I have been doing go-to-market for 20 years.

Not the "I read about GTM on Twitter" kind. The "I have bled for it across four companies, three industries, and two countries" kind.

I started my career at Art of Living, where I spent over five years learning what it means to build a movement, not just a business. When your "product" is inner peace and your "conversion" is a human being transforming their life, you learn things about trust, community, and long-term value that no SaaS playbook will ever teach you.

From there, I went to Zomato as Business Head of Hyperpure, their B2B supply chain arm. Completely different universe. Restaurants. Logistics. Cold chains. Operations at a scale that makes most startups look like lemonade stands. But the GTM principles were eerily similar. Find the right customer. Understand their pain deeply. Deliver value before asking for anything.

Then I co-founded Parallel, built and failed and learned some more. And through all of it, one pattern kept repeating with painful consistency.

The Pattern That Repeated Across Every Company

Every company I worked at had the same problem. Brilliant people doing the same repetitive GTM tasks, poorly, because the tools were fragmented and the processes were manual.

At Art of Living, we had incredible facilitators who could transform a room. But the outreach that filled those rooms? Manual. Inconsistent. Dependent on whoever happened to be in charge of marketing that month.

At Zomato, we had logistics down to a science. But the go-to-market for signing new restaurants? A patchwork of spreadsheets, cold calls, and tribal knowledge that lived in people's heads.

The people were extraordinary. The systems were terrible.

And it was not for lack of trying. Every company I worked at had tools. CRMs, email platforms, analytics dashboards, project managers. But none of them talked to each other. None of them remembered what worked last quarter. None of them could tell a new hire, "Here is exactly how we won our best customers."

The knowledge lived in the heads of the senior team. When those people left, the knowledge left with them.

Five Universal GTM Lessons from Two Decades

Twenty years of GTM taught me a handful of truths that I believe are universal. They apply whether you are selling meditation courses or restaurant supply chains or AI software.

Lesson 1: Context Is Everything

The same message lands completely differently depending on who is receiving it, when they are receiving it, and what they already know about you. Every great GTM motion I have seen was built on deep contextual understanding of the customer. Every failure was a spray-and-pray approach that ignored context.

Lesson 2: Consistency Beats Creativity

The best campaign I ever ran was not the most creative one. It was the most consistent one. Showing up every day, with a relevant message, to the right audience. The problem is that consistency at scale requires systems. And humans are terrible at building systems for themselves.

Lesson 3: The Handoff Is Where Value Dies

Marketing generates a lead. Sales picks it up. Customer success takes over after the deal closes. At every handoff, context gets lost. The customer's story, their pain, their journey, gets reduced to a few fields in a CRM. By the time customer success reaches out, they are starting from scratch.

Lesson 4: Memory Compounds

The companies that win over decades are not the ones with the best single campaigns. They are the ones that remember what worked, who their best customers are, and why deals were lost. Institutional memory is the most underrated competitive advantage in business.

Lesson 5: Trust Is Earned in Small Moments

A perfectly timed follow-up. A personalized reference to something the customer mentioned three weeks ago. A proactive heads-up about an issue before the customer notices. Trust is not built in grand gestures. It is built in a thousand small ones.

Why 20 Years of Experience Led Me to Build Canvas AI

After 20 years, I had a very clear picture of what I wanted.

I wanted an AI that understood GTM the way a 20-year veteran does. Not just the mechanics of sending emails or scheduling posts. The strategy. The timing. The context. The judgment.

I wanted an AI that could remember everything. Every customer interaction, every campaign result, every lesson learned. Not in a database that nobody queries, but in a living memory that influences every decision.

I wanted an AI that worked the way the best GTM people work. They do not wait to be asked. They proactively surface opportunities. They notice patterns. They flag risks. But they always, always check with you before acting.

That is Sketch.

When Canvas monitors your X/Twitter every 30 minutes and Sketch drafts contextual replies based on your brand context, that is 20 years of learning that top-of-funnel is about timing and relevance, not volume. When Sketch detects a LinkedIn action point ("They asked for pricing") and drafts a response referencing the prospect's specific pain point from your last meeting, that is two decades of seeing that personalized context converts 5x better than templates. When Canvas fires a product login trigger because a prospect who promised to try your tool has not logged in, and Sketch drafts a warm follow-up, that is thousands of hours of learning that retention starts before the customer complains. When Sketch classifies your meeting automatically, extracts action items, and routes them to the right system (CRM for sales, GitHub for product, ATS for hiring), that is the operational muscle that used to require an entire ops team.

As we shared in the day OpenAI tried to kill us, the journey has not been smooth. And as we documented in our alpha to beta story, the product has evolved enormously. But the principles have stayed the same.

What We Chose Not to Automate

The hardest part of building Canvas was not the technology. It was deciding what not to automate.

Twenty years of GTM experience means I have seen the damage that bad automation can do. The spray-and-pray campaigns that burn your brand. The autonomous emails that offend customers. The "personalization" that is so obviously templated it insults the recipient's intelligence.

So we built guardrails into the DNA of the product. Sketch never sends without approval. Sketch never makes assumptions it has not validated. Sketch always shows its work.

Because the most important lesson from 20 years of GTM is not about efficiency or scale. It is about trust. Every customer relationship is built on trust. And trust is built by humans making good decisions, consistently, at scale.

Sketch does not replace that human judgment. It amplifies it. It handles the 60% of work that does not need judgment so you can focus the other 40% on the decisions that matter.

For the specific playbook on how to apply these lessons, read our founder's guide to GTM in 2026.

Twenty years of lessons. One AI. Built for the builders who are doing it all themselves.

That is Canvas. That is Sketch. That is the future of GTM.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Canvas AI built on?

Canvas AI is built on 20 years of go-to-market experience across industries including wellness (Art of Living), food tech (Zomato), and AI. The product encodes five universal GTM principles: context, consistency, seamless handoffs, institutional memory, and trust-building.

How is Canvas AI different from other AI marketing tools?

Canvas AI's differentiator is that it was designed by a founder with two decades of hands-on GTM experience, not by engineers building generic automation. The product focuses on the full GTM lifecycle (attract, convert, retain) with persistent memory and mandatory human approval for all external actions.

Who is Canvas AI built for?

Canvas AI is built for founders and small teams who cannot afford a full marketing department but refuse to settle for mediocre go-to-market. The ideal user is an "operator," someone who wants to build a content and outreach system rather than personally executing every task.