National Incubation Center Hyderabad is hosting a session on go-to-market strategy that pushes back against a common assumption among early-stage founders, that building a strong product is enough to guarantee it finds its market. The session, led by Nidhal Shaikh, Marketing Advisor at Touchgrass, is built around a more uncomfortable but ultimately more useful premise, that a great product can still fail commercially if the founder has not done the harder work of understanding exactly who they are selling to, what actually makes that audience care, where to reach them without wasting resources, and just as importantly, what channels and activities to abandon entirely.
Shaikh’s session focuses on how founders can use artificial intelligence and data to make sharper go-to-market decisions rather than relying on instinct or copying what competitors appear to be doing. This includes identifying the right audience segments with more precision than broad demographic targeting typically allows, selecting channels based on where that audience actually spends attention rather than where marketing conventionally happens, and building a growth strategy that is deliberately narrow and measurable instead of spread thin across every available platform. The emphasis on stopping certain activities, not just starting new ones, is a detail that often gets left out of standard marketing sessions but tends to matter more for resource-constrained startups than any single new tactic could.
The framing Shaikh brings, that growth is not about doing more marketing but about doing the right marketing for the right market at the right time, reflects a broader shift happening across Pakistan’s startup ecosystem as founders move away from growth-at-all-costs thinking toward more disciplined, data-informed customer acquisition. For many early-stage companies operating with limited runway, this kind of focused approach to go-to-market planning can be the difference between burning through a marketing budget without clear signal and building a repeatable acquisition engine that scales predictably as the company grows.
The session takes place under NIC Hyderabad’s ongoing programming, supported by the Ministry of IT and Telecommunication, Ignite National Technology Fund, PTCL, LMKT, and Tech Destination Pakistan, continuing the center’s pattern of bringing in practitioners who work directly in the areas founders are trying to navigate rather than relying solely on theoretical frameworks. Founders interested in attending can register here ahead of the session.
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