The Clarus website welcomes visitors with a simple statement: “Building a great product is hard, but it’s just the beginning.” The bulk of the work is building the systems to deliver this great product to users.
Most founders only start to understand this idea, often painfully, after they launch. When startups fail, post-mortems tend to throw out the usual explanations: lack of funding, poor macroeconomic conditions, conflicts between co-founders, lack of a real market need. However, one key element, the lack of a clear and executable go-to-market (GTM) strategy, is often underestimated or misunderstood.
Most startups don’t fail because they develop the wrong product. They fail because they simply don’t understand how to consistently sell, distribute, and scale. This is the gap Clarus wants to fill.
Why early-stage startups struggle with GTM
For many early-stage startups, going to market is an afterthought. Founders spend months, even years, building products, honing features, and pursuing technical excellence.
These founders believe that if they create a great product, adoption is a natural outcome. In reality, this is rarely the case. Even the most important solutions will struggle without a clear plan for how to reach, acquire, and retain customers.
One reason startups repeatedly make mistakes with their GTM strategies is resource constraints. GTM strategies are often put on the back burner when founders need to carefully manage capital allocation. The result is a patchwork of experiments. Advertising here, cold emails there, influencer marketing, and some partnerships that never fully integrate into a repeatable system.
There are also knowledge gaps that force teams to adopt ineffective strategies. Many startups enter the market without understanding who their ideal customer is. Initial traction, often driven by friends and family, can be misleading and founders may mistake it for product-market fit.
“The reason Clarus exists is because typically these kinds of skillsets and capabilities are hard to come by,” Victor Ekwealor, founder and managing partner of Clarus, tells Techpoint Africa. “The people and teams that can do this are usually too expensive, especially in emerging market situations.”
This challenge is compounded by the fact that GTM jobs are often menial. This includes documentation, process design, funnel analysis, and continuous iteration. These tasks rarely bring the same prestige as releasing a new feature or closing a funding round, but they are essential for sustainable growth.
For fast-moving, lean startups, GTM is often postponed until it becomes a reason for growth not to materialize.
Building a GTM playbook for emerging markets
Over the past decade, Equware has become deeply embedded in the startup ecosystem, first as one of the industry’s earliest journalists and then as a builder and operator within startups. Along the way, he has consulted and mentored hundreds of founders.
Building Clarus, he says, was a direct response to a problem he encountered too often to ignore. He explains, “Startups don’t fail or struggle because they lack marketing. They struggle because they lack repeatable processes.”
It’s that repeatable process he hopes to bring to the startups he works with Clarus (in plain Latin).
Clarus works using a three-part model. First, we work with startups to build a GTM strategy. Then implement these strategies before transferring your playbooks and skills to your startup. It trains internal teams to replicate the process as it transfers skills and strategies, but in that sense it is not designed to be a permanent partner for startups.
Ekuwarer, who has previously launched startups, says many of the mistakes he has made and seen startups make could have been avoided if he had access to a system to follow. While he acknowledges that startups are inherently experimental, he points out that founders can ensure their actions are backed by a system rather than a spur-of-the-moment strategy.
When startups sign up to work with Clarus, they receive a complete GTM diagnostic. This includes an assessment of the market in which your company operates, including its size, maturity, and underlying demand drivers, along with a clear-eyed analysis of the competitive environment to understand where your product really fits.
Clarus investigates direct and indirect competitors, alternative solutions, and existing players to help founders identify defensible positioning.
A key part of this process is defining your audience. Clarus works with founders to define their Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). This process forces difficult conversations about who the product is not for and helps with product communication. Once the customer is clearly defined, the rest of the GTM motion begins to take shape.
Messaging and positioning are defined. As Ekwareer points out, knowing who you’re pitching to makes it easier to know what to say, how to say it, and even when to say it.
At this point, the team begins to move from strategy to action. Clarus executes the strategy defined at the outset and provides startups with a detailed execution roadmap once engagement is complete. Founders and their teams receive hands-on coaching to build internal GTM capabilities and ensure that no knowledge remains with the Clarus team.
Clarus says its services are cheaper than hiring in-house, but Ekwearor points out it’s not cheap. Instead, we try to provide the best possible service within your startup’s budget.
Why fractional GTM services are important
To understand why companies like Clarus are important right now, Ekwareer points to a clear shift in investor behavior. Before 2022, investors had piled up a lot of money, supported by a long period of low interest rates. However, rising interest rates over the past three years have changed the game, making capital tighter and making disciplined deployment more important.
At the same time, venture capital has been gradually emerging in Africa since its infancy. The narrative stage where ambitious vision and market potential were sufficient to secure support is being replaced by a stage defined by performance.
It’s no longer enough to talk about the possibility of building a highly successful business; investors are increasingly looking for tangible results. This change has sparked a broader reassessment of growth strategies, with greater scrutiny of fundamentals such as customer acquisition costs, unit economics, and go-to-market execution efficiency.
“Investors are becoming more cautious. Investors are asking them questions, so they’re asking tougher questions. What this means for many startups is that investors are asking about acquisition costs and retention rates. Even investors who can’t articulate like this are asking for it. So the more clarity you have about your growth engine, the more likely you are to raise money,” he points out.
Looking to the future
It’s still early days, but Exwearer is careful not to get carried away with lofty ambitions. The immediate goal, he said, is to help startups be more efficient and deliberate in their go-to-market strategies, regardless of the channels or tactics they end up using.
Although Clarus currently operates primarily as a services business, Ekwealor envisions a future where products also play a role. Some exploratory work in that direction has already begun, but it is not yet a core priority. For now, we’re focused on expanding Clarus’ impact beyond individual customer engagement. That idea led to the creation of Clarus Growth Labs.
Through Clarus Growth Labs, the company partners with investors, startup studios, and accelerators, many of which lack in-house growth and GTM teams to build go-to-market expertise across their portfolios.
The Labs model allows us to incorporate GTM thinking early in the venture-building process, rather than working with one startup at a time. For investors and accelerators, this approach offers a way to increase a startup’s odds of success by addressing one of the most common and costly points of failure before its survival is threatened.
Although Clarus has primarily worked with technology startups to date, Ekwareer is quick to point out that the company was not founded solely for technology. Early-stage companies in need of structured go-to-market guidance can benefit from our services, regardless of industry.
Having said that, Clarus has a deliberate focus on startups in Africa, the Middle East, and North Africa. These are regions where access to experienced GTM talent and growth resources is often limited, and where the right guidance can make a big difference.
