Hey. I’m Nev Santana, and thanks for reading this edition of Nurtured for B2B Founders - a weekly newsletter for B2B Founders building their GTM from scratch.
Each week, I share practical insights on Founder-led growth, distribution, monetization, and building repeatable revenue systems.
Expect practical ideas you can apply immediately to attract customers, generate revenue, and build a more repeatable GTM motion.
There's a specific mistake many early-stage B2B Founders make when building their ICP.
They define it by demographics — job title, company size, industry, funding stage. And those things matter. But they never answer the question that actually determines whether their GTM motion works:
Where does this person spend their attention?
That question — Layer 8 in the ICP framework I'll share below — is the one that tells you where to show up, what to write, and which channels are worth building versus ignoring. Without it, you're distributing content and outbound into the void and hoping the right person notices.
For the first few months of building Nurtured, I was a mess. I switched my ICP every few weeks, and whenever I settled on one, I assumed they were browsing on places like Facebook, of all places. Long story short, I made a lot of inaccurate assumptions. And inaccurate channel assumptions cost you the most valuable thing you have at zero-to-one: time and money.
The fix wasn’t more guesswork or a longer list of assumptions. It was structured AI research that surfaced real signals in under an hour — and it feeds directly into a complete ICP picture.
The ICP gap most Founders have
When I say "ICP," most Founders think: Head of Sales, Series A SaaS, 50–100 employees. That's a targeting filter. It's not an ICP.
A real ICP goes deeper and answers ten questions — not three. It covers who they are, their company context, their KPIs, their core pain, what they're using today, what triggers them to buy, what objections they raise, where they spend attention, how they talk about their problems, and what signals indicate they're ready.
That’s a full grasp of who your buyer is.
Most Founders have answers for the first two or three. The rest stay blank, or get filled in with guesses.
Two of the hardest layers to fill in without research are:
Layer 8: Where they learn and engage. Which newsletters, communities, podcasts, LinkedIn creators, events, and YouTube channels they actually trust and spend time in.
Layer 9: Voice of the customer. The exact phrases, complaints, and language patterns they use when describing their problems — in their own words, not yours.
These are also the two layers that matter most for distribution and messaging. Layer 8 tells you where to show up. Layer 9 tells you what to say when you get there.
You can do Deep Research to fill both of them in — with specificity — in about an hour.
The system: 4 steps
Write your ICP brief before you open the AI
Deep Research output quality scales directly with the context you give it. A vague ICP brief gets a generic report. Before running either prompt below, write 4–5 sentences covering: the role, the company stage, the core pain, how they solve that pain today, and what a good week looks like for them. This brief goes directly into the prompt. Use the free framework listed below for guidance.Run the "where do they gather" prompt — fills in Layer 8
This surfaces the communities, publications, podcasts, events, and LinkedIn creators your ICP is actively engaged with. Not just present in — engaged with. The distinction matters. A Slack group with 8,000 members where nobody posts is worthless. You want the channels where they're leaning forward.Run the "what are they saying" prompt — fills in Layer 9
This surfaces the exact language your ICP uses when they're frustrated, asking for help, or recommending something to a peer. This is your copywriting brief. It informs outbound subject lines, LinkedIn hooks, positioning language, and your website. The goal is to capture their words — not a summary of their themes.Manually verify the top 3 channels before building anything
AI research points you in the right direction. It can't tell you whether a Slack group is still active, whether a newsletter is growing or dying, or whether a LinkedIn creator has pivoted their content. Spend 30 minutes verifying before you commit to a channel strategy.
The prompts — copy and adapt
The example throughout: a Founder building ops automation software, targeting Chief of Staff or Head of Operations at 20–200 person B2B companies, Series A to Series B.
Prompt 1 — Layer 8: Where do they gather?