A GTM engineer is a software engineer who owns go-to-market work: building automations, integrating tools, and creating content to bring a product to market. This article walks through one engineer's real first weeks in the role at an Estonian startup, including a payments and authentication integration and the growth metrics he set up.
What Is a GTM Engineer?
A GTM engineer is a software engineer who owns go-to-market work: bringing a product to its audience through code, automation, and content. The engineer part means you can build integrations, improve the SDK, and fix the product itself. The GTM part means you explain the product publicly and grow its reach.
The developer who describes this role in the source video joined Cream, a small Estonian startup, as a founding partner responsible for go-to-market. He is careful about the word marketing: the role is closer to growth engineering than to running ads. Social content, demos, and product explanations are all part of the job, but so is writing code every day.
One company principle shapes the role. Everyone writes at least some code early on, so any teammate can fix a bug or ship a small change. Each person still has a primary focus: infrastructure, operations, design, and in his case GTM. The team at the time included a CEO handling external plans, a newly hired chief operating officer, and an open search for a design engineer, with more hiring planned for the following year.
A GTM Engineer's Day: Content in the Morning, Code in the Afternoon
The working day splits in two. Mornings go to content and social media; afternoons go to the larger engineering projects. On the day described, the morning list included a LinkedIn post, a Twitter post, and planning the script for a new weekly company YouTube channel.
The content itself is product work. To announce a new onboarding flow shipped the previous week, he recorded a short screen video showing the new step-by-step signup experience, which replaced a simple form with a more dynamic wizard-style flow. Because it was a first version, he expected the public video to differ slightly from the internal recording by the time it was posted.
The office setup reflects the same rhythm. The team records timelapses of the workspace for the company Twitter account, sets up plants and lighting for video scenes, and runs financial meetings in the same room. He also tracks notifications and replies from the official accounts as part of the morning routine.
First Project: Integrating Payments With Authentication
The afternoon project was an integration combining payments with authentication, the kind of wiring a GTM engineer ships so customers do not have to. The stack pairs Stripe, the payment processing platform, with Better Auth, an open-source authentication library for applications that supports plugins and database integration.
The goal is a common SaaS pattern: when a user signs up on a platform and subscribes through the payment provider, the subscription state is already connected to the application's own user system. With the auth library's plugin system, a developer installs the integration, connects it to the database, and the signup and subscription flow works end to end. The version shown in the video was not finished at recording time, with the result to be shown publicly once ready.
This project also shows why the role exists. A signup-to-subscription flow is product code, but shipping it is a growth decision: it removes friction from onboarding, which the team had already flagged as a metric to improve. The engineer who measures activation is the same one who builds the flow that moves it.
Why Startups Hire Engineers for Growth
The GTM engineer role works because a small team cannot afford a hard split between building and selling. The video compares the roles on a small founding team, and the differences are easier to see side by side.
| Role | Primary focus | Example work in the video |
|---|---|---|
| GTM engineer | Growth through code and content | Onboarding and payment integration, social posts, YouTube scripts |
| CEO | External direction and plans | Partnerships, company strategy |
| COO | Operations and automation | Making internal processes fluid |
| Design engineer | Design and front-end code | Landing page, platform interface |
Project tracking runs on Linear, the issue-tracking tool the team uses for tickets. The GTM engineer reads the board like any developer, but his tickets include content deliverables next to integration work.
The role also changes how you think about your own products. He notes that selling globally forces you to aim further ahead than building a micro SaaS alone, while still crediting micro SaaS projects as the training ground where the first skills are built. Tools like Lovable, the prompt-to-app builder founded by Anton Osika, sit in that same learning path for many developers.
A Founder Playbook in Four Phases
During the first week he highlighted a playbook posted on Twitter by Anton Osika, the founder of Lovable, describing four phases any founder should follow. As summarized in the video, the sequence is:
- Identify the problem worth solving.
- Launch something, even a first rough version.
- Build a base of early adopters, what the playbook calls believers.
- Find product-market fit, then scale.
He places the company between phases three and four: still finding product-market fit while already thinking about scale. The playbook breaks each phase into concrete steps and checklists, which he recommends to anyone building a product of their own.
The organic growth pattern the company is seeing supports that placement. Interest is arriving with no heavy ad investment, which makes understanding why customers care, and expanding on that, the first question on his list.
Finding Users by Listening: Social Monitoring
One of the tools he praises most is PitchGhost, a social listening service. The team has a Slack channel connected to it, and the tool scans the internet for posts about topics the team defines in its dashboard.
The use case is direct. They monitor complaints about competitors, including Paddle, the merchant-of-record payment platform. One example in the video shows a user complaining that Paddle blocked their account without explanation. The team can then reply from the official account, without being intrusive, mention they are building an alternative, and invite the person to try the product.
He offers this as a practical tip for anyone trying to grow a product: find the public conversations where people describe the problem you solve, and join them politely. It is a manual, high-signal channel that costs attention rather than ad budget.
Metrics and Experiments From the First Week
After his first week he prepared an internal presentation with observations and next steps, organized around a simple question: why are people interested in the product, and how can the company expand on that? Two known pain points, onboarding time and payout time, already had fixes in Notion through new hires.
The first gap he wants to close is measurement. The company is early and immature in data collection, so his top request is a single dashboard with the key numbers. The baseline metrics he listed are visits, signups, activations, churn, and GMV.
For initiatives, he organized opportunities into four quadrants: steady growth, viral potential, retention, and tests to run. Concrete ideas included Reddit posts with viral potential, Discord events with specialists, SaaS pitch participation, reviving the newsletter, YouTube partnerships, exploring Product Hunt, a referral system, SEO, and scripts to recover or reactivate users who stopped using the platform.
The most personal idea is a real-time map of sales, inspired by the map indie maker Marc Lou built for visits, but showing actual purchases instead. With his background in 3D for the web, he considers the front end straightforward; the real work is connecting live sales data from the backend. Heavy A/B testing and Twitter content round out the plan.
FAQ
- What does a GTM engineer actually do day to day? Mornings usually go to content: social posts, demo videos, and scripts. Afternoons go to engineering projects such as integrations, automations, and SDK improvements. Both halves serve the same goal of bringing the product to more users.
- Does a GTM engineer replace a marketing team? At an early-stage startup, one GTM engineer can cover content, social listening, and growth engineering that would otherwise need several people. As the company scales, the role typically specializes rather than disappearing.
- What tools appeared in this GTM engineer's workflow? Linear for ticket tracking, Stripe for payments, Better Auth for authentication with its plugin system, PitchGhost for social listening, and Product Hunt as a launch channel. A Slack channel feeds the listening results to the whole team.
- Why integrate payments directly with authentication? Connecting a payment provider to the auth layer means a new signup and subscription is reflected in the application's own user system automatically. That removes manual wiring for every customer and shortens onboarding.
- Which metrics did he prioritize in his first week? Visits, signups, activations, churn, and GMV, all on one dashboard. He also flagged onboarding time and payout time as operational metrics with fixes already underway.
Turn Your Own Videos Into Articles
The whole story above came out of a single fifteen-minute video: a developer explaining his first weeks as a GTM engineer, the payment integration he shipped, and the metrics he wants to track. That kind of practical knowledge often stays locked inside a video, watchable only from start to finish.
If you record videos like this, you can turn them into written articles with Skala Blog. Paste a YouTube URL, get the transcription, and generate a structured article your audience can search, skim, and quote.
A walkthrough of an onboarding flow, a playbook in four phases, a first-week metrics plan: any of these works better as a page people can find than as a video they have to rewind. Visit skalablog.com to convert your next video the same way.
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