On the Clarus website, a simple statement greets visitors: Building a great product is hard, but it is just the beginning. A bulk of the work is building out systems to get this amazing product to your users.
It’s an idea most founders come to appreciate, often painfully, only after launch. When startups fail, the post-mortems tend to circle familiar explanations: a lack of funding, poor macroeconomic conditions, co-founder disputes, or the absence of a real market need. Yet, one critical factor — the lack of a clear, executable go-to-market (GTM) strategy — is frequently underplayed or misunderstood.
Many startups don’t fail because they built the wrong product; they fail because they never figured out 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, go-to-market is an afterthought. Founders spend months, sometimes years, building a product, refining features, and chasing technical excellence.
The assumption for such founders is that adoption will be a natural consequence of having a great product. In reality, that’s rarely the case. Even the most critical solutions struggle without a clear plan for how they will reach, convert, and retain customers.
One reason startups repeatedly make mistakes with their GTM strategies is resource constraints. Where founders must manage capital allocation prudently, GTM strategies are often pushed to the back burner. The result is a patchwork of experiments. Ads here, cold emails there, influencer marketing, and a few partnerships that never quite coalesce into a repeatable system.
There’s also a knowledge gap that forces teams to adopt ineffective strategies. Many startups go to market without an understanding of who their ideal customers are. Early traction, often driven by friends and family, can be misleading, leading founders to mistake it for product-market fit.
“The reason Clarus exists is that typically, this kind of skillset or capacity is hard to come by,” Victor Ekwealor, Founder and Managing Partner at Clarus, shares with Techpoint Africa. “People or teams that can do this are usually too expensive, especially in the context of emerging markets.”
Compounding this challenge is the fact that GTM work is often unglamorous. It involves documentation, process design, funnel analysis, and constant iteration. These tasks rarely carry the same prestige as shipping new features or closing a funding round, yet they are essential for sustainable growth.
For startups moving fast and running lean, GTM often gets postponed until it becomes the reason growth never arrives.
Building GTM playbooks for emerging markets
Over the past decade, Ekwealor has been deeply embedded in the startup ecosystem, first as one of the industry’s earliest journalists and later as a builder and operator within startups. Along the way, he has consulted for and mentored hundreds of founders.
Building Clarus, he says, is a direct response to a problem he has encountered far too often to ignore. As he describes it, “startups don’t fail or struggle because of a lack of marketing. They struggle because of a lack of repeatable processes.”
It is that repeatable process that he hopes to bring to startups that work with Clarus — Latin for clarity.
Clarus operates using a three-part model. First, it builds GTM strategies in concert with startups; then it executes on these strategies before transferring the playbook and skills to the startup. In transferring the skills and strategies, it trains in-house teams to replicate the process and, in that sense, is not designed to be a permanent partner for startups.
Having built startups previously, Ekwealor shares that many of the mistakes he made and those he has seen startups make could have been avoided if they had access to a system to follow. While he acknowledges that startups are, by their nature, experimental, he notes that founders can ensure their actions are backed by systems rather than a rash of strategies.
When startups sign up to work with Clarus, they get a full GTM diagnostic. This includes an evaluation of the market they are operating in, including its size, maturity, and underlying demand drivers, alongside a clear-eyed analysis of the competitive landscape to understand where the product truly fits.
Clarus examines direct and indirect competitors, alternative solutions, and incumbent players, helping founders to identify defensible positioning.
A key part of this process is audience clarity. Clarus works with founders to define an ideal customer profile (ICP). This process forces hard conversations about who the product is not for and comes in handy in product communication. Once the customer is clearly defined, the rest of the GTM motion begins to take shape.
Messaging and positioning are defined. As Ekwealor notes, knowing who you’re selling to makes it easier to determine 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 initially executes the strategies it defines, and upon completion of its engagement, provides startups with detailed execution roadmaps. Founders and teams receive hands-on coaching to build internal GTM competence, ensuring that knowledge doesn’t leave with the Clarus team.
Clarus says its services are cheaper than hiring in-house, but Ekwealor notes they are not cheap. Instead, it tries to work within a startup’s budget to deliver the best possible service.
Why a fractional GTM service is important
To understand why a company like Clarus matters now, Ekwealor points to a clear shift in investor behaviour. Before 2022, investors were flush with capital, buoyed by prolonged periods of low interest rates. Over the past three years, however, rising interest rates have reshaped the landscape, tightening capital and making disciplined deployment far more critical.
At the same time, venture capital in Africa is gradually emerging from infancy. The narrative phase — where ambitious visions and market potential were often enough to secure backing — is giving way to one defined by performance.
Talking about the possibility of building wildly successful businesses is no longer sufficient, and investors are increasingly demanding measurable results. This shift has triggered a broader reassessment of growth strategies, with sharper scrutiny on fundamentals such as customer acquisition costs, unit economics, and the efficiency of go-to-market execution.
“Investors are more cautious. Their investors are asking them questions, and so they are asking harder questions. What this means for a lot of startups is that investors are asking about acquisition costs and retention rates. Even the investors who are unable to articulate it this way are looking for it, so the more clarity you have about your growth engine, the more likely you are to raise money,” he notes.
Looking to the future
It is still early days, and Ekwealor is careful not to get carried away by lofty ambitions. The immediate goal, he says, is to help startups become more efficient and deliberate with their go-to-market strategies, regardless of the channels or tactics they ultimately use.
Today, Clarus operates primarily as a service business, but Ekwealor envisions a future where products also play a role. Some exploratory work in that direction has already begun, though it is not yet a core priority. For now, the focus is on extending Clarus’s impact beyond individual client engagements. That thinking has 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 or GTM teams to help build go-to-market expertise across their portfolios.
Rather than working with one startup at a time, the Labs model allows Clarus to embed GTM thinking earlier in the venture-building process. For investors and accelerators, this approach offers a way to improve the odds of success for their startups by addressing one of the most common and costly failure points before it becomes existential.
While Clarus has so far worked largely with technology startups, Ekwealor is quick to note that the company was not built for tech alone. Any early-stage business in need of structured go-to-market guidance can benefit from its services, regardless of industry.
That said, Clarus is intentionally focused on startups in Africa, the Middle East, and North Africa, regions where access to experienced GTM talent and growth resources is often limited and where the right guidance can make an outsized difference.
