Hackathon Workshop — Go-to-Market by Frank
GTM Session: How Your Product Reaches the Right People
Speaker: Frank Gu · 60 minutes, including Q&A
You can build something in a weekend. This session is about what happens next: how a product finds the right people and gets them to actually use it. No marketing or startup background needed — every term is explained in plain language.
We'll walk through a 7-part go-to-market framework, one part at a time, using a single real company all the way through: Cal AI, the photo calorie-tracking app two teenagers built and sold to MyFitnessPal less than two years later.
What we'll cover
- What go-to-market actually means, and the 3 questions it answers: who, why, where
- Why most launches jump to execution before they have a strategy
- The 7 parts: user insight, product design, brand positioning, content strategy, marketing channels, conversion, and path optimization — and how they connect into one loop
- A one-sentence positioning template you can write for your own project
- Why a crowded market is good news, and why ads should come last
- A live demo: a brand-new idea in Cal AI's market, run end to end through a free, open-source Claude skill that does the research and fills in the plan
- Where AI products are finding their first users right now
You'll leave with the framework, a one-page canvas to fill in for your own project, and the link to the skill so you can run it yourself.
About the speaker
Frank Gu spent 8 years as a software engineer at Amazon, then learned marketing by building Cspuerh, a premium pu-erh tea brand, to more than $1 million in sales. In 2023 he founded Folson Marketing, which has worked with 50+ clients across AI, fintech, and consumer brands. Since 2025 he has been a technical co-founder at two AI companies.
Recorded at the ZILIUDI Herackthon workshop series, Sep 19, 2026. Presented by Frank Gu.