Technical founders: what's your actual GTM process?

I've been building software for 20+ years and I've noticed a pattern in myself and every technical founder I talk to. We all know we should have a GTM strategy, but what we actually do is some version of:

1. Build the thing
2. Post it on a few places (HN, Reddit, here)
3. Hope for the best
4. Go back to building features when the silence gets uncomfortable

I'm guilty of this. I shipped a property management SaaS. Solid product, clean code, good pricing. My "marketing strategy" was posting in a couple subreddits and waiting.

The advice exists — "find your ICP," "identify your channels." But the execution path doesn't. Nobody tells you how to systematically do that when you're one person with no marketing background and 4 hours a week.

I've been building a tool to fix this (a persistent GTM engine that maps your market and gives you a structured playbook — cantrip.ai if you're curious). But before I go too deep, I want to make sure I'm solving the real problem, not the one I imagine exists.

So for those of you who've gotten traction:

Did you follow a structured process, or was it more intuition/luck?

What's the one thing you wish you'd done differently in your first 90 days of trying to find customers?

Do you use any tools for GTM research, or is it all manual?

Not looking for theory. I want to know what you actually did.