Introduction

The startup world has changed significantly in recent years.

Global VC dollar volume has declined 20% year-over-year since 2021, Crunchbase reported, yet early-stage startup investments are on the rise. But unfortunately, the rapid changes have also brought a jump in startup closures, with a 58% increase in startup shutdowns from Q4 2023 to Q1 2024, Axios reported.

That doesn’t mean it’s time to panic or push your startup dreams to the side, though. It just means it’s time to get creative to adapt and even push ahead of new trends in the industry.

From preparing a go-to-market strategy to making sales efforts more engaging to providing more value to potential clients through your marketing, there are several tactics startups today can use not just to survive but thrive in the ever-shifting startup landscape.

A conversation with Josh Garrison, VP at Apollo

There are few people more familiar with the changes and challenges startups face today than Josh Garrison, VP at Apollo, a sales intelligence and engagement platform that helps startups with their go-to-market motions.

Garrison’s career started in sales, giving him a solid understanding from the jump about how to reach customers in an engaging, authentic way. From there, he started his own company, sold it, and founded a second company that taught him about failure. After selling his first business and losing the second, Garrison decided to explore marketing and worked with the architecture and construction software platform Autodesk before moving into a head of revenue role at another startup. 

When a former boss started working at Apollo and shared an opportunity to join, Garrison jumped at the chance. Now, as VP, Garrison helps make a difference every day for startups as they prepare for the go-to-market stage.

Garrison shared more about his experience working at startups and with founders over the years and provided helpful advice for navigating the changes in the startup space today.

HSFS: How are you seeing go-to-market change, particularly for startups?

Josh Garrison: A couple of things are happening, kind of at a macro level. So, one thing that's happening is that for most people, outbound sales are getting less effective. For a long time, that was the way. “Hey, you're a startup, you need to scale, go get yourself an Apollo license,” or whatever. That's how I grew the company that I ended up selling. Send some emails out, and get some meetings. 

From my view behind the scenes of Apollo's data, the traditional playbook doesn't work very well anymore. This isn't to say outbound can't work; it's just that low-effort outbound doesn't work at all. 

Particularly with email, it used to be that there was some function where the more emails you send, the more responses you get, and the more meetings you get. Now, spam filtering has gotten so much better that it's actually a breakpoint where the more emails you send, the worse your results are going to be. 

You find this really interesting kind of inverse relationship between volume and results. What that means is that one really accessible, cheap, fast, and easy way to test your product-market fit (PMF) isn't so easy, accessible, cheap, or fast anymore. 

So, you've got a couple of different options. One is you can not do it at all and just index hard on inbound, relationship building, and word of mouth. We can talk about some strategies for that.

The other option is to adapt the original playbook of the automated email templates. I think we're seeing a lot of interesting stuff happening right now with Clay and with AI where people are considering, “How do I get really quality messaging, but in way less time?”

I think that that's sort of right on that cutting edge of how to bring these traditional tactics together with the latest and greatest technology to get to what has always worked when you're scaling a startup, which is you have to find the right person, you have to deliver the right message to them, and you have to do it in the right format at the right time. If you have a product-market fit, a number of those people will want to buy it. I think that's the biggest thing, right? If you're trying a bunch of stuff and nobody wants to buy your thing, you don't have PMF at all, not even a little bit. There are a lot of other indicators that you could not have PMF, even if they do want to talk to you.

I advise a couple of startups. I have a lot of friends from startups. When they ask me questions, I give them two places to start. The first one is I say, depending on where your audience is — if your audience is on LinkedIn, build in public on LinkedIn, and not in a salesy way, meaning you treat it almost like a blog, where you're just like, “Hey, here's what I'm doing. I'm going to just show you all the results. This is exactly what I'm doing and exactly what's happening. Here's exactly how it goes. Let me know if you have questions.” Keep that content contained within that platform, whether it's LinkedIn or not. If you're on Instagram or wherever your audience is, don't post links to elsewhere. Just treat the platform like a thing. 

Stan CEO Jon Hu has perfected the art of building in public.

What's going to happen is, ideally, if you keep doing that, you're going to get engagement, and people are going to start commenting. Then, the comments are where the magic is. If somebody comments on your thing, comment back. If they comment back, start a direct message that might lead to a conversation that's vastly more authentic than what you would get from what we call pitch slapping, where you just find them on LinkedIn, slap them with a pitch, you're not going to get anything.

You can start there. The other place is you can't do the outbound thing. I describe it as if we're going to go back to math class, and before you're allowed to have a calculator, you have to do it with a pencil and paper. I think the thing with tools like Clay or even Apollo, or any of these tools, is that you can mess yourself up so fast now; it's so easy. Most people have none of the technical knowledge of what it actually means to send emails: what Sender Policy Framework (SPF) is, what DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) is, what Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance (DMARC) is, what email blacklists are, what a tracking subdomain is. This is a fairly technical niche where people like me have made a career out of this, but most people don't. 

When I was a founder, and I was looking for investors, most people told me that the only way to get in front of a VC is a warm introduction. And the problem with that for somebody like me is I don't come from a wealthy background. I didn't go to an A-plus school. I don't have those connections. I have a few here and there, but that's not my world. It always seemed to me like that was another way of saying you have to be rich to get rich. I didn't like that at all, but I'm a damn good email writer and a really, really good marketer. So, I actually built my list of the 50 investors who play in my space, and then I did a spreadsheet of the ones who play in my space, their investments, investments adjacent to this investment, and their investment theses. 

It was about doing my research to then go and craft an email for each one of these people. I remember I emailed this guy who was head of the division of Google Ventures that does AI. There was a line from his investment thesis, which was on his website, and it was like, “I look for turgid industries to revitalize them” or something like that.

I just lifted that line, and I was like, “Hey, I know you're on the lookout for industries like this, and there's no industry that's more ready for a turnaround than payday lending.” That was kind of my hook; I'm out to get rid of payday lending. And I booked literally 20 first meetings with VCs from those cold emails, which everybody had told me is something you can't do. 

So, scale that up. I've closed millions of dollars of net new products from similar tactics. The thing that I did every time is I did it myself before I created the automation. I think that no matter what the tactic is, whether it's email, cold calling, dropping in another office, or slipping in other DMs, it doesn't matter. Do I have a reason to reach out to you? Do I know who you are? Do I really know who you are? Do I have a reasonable certainty that you're going to care about the thing I'm going to reach out to you about?

HSFS: What are some ways for people who aren’t trained in marketing to get their message across?

JG: First, I'll do a little plug. We wrote a book on this subject. It's called Outbound Sales, and it is about 200 pages long. You can treat it like a field guide. There's a section for each of those things, and it's 100% free. It's on Apollo Academy's website, and soon, we're going to put it on Amazon, and it'll be available on Kindle and print. I highly recommend people pick that up because we analyze data from Apollo to figure out what works and what doesn't. It's not just what we think is actually based on data, but what you can do.

So, what's cool about these large language models that we have today is that they can make a mediocre writer a pretty good writer. I don't think that they can make anybody a great writer, but they democratize pretty well. Anybody can get to that level. So, if you're not a good writer, there are a number of tools to choose from. Grammarly is a really good tool. You've obviously got OpenAI's suite of products. There are sales-specific tools, like Apollo, which has an AI copywriter built into it. Lavender has stuff. If you just Google it, a million different options come up. 

My take would be that there are really two ways to go with writing. Either one can be effective, but you really want to do one or the other. One way is brevity is king, where you're like, “How do I get the heart of my message across in as few words as possible?” And if you go that route, that really becomes an exercise. You've got to try to cut your stuff down as small as you can get it. It's like, why am I reaching out to you? Why should you care? And what am I asking of you? If you're still not happy with that, feed it to the model and ask the model to make it shorter. Ask the model to write it like Ernest Hemingway. There are a lot of different ways you could get that down into a more manageable size and quality, and you can roll with that. 

The other way you can go is longer and longer for a purpose. It would be longer so that you can show them that you have something for them specifically, not longer so you can talk more about yourself. 

That's something I would tell anyone who's not a good writer or not a good salesperson. Sales is actually very easy. People like to talk about themselves. It's how you do anything. How do you start a conversation at a bar? You ask somebody a question about themselves. How do you start a sales conversation? You ask them a question about themselves. This is just human nature. 

So, when you're writing to somebody, if you go the longer route, we have a resource on Apollo Academy with Samantha McKenna. It's like a master class. It's free. It's called How to Write Cold Emails Anyone Will Respond To. Basically, she breaks down a method that she has called Show Me You Know Me, where from the subject line and all the way through, you're showing the person — it's kind of what I was talking about with that VC — I know who you are and I'm reaching out to you because you are you, not because I need to make a sale.

That can be really effective. As you're looking to scale, if you've already got a few deals, what you want to do is look adjacent to the deals that you have now.

HSFS: What types of things have you seen startups do recently that are creative or exciting?

JG: There's a company called Framer, and I think Framer is like this Figma, Squarespace combo. I know the person who leads their video efforts, Andy Orsow. Andy is doing a lot of really interesting work at Framer, and Framer's doing a lot of really interesting work. 

Specifically, Andy just posted a video recently. He's making videos for Framer, but he's the only person on this team. He has a really high standard of quality. So Andy posted a tutorial on how to take images from Midjourney, animate the image in Luma AI, pull it into Adobe After Effects, and then incorporate it into the video that he needed. He created an opening shot, like a setting that he never would've been able to make in analog, to take a picture of something in a palace with a bunch of plants, impossible and out of reach for him, but you could do it in 30 minutes with AI, which is super cool. 

All of those products are really interesting to me. I think Midjourney is incredible. I think all of the suite of tools around animation from AI and these AI video creation tools are really interesting. You still have to be an expert video creator to make things that are good with them. Andy is a god-tier video guy, but if you fit that criteria, these tools can let you do things that you never would've been able to do before. 

I think most of the tools in that space are like that. They're all marketing themselves as if you don't have to be really good at it. Anybody could be good at it. Look at the AI; the AI does it for you. 

I think what we're all going to realize is no, it doesn't. The power hammer didn't replace the need to know how to build a building. All of these have been through these industrial revolutions as a society. A bulldozer is incredibly powerful, but you've got to know how to drive it. That is still true, but Framer is doing a lot of really interesting stuff. Andy's building in public, and I'd recommend checking them out. I think their marketing is really effective.

HSFS: How is AI changing your perception of marketing at Apollo and in general?

JG: We use AI mostly to speed us up in content marketing, and that has actually been a big boon for us. We've produced a lot of content, and one of the ways we do it is we'll do interviews, get the transcript, and then it's pretty straightforward to edit the transcript — if you're a good writer — into a good piece. But we'll also reuse the content. This isn't about AI; this is just being effective. I might make a webinar, and then there's a YouTube video from it, an article from it, an SEO article from it, and a download from it. I might run the webinar again for a sponsored audience. There are all these different repurposings that we get out of a specific asset. 

That's one thing that we're doing. The other thing is we're giving everything away. It's just all available. Very little of what we make is gated. If it is gated, it's just an email address. You don't have to sign up for the product. You don't need to create an account. You don't need to tell me your name. Just give me your email. 

What I'm trying to do and what we're doing at Apollo, at least in marketing, is I think that the internet is rapidly becoming just a wasteland of AI-generated garbage. What that means is that the bar for content is actually higher now than it's ever been before. I think a lot of people think it's the other way around. I think they can just do a lot of AI-generated garbage and win a volume game. But I fundamentally don't believe that. 

We've kind of articulated the standard, and the standard is a salesperson, a small business owner, or a founder has to be able to engage with a piece of content we make and know how to make more money by the end of it. If we don't hit the bar, it doesn't go out. What we've been rewarded with is an overwhelming amount of engagement on almost everything we put out the door, which has been super gratifying for me as a marketer because I really care about the outcomes that our customers experience. Every week, I get a message from at least one person, but often a lot more than one, on LinkedIn or in my email. 

People are like, I read this article. I watched your video. I get a lot of “I watched your video, I did the things you said, and I booked a meeting, or I closed a deal, or I'm just getting started, and I feel way more confident.” 

I find people in all different parts of their journey. Where I'm going with all this is the old playbook, “Let me write a thing. Let me make an infographic or an ebook. Let me put it on the website. You’ve got to give me your email. I'm going to put you on a list.” We're not doing that really at all. I don't know that I believe in that as a function anymore, but what I do believe in instead is providing insane value. 

There are a lot of different ways you could do that. You could do that at really high production quality. You could do it at really low production quality. And we do both. At Apollo, you can see if you go to our YouTube, there are potato-quality videos of me, and then god-tier quality master classes, and there’s everything in the middle. But the common thread is the quality of the content is really high.

Then, what happens is your audience becomes propagators for you. I'm seeing this now, where almost every week, somebody organically creates a post about my content. I had nothing to do with it. I've never talked to them, and I don't know about them. We didn't ask them for it. And it's just happening. I've been doing this now at Apollo for a year and a half. It's just now starting to pick up. 

I think it takes a few years for this kind of thing to really propagate. What I would say is that that's where you become most effective, where you are creating the conversation by having other people perpetuate your message and by getting the content out there. The only way you do that is if your content is not about selling your products. It's actually not about our product at all. In most cases, we talk about how to do the thing we're talking about in our product, but it's not, “Let me show you the product.” It's like “How to solve this problem” or “How to do this thing.”

HSFS: Have you noticed a change in the relationship between marketing and sales?

JG: The handoff is a lot muddier now, such as what's sales versus what's marketing. I don't think, to be honest with you, if you're a newly hired salesperson at a small company, you can't rely on marketing for anything. You are marketing. 

Having done both jobs, sales and marketing, and also customer success, I can tell you it's a continuation of the same spectrum. It's just one thing. So, as a salesperson, my greatest asset is being able to fill the top of my pipeline by myself. I don't need marketing to send me leads. I think that that's how it's changing, which is that if you're a sales leader or a salesperson, and you find yourself constantly saying, “I'm not getting enough from marketing,” you need to sit down, get a mirror, look straight at the mirror, and then yell at the mirror about what marketing is not doing for you because that's your job. 

I've had this conversation with a lot of different people, not just marketing or sales, but also product leaders who will come to me within Apollo and say, “Hey, this metric isn't moving. What is marketing doing about this?” And I'll say to them, “Is the business growing?” They're like, “Yeah.” And I say, “Do you have more users of your product than you did last month?” They say, “Yes.” I say, “Okay, but you're upset.” The metric in question was awareness of my product, but then the user base isn't changing. 

But the business is growing, and you have more users now than you had before. You've had more users every month for the last 16 months than in the previous month. So whose job is it? Is it marketing's job, or is it your job to fix this particular problem? 

Maybe that's the way that it's changing: you’ve got to have a really clear definition of the roles. If sales expects marketing to feed them, they're setting themselves up to fail, and they're setting marketing up to fail. Marketing is about getting the word out there and bringing people in the way that people want to be brought in, and they're going to come in on their own timeline. Everybody has to participate in marketing and not just expect someone else to solve it for them.

HSFS: Do you have any final advice to share with fellow startups?

JG: I think the era of being able to rely on that next round is well and truly over, and it's going to be over until interest rates go down. And I don't know that they're ever going to go down. Most of us came up in our careers in an environment that's never going to come back. The 0% interest rate is gone. So, what that means is that you don't have a startup — you have a business, and from day one, your business’s survival is determined by your ability to grow profitably. 

There's this phrase: do things that don't scale. I agree with that, but often, I think people misinterpret that to mean doing things that won't work for the long term or doing things that are “Work now, but not tomorrow.”

You have to always think about what a profitable and sustainable way to grow is and not what you might get from a lot of the literature that exists today of hacky ways to go fast. You still need to go fast, but you have to do it in a way that's going to pay today and tomorrow. That's probably the best advice I could give.

Conclusion

Startup growth can only work when it’s sustainable. That means quick fixes and viral “hacks” probably won’t do the trick when it comes to sales, marketing, and networking. 

Sure, you can use various tools to make do with a lean budget and propel your growth, but make sure you have the skills to do so wisely and sustainably, as Garrison has seen from many startups that take advantage of AI and other tools in clever ways.

Ultimately, the goal is to provide as much value as possible to audiences rather than just simply pushing the product or service you are trying to sell. The old ways of doing business are a thing of the past, but new methods allow startups to focus on value. If you succeed in providing value, the clients will come.

With constant changes in the startup space in recent years and more to come with the rise of AI, it will be crucial for startups to be willing to adapt in order to scale sustainably.