5 Essential Go-to-Market Lessons from April’s Journey in Disrupting Tax Software

5 Essential Go-to-Market Lessons from April’s Journey in Disrupting Tax Software

When you’re up against an incumbent with seemingly unlimited marketing resources, conventional wisdom says you’ll lose. But in a recent episode of Category Visionaries, April co-founder Ben Borodach shared how his team is challenging this assumption through strategic innovation in distribution and go-to-market execution.

Here are five critical GTM lessons from April’s journey:

1. When You Can’t Win the Marketing Game, Change the Rules

Traditional customer acquisition in tax software is prohibitively expensive due to TurboTax’s market dominance. Instead of trying to outspend them, Ben’s team completely reimagined distribution: “We’ve got to come with a business innovation that allows you to get distribution in a different way… because to it is just so dominant that they’re going to outspend anybody that’s out there.”

April’s solution? Position themselves as the infrastructure provider for fintech platforms, enabling distribution through established customer relationships rather than direct marketing.

2. Focus Your Initial GTM on Specific Vertical Use Cases

Rather than targeting the entire market, April identified three strategic verticals where tax integration creates clear value. As Ben explains: “We’re seeing a wide array of adoption across different finance apps. I think the ones that we’re focused on heavily today are in the banking credit space… seeing a lot of traction in the investment category… and then third is going to be payroll.”

This targeted approach enables April to build deep expertise in specific use cases rather than spreading themselves too thin.

3. Let Your Business Model Enable Product Differentiation

April’s B2B2C distribution strategy enables them to offer a fundamentally different pricing approach. Ben notes: “We believe having more of a flat fee model where what you see is what you pay is really the best thing for the consumer. And there’s not a reason why you also can’t have a great business in the process.”

This highlights how GTM strategy can unlock product differentiation that might be impossible through traditional channels.

4. Build Trust Through Your Cap Table

When targeting enterprise partners, credibility is crucial. Ben shares their approach: “We’ve surrounded ourselves with great cap table of investors from teammate and treasury and QED and Nica and others. And so we leveraged my network, the network that we put around the table, in order to build trust and relationships over time.”

This demonstrates how strategic investor selection can directly support GTM execution.

5. Balance Experimentation with Focus

Ben emphasizes the delicate balance required in early GTM execution: “I think you’ve got to be willing to try lots of things, but on the same time, you’ve got to have real focus and discipline. What you end up with is if you try too many things in too many places, you find you get spread too thin.”

The key is giving yourself “enough shots at success” while maintaining “a very strict and disciplined manner about the sequencing and the scope of those activities.”

The results validate this strategic approach. April has attracted “dozens of companies on the platform” with “hundreds of thousands of users” and NPS scores “in the high fifties and sixties.”

Looking ahead, Ben articulates an ambitious vision: “The big picture for April is that whenever the US taxpayer individual small business is going to transact, they can get complete clarity about the impact to their taxes.”

For founders facing similar challenges, April’s journey offers a masterclass in strategic GTM thinking. Instead of accepting conventional wisdom about customer acquisition, they fundamentally reimagined how their solution reaches end users. The lesson? Sometimes the most powerful GTM strategies don’t just execute better than competitors – they change the rules of competition entirely.