No 'Strategist' at Your Company? Then Revenue Is Just Luck

Opening

Reader, have you ever searched “GTM” on LinkedIn?

Search it from California, and over 17,000 positions come up (as of March 2026) — Stripe, Anthropic, Google, DoorDash, of course, but also VCs like Andreessen Horowitz, insurance companies, even Nike. It cuts across every industry. Now switch the location to Seoul, Korea. The openings barely fill one hand. And nearly all of them are at foreign multinationals.

A job that tens of thousands of people hold in the US barely exists in Korea. This isn’t simply a story about “Korea being behind.” It touches the root cause of what Korean startups are struggling with right now — failing to find PMF¹, failing to scale up, failing to generate recurring revenue.

Today I want to talk about what the GTM (Go-To-Market) strategy role actually is, why Korea needs it now, and the ‘structure of recurring revenue’ this role creates.

GTM Is Not ‘Marketing’ or ‘Sales’

Most people react the same way the first time they hear “GTM”: “How’s that different from marketing?” or “Isn’t that just sales?” No. It’s an entirely different discipline.

GTM is short for Go-To-Market Strategy. Literally, the concept starts from the question “have you actually gone to market?” Here’s the core of it: building and executing a strategy that makes a specific product sell into a specific market in a repeatable way. The most important word here is ‘repeatable’. Selling once and calling it done is just luck — the same as winning one hand of blackjack. But making revenue happen again and again, on repeat, is strategy.

Here’s what GTM does, in four lines.

• Decide where to fight — choosing the market, segment, and channel
• Decide what to win with — value proposition, packaging, pricing design
• Decide how to execute — partnerships, marketing channels, sales motion
• Set the criteria for success and failure — defining metrics, building feedback loops If sales is “the person who closes the deal” and marketing is “the person who brings in the customer,” GTM is the person who gets every one of these teams looking in the same direction. Like the checks and balances of separation of powers, GTM does the strategic coordination between the product, sales, and marketing teams.

Even abroad, the job title for GTM keeps shifting. Some call it GTM Engineer, focused more on systematizing the process; others call it Revenue Optimizer or RevOps, focused on managing and optimizing revenue.

That’s why where GTM sits in the org chart matters so much. It needs to report directly to the CEO or sit under the CSO² to actually do its job. The moment it gets buried under the sales or marketing team, it’s highly likely to be reduced to a support role that just pulls data on request.