Why Begin With Go-to-Market?

In COSS, "go-to-market" is not a siloed function; it is the operational expression of every critical decision a founder makes. The choice of license, the business model, the governance structure, and the community engagement strategy are all inextricably linked components of the GTM architecture. Get these foundational decisions wrong, and no amount of marketing spend can fix the misaligned system.

This is why the core challenge in COSS is so unique: you cannot simply “acquire” customers; you must first earn users. You cannot “sell” a product; you must first build a movement. The traditional B2B marketing and sales funnel, a linear model of conversion, is wholly inadequate. It seeks to extract value, whereas a COSS GTM must be designed to create value first.

To meet this challenge, we need more than a new playbook; we need a new map of the world. It requires rethinking the one-way street of the traditional sales funnel for the perpetual motion of a flywheel. This is the COSS Go-To-Market Framework, a system engineered to make commercial success a predictable science, not a black art. In this model, community is not merely a source of leads but the gravitational center of the entire system: it is the mechanism by which we build momentum, create an inimitable competitive advantage, and allow revenue to become a natural downstream effect of the value the company has already created. But a framework is only as powerful as its ability to be understood, measured, and consistently applied across the ecosystem.