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The GTM bets that shouldn't have worked, and did
One grew revenue 50x after half his team quit over the strategy. One brought in 50K signups in a single day with no paid budget. One generated 100M+ views from a stunt that took 50 hours to conceive. One asked every prospect to demo the product themselves instead of demoing it for them.
None of them followed the safe playbook. They treated GTM like an experiment, moved before they had proof, and made bets most founders would never get approved.
HubSpot for Startups documented all 6 stories in the free Bold Bets Playbook. The risks they took, why it was risky, and what it returned.
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—— ON THIS DAY ——
MAY 24, 1844
Washington, D.C. → Baltimore, Maryland, USA
181 years ago
Samuel Morse, daguerreotype, 1845 — the artist turned inventor who spent twelve years developing the telegraph and Morse code after inspiration during a transatlantic voyage in 1832.
On May 24, 1844, Samuel Morse sat at the receiving station in the US Capitol building in Washington and tapped out a message in his code to Alfred Vail, forty-four miles away at the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad depot in Baltimore. The message — 'What hath God wrought,' a phrase from the Book of Numbers chosen by Annie Ellsworth, daughter of the US Patent Commissioner — was the first official transmission over the first long-distance electric telegraph line in the United States. Vail received it. The message was sent back. The age of instant communication had begun.
The implications were not immediately apparent to most observers. The telegraph demonstration had attracted a crowd — Congress had funded it with $30,000 in 1843 — but the technology seemed novel rather than transformative. Within a decade, the transformation was undeniable. By 1850, the telegraph network covered most of the eastern United States. By 1866, Cyrus Field's Atlantic telegraph cable connected America to Europe. A message that had taken ten days to cross the Atlantic by ship could now travel in minutes.
—— MARQUEE EVENT ——
The Vail key — the type of telegraph instrument used to send the first message, operated by pressing the key to complete the circuit and create the dots and dashes of Morse code.
Morse's path to the telegraph was accidental in the way many great inventions are. He was a portrait painter — a successful one, not a hobbyist — who had studied in Europe and whose painting of the House of Representatives hung in the Capitol. In 1832, returning from Europe on the ship Sully, he became engaged in a dinner-table conversation about electromagnetism. The idea that electrical current could be used to transmit messages occurred to him. He spent the next twelve years developing it, working alongside Alfred Vail and physicist Joseph Henry, whose earlier work on electromagnets was essential but was not always credited.
Morse code — the system of dots and dashes representing letters and numbers — was not Morse's most technically difficult invention; the telegraph hardware was more challenging. But the code was elegant in its economy: it assigned shorter sequences to more common letters (E is a single dot; T is a single dash) and longer sequences to rarer ones. It was designed for speed and efficiency in ways that anticipated information theory by a century. Operators who became expert at it could send and receive sixty words per minute, and could identify individual operators by their 'fist' — the distinctive rhythm of their transmission.
The telegraph's consequences for warfare, journalism, financial markets, and political organization were immediate and permanent. Generals could coordinate troop movements across continents in real time. News agencies could file stories instantly from battlefields. Stock prices in New York could respond to events in London within minutes. Presidents could receive and send instructions during crises without waiting for messengers. The American Civil War was the first major conflict in which telegraph communication played a central strategic role — a fact not lost on Ulysses Grant or Abraham Lincoln, who spent many evenings in the War Department telegraph room.
—— WHY THIS MATTERS ——
The telegraph was the first technology to separate communication from transportation. Before it, the fastest a message could travel was as fast as a horse or a ship. The telegraph made instantaneous long-distance communication possible for the first time in human history. Every subsequent development — telephone, radio, fiber optic cable, the internet — built on this fundamental innovation.
The information asymmetries it eliminated transformed financial markets, journalism, and military strategy simultaneously. Markets that had operated on days-old information became efficient in real time. News agencies that had relied on pony express riders became wire services. The modern economy, modern journalism, and modern warfare all took their current shapes partly because of the telegraph.
Morse's career is a case study in the relationship between invention, patent law, and credit in science and technology. Joseph Henry, whose work on electromagnets was foundational, received none of the commercial benefit of the telegraph and contested the extent of Morse's credit throughout his life. The dispute about who deserves credit for technological inventions — still active in every patent court — is as old as Morse.
—— THE TAKEAWAY ——
On May 24, 1844, four words traveled forty-four miles in seconds through a wire strung along a railroad track, and the world was never the same. The telegraph separated communication from transportation for the first time in human history. The internet is its great-grandchild.
—— QUOTE OF THE DAY ——
"What hath God wrought."
— First official telegraph message, sent by Samuel Morse from Washington to Baltimore, May 24, 1844; text chosen from Numbers 23:23
—— OUR QUIZ OF THE DAY ——
How much do you know about Samuel Morse, the telegraph, Morse code, and the extraordinary consequences of instant long-distance communication for war, finance, journalism, and politics?
