"Harvesting Demand vs. Creating Demand: Pick the Right GTM Playbook"

The Framework

There are two fundamentally different GTM motions. Most founders never stop to figure out which one they're in. Then they wonder why their channels aren't working.

Girish Redekar, who grew Sprinto to 3,000+ customers across 70 countries, breaks it down simply. You're either harvesting demand or creating demand.

Harvesting demand means the problem already exists. People are actively looking for a solution. Your job is to show up where they're looking.

Creating demand means people don't know they need you yet. You have to put yourself in front of them and make them realize there's a better way.

Most founders grab tactics from the wrong playbook. They try brand-building when they should be capturing search traffic. Or they pour money into SEO when nobody is searching for what they sell. The distinction changes everything about how you spend your first year.

The Steps

1. Figure out which world you live in.

Ask one question: are people already looking for solutions to this problem? Check Google search volume. Browse founder communities. Talk to your ICP and ask how they currently solve this.

Girish knew Sprinto was in harvesting territory. "People were talking about this in founder groups. They were asking this to their investors. They were reaching out to consultants, they were googling for this."

If your customers are already searching, you're harvesting. If they don't know the problem exists, you're creating.

2. Go where your customers already go.

For harvesting demand, the strategy is presence, not persuasion. Girish's principle was simple: "Find where people go today in order to solve this problem and then try and be present at those places."

For Sprinto, that meant three channels:

• VC perks programs. They got injected into the perks programs of multiple VCs, offering discounts to affiliated startups. "That helped us get some of our early customers."
• Google (ads + SEO). "If you're a CTO in a young startup and you get a security questionnaire on your desk, you would basically go to Google." Being present on Google, both paid and organic, was critical.
• Founder communities. Slack groups, WhatsApp groups, wherever founders hang out and ask questions. "Compliance used to come up once in a while over there. So we made sure we got ourselves injected."

3. Expect most experiments to fail.

Here's the part nobody talks about. Even when you know your playbook, most channels won't work. "We tried 20 things. 17 of them didn't work, three did."

Girish tried startup conferences (didn't work early on, worked later). He tried co-selling with advisory firms ("on paper it makes a lot of sense, but it didn't work for us in the early days"). Some channels have long maturity periods. Others just aren't right for your stage.

The lesson isn't to find the perfect channel upfront. It's to run enough experiments that you find the two or three that work. "You only make the shots that you take. So you have to take about 20 shots to make two or three of them work."

Real Numbers

Sprinto's three working channels (VC perks, Google, founder communities) took them from zero to 30 to 40 customers within months of launching. They were acquiring more than 100 customers a month by the time RecruiterBox sold (showing Girish already understood the pattern).

But 17 out of 20 channel experiments failed first. That's an 85% failure rate on GTM experiments. Totally normal.

When It Fails

This framework breaks if you misidentify which world you're in. If you think you're harvesting demand but nobody is actually searching, you'll waste months on SEO and ads that go nowhere. Validate the demand signal first (search volume, community questions, consultant spend) before committing to a harvesting strategy.

It also fails if you give up after three experiments. You need to run 15 to 20 to find what works.

Your First Move

This week, do one thing. Go to three places where your ICP already hangs out (Slack groups, Reddit, LinkedIn communities) and search for your problem keyword. Are people asking about it? If yes, you're harvesting. Show up and be helpful. If nobody's talking about it, you're creating demand and that requires a completely different approach.