases I use in every engagement, and the playbook I used to build this site. All free, designed by David Pires.
The 90-Day Strategy Canvas
Diagnosis, guiding policy, coherent actions and what you will not do, on one page.
Use it when You're starting a role or a quarter and need a strategy you can hold in one hand.
Build your first website with Claude Code
Your own website, live in a few hours with Claude Code. Every prompt, template and checklist I used.
Use it when You want your site live this week, without a developer or a page builder.
The GTM Canvas
The whole go-to-market system on one page before you spend a franc.
Use it when You're about to spend on growth and want the full system in view first.
Get notified Coming soon
I'm David Pires. I build go-to-market from zero for complex B2B products.
For fifteen years I've done it inside the company: on the leadership teams of Beekeeper, SpotMe and Strategyzer, running the motions that took each from self-serve to enterprise deals. Two of those companies were acquired while I was there.
Today I run growth at Strategyzer as a team of one, on a stack of AI agents I built myself. Growth Protocol is where I bring that system to deep tech and AI founders in Switzerland and Europe.
French and Portuguese by origin, Zurich-based since 2011, I've lived on three continents and work in English, French, Portuguese and Spanish. Outside work: trail running, graphic novels, and a long-standing interest in longevity.
Zurich, SwitzerlandEN · FR · PT · ESAngel investor in B2B startupsAdvisor to Constor (YC)
Thirty minutes. Where you stand, what to fix first, what comes next.
A free GTM diagnosis for founders with product-market fit. We audit your positioning, channels and funnel, find this month's quick fixes, and sketch what a roadmap could look like. No deck, no pitch.
Book a 30-minute GTM diagnosisPrefer email? hello@growthprotocol.co