Our go-to-market sucks (and what I'm doing about it)
Derek Pharr, CPO at Sporcle, shares how his team is shifting from "build, ship, and pray" to a go-to-market approach that treats promotion as a crucial part of the product process.
Sporcle is a platform where millions of users test their knowledge, create quizzes, and dive deep into a variety of topics, from geography to pop culture. We also run pub trivia nights in 30+ states across the country.
We’ve been around since 2007, and while we have grown and thrived, we’ve also built a graveyard of features that are difficult to find, unclear in their value proposition, and paired with an onboarding experience that almost seems to unintentionally discourage users from continuing to engage.
I used to think this was just a Sporcle problem. Turns out, it's everywhere.
The cultural problem: Smart teams, dumb assumptions
Product teams often buy into the myth that good products don't need promotion. We get so focused on building that we completely forget about the other half: getting people to discover, understand, and use what we've created.
The "build, ship, and pray" mentality is expensive. It wastes engineering cycles, demoralizes teams who watch their hard work disappear into the void, and prevents us from serving users who would genuinely love what we've built.
At Sporcle, we fall into traps that a lot of smart, well-intentioned product teams do:
The field of dreams fallacy: We assume good products don't need promotion. If we have to promote it, maybe it wasn't good enough
The perfectionist paralysis trap: We wait for features to be "amazing" before telling anyone. By the time they're "ready," the moment has passed
The ROI measurement problem: We demand measurable returns before investing in promotion, but we can't get proof without trying
The desperation delusion: We've convinced ourselves that promotion feels like desperation rather than service to users who might actually want what we've built
The iteration timing challenge: We love shipping quickly, but this creates a go-to-market timing problem: When do you promote an evolving feature?
Our Lessons feature is a good example of this. We launched it on quiz pages and did a full newsletter promotion, then lost our engineer for two months to another project. The landing page, lessons tool, and curated topics came in spurts later.
While this gave us time to create content for homepage features, the challenge remains: how do you sustain promotion momentum when the product is constantly evolving?
Go-to-market failures at Sporcle
These aren't just theoretical problems. Here are three real examples from our own recent history that show exactly how expensive this GTM blind spot can be:
The invisible app: We completely rebuilt our flagship mobile app with heavy, ongoing investment. Downloads were OK, but nowhere near the potential. Why? Almost zero promotion. It's not above the fold on our site, we've never sent emails about it, and there are no viral mechanics built in
Lesson: Great product, invisible execution = expensive mediocrity
Sporcle Lessons and the stealth launch: After months of development on this educational quiz feature, our launch strategy was a button next to the play quiz button and a spot in the hamburger menu. When we finally added a homepage box months later, it drove real usage
Lesson: Promotion should be built into the product from day one
Tournaments, the exception that proves the rule: This is closer to a success story. Full site modal, newsletter, and social push on launch led to strong initial traction. But even here, we face the ongoing challenge: how do new users discover existing features?
Lesson: Discovery and promotion need to be built into the launch plan
The good die young: Good features fail without promotion
Most of the features we launch have to survive this three-tiered issue:
Users don’t know the feature exists because we don't tell them
If they somehow stumble across it, the benefit isn't clear
If they're motivated enough to try it, the onboarding misses the mark so much that users bounce before experiencing any value
When features fail, it represents a systematic problem that compounds over time. Our work starts to feel like it has cumulative invisibility. Team morale takes a hit. "Why doesn't anyone use our stuff?" becomes the recurring question hanging over every launch.
The cost of "Build, Ship, and Pray" is that we overinvest in trying to make a project perfect, underinvest in go-to-market, and end up feeling despair when good work goes unnoticed.
How Sporcle is fixing our GTM blind spots
There is a cost to invisibility. Not just for individual features, but to users who would genuinely benefit from what we've built, but may never find it.
Promotion is not desperation or an immeasurable cost, but a service. We're not creating demand, we're reducing friction for people who already have the need. But it’s a cultural shift, and changing culture is no small challenge.
1. Building better promotional infrastructure
Asking individual teams to reinvent promotion for every feature launch isn't scalable.
To address this, I’m conducting an audit of our promotional tools and spaces.
Moving forward, we will be creating shared promotional tools and spaces that can work for any new product:
Homepage slots that can be dynamically allocated
Email templates that don't require starting from scratch
Social media assets that follow consistent patternsConsolidating forums so that we have more focused customer messaging channels
The goal is to eliminate barriers to promotion itself, so teams can focus on crafting the right message rather than building the delivery mechanism.
2. Measuring what matters
At Sporcle, we’re very data-driven. We track user sign-ups, premium subscribers, quiz plays, badges, etc. But our data hasn't been focused on discoverability.
To change that, I recently worked with a PM and an engineer to create a new Discoverability dashboard for various features. Instead of simply tracking usage, we're now tracking the gap between potential and actual participation across our feature set.
For example, our Tournaments feature is mostly for paid subscribers, so we can see how many users actually join compared to how many could. Nearly 20% of eligible users join, and they play about 30% more quizzes per session than average.
The opportunity isn’t fixing discoverability for current subscribers, it’s getting more users into the funnel and unlocking that value earlier.
3. Defining “good enough to promote” in a fast-shipping culture
We ship fast and improve constantly, but when do you promote something that’s always changing?
At Sporcle, my team and I are defining what “good enough to promote” means, so promotion can align with dev cycles instead of clashing with them.
And when engineering shifts projects, we can use those gaps to write content, talk to users, and refine messaging.
Final thoughts: Promotion is product craft
We’re still early in the shift, and changing culture takes time, but “good enough to promote” is a lower bar than you think. Promotion drives the feedback you need to improve, but only if you actually do it.
We’ve waited for “amazing” before promoting, which often means not promoting at all. Discoverability can’t be an afterthought; it’s core product craft. If users can’t find and use what you’ve built, it might as well not exist.
Building things is great, but too many product teams stop there. You also have to become a master at go-to-market strategies or risk getting left behind.
Because it turns out, if you build it, they won't just come.
You have to go get them.
Check out Derek’s recent episode on LaunchPod:
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