When I lost my role in a reorganization, I did what most senior marketers do: I updated my resume, refreshed my LinkedIn, and started reaching out to my network. Then I did something most marketers don't do. I built a tool.
Not a spreadsheet. Not a tracker in Notion. A fully deployed web application with a nightly crawler that monitors 260+ pre-IPO cybersecurity companies for open GTM roles, filters by function, seniority, location, workplace type, and investor backer, and updates itself while I sleep.
I called it GTM Radar. And building it taught me more about how I want to be evaluated than any resume bullet point could.
The problem with job search as a to-do list
Most job searches are treated as an admin task: find postings, tailor a resume, apply, wait. That's not a GTM motion, it's a checklist. And a checklist mindset is exactly what I've spent my career telling clients and teams to avoid.
Good GTM starts with market intelligence, not activity. Before you launch a campaign, you map the landscape: who are the accounts, what signals indicate intent, where is the budget moving, and how do you get in front of the right buyer before your competitors do. I've built demand gen and ABM functions from scratch around that exact discipline. So when I found myself job hunting, the obvious question was: why would I treat my own search with less rigor than I'd apply to a client's pipeline?
The market for pre-IPO cybersecurity marketing leadership is narrow, fast-moving, and scattered across dozens of ATS platforms: Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby, Wellfound, and more. Roles open and close in weeks. Waiting for a recruiter to surface an opportunity, or manually checking a dozen job boards, isn't a strategy. It's hoping.
So I treated the search like what it actually is: an account-based go-to-market problem, where the "accounts" are companies and the buyer is a hiring executive.
Building the radar
GTM Radar started as a simple question: what if I could see every relevant opening the moment it appeared, across every company I actually cared about, without checking ten different sites every morning?
The build itself is intentionally lean. A React front end sits on top of a PHP crawler that runs nightly against a curated list of pre-IPO cybersecurity companies, the kind backed by the VC and PE firms I already track. It's hosted on standard shared hosting, which came with its own constraint: proxy timeouts capped every crawler run at 70 seconds, regardless of how long the underlying job would actually take. So the crawler checkpoints its progress and picks up where it left off on the next run, rather than trying to force a single long-running process through infrastructure that wasn't built for it.
That's a small technical detail, but it's also a GTM lesson in miniature: you don't get to pick your constraints. You design around them.
The result is a tool that does the market-scanning work automatically, so my time goes toward outreach and positioning instead of manual searching. It has a company directory, a curated job board tab, and analytics tracking how I actually use it, the same instrumentation discipline I'd put behind any campaign.
Why this matters more than it looks like it should
Here's the honest version of why I built this: I didn't need to. I could have run this search with a spreadsheet and forty minutes a day. Instead, I spent real time architecting a system.
That choice is the point. Anyone can tell a hiring manager they know how to build GTM infrastructure from scratch, run ABM against a defined account list, or apply market intelligence before spending a dollar on outreach. It's harder to fake actually doing it, unprompted, under no obligation, for an audience of one.
GTM Radar is a working demonstration of how I think: identify the market, build the infrastructure to monitor it continuously, remove friction from the parts of the process that don't require judgment, and spend my actual attention on the parts that do: the conversations, the positioning, the relationships. That's the same operating model I'd bring to a VP or CMO seat. I just happened to build the proof-of-concept on myself first.
If you're evaluating a marketing leader, don't just read what they say they've built. Ask what they've built when no one was asking them to.
GTM Radar is live at christinecastro.com/gtm-radar.html.