Manifest

Your GTM is a codebase. Own it.

Manifest is a free, open-source template for running your go-to-market the way engineers run software: everything your company knows, everything it's trying to do, and everything that runs in production, in one repository that you own and that AI agents can operate.

Clone it, tell your AI agent to read it, and you have a revenue engine with a memory.

New to the idea? Start with the full definition: GTM as Code.

The problem this solves

Your GTM knowledge is scattered: the ICP lives in your head, the objection answers live in a rep's notes, the positioning lives in a deck from two quarters ago, and the automations live in tools nobody can audit. Every time you open an AI assistant, you re-explain your company from zero. Every time someone leaves, knowledge walks out the door.

Software teams solved this decades ago: one repository, version-controlled, where every change is reviewed and nothing is lost. Manifest applies that structure to revenue.

What is Cargo?

Manifest is built by Cargo, the platform GTM teams use to run their revenue engine. Cargo unifies your GTM data into one clean set of account and contact tables: the outcome that used to require a dbt project or a CDP, delivered as ready-made primitives. On top of that unified data it runs everything the engine needs: waterfall enrichment, scoring, routing, a context graph your agents reason from, and AI agents executing automated plays. You define the whole workspace as code and deploy it with one command, the way engineers deploy cloud infrastructure.

Manifest is the repo structure Cargo's own GTM team runs on, extracted into a template anyone can use.

Why trust this repo

• It is the working structure behind Cargo's own go-to-market, not a thought experiment.
• Cargo runs millions of executions every month for revenue teams at Braintrust, Augment Code, Descript, and WorkOS.
• Everything here is inspectable. No black box: every file is plain text you can read, edit, and delete.
• MIT licensed. Fork it, gut it, make it yours. Cargo is optional (see below).

Is this for me? (I'm not an engineer)

Yes. Manifest is for GTM people: founders doing founder-sales, heads of growth, RevOps, sales leaders. Here's the honest deal:

• You never write code. The files you touch are plain text: your ICP, your weekly plan, your objection answers. If you can write a Notion page, you can write these.
• Your AI agent does the technical part. Open this folder in Claude Code (or Cursor), and the agent reads the operating manual (AGENTS.md) and handles git, deploys, and file conventions for you. You review its work like you'd review a campaign brief.
• You should still understand every folder. Forking something you don't understand is how you end up with someone else's engine. The section below explains each layer in plain language: read it once and the whole repo makes sense.

What's inside, explained properly

plan/: the destination. Three files. The number you're chasing this period and the three moves that get you there (company-plan.md). How revenue actually gets won: your ICP, your motions, the bets you're making and what you're explicitly not doing (strategy.md). And the concrete outcomes that must become true, each with an owner, a way to verify it, and what it becomes in the engine: a play, an agent, a report (outcomes.md). This replaces the strategy deck that goes stale a week after the offsite, because here the plan is checked against reality continuously.

context/: what your company knows. The single source of truth for your market knowledge, split into folders a rep would recognize: icp/, persona/, objection/, proof/, signal/, alternative/ (competitors), motion/, client/. One claim per file, in plain text. Every AI agent reads this layer before writing a single email on your behalf: this is why an agent working from this repo sounds like your best rep instead of a generic bot. If you run Cargo, this same knowledge can live in your workspace's context graph, where your production agents reason from it. One rule keeps it honest: a claim enters context after it shows up twice in the real world. Once is an anecdote.

cadence/: the operating rhythm. Your week, in writing. A weekly plan (theme, outcomes, deals to move), a daily log, and a carryover file that keeps dropped balls visible until they're resolved. This is what turns the repo from a wiki into an operating system: knowledge layers tell agents what's true, the cadence layer tells them what matters right now.

initiatives/: the big rocks. One file per bounded effort ("stand up the outbound motion by end of Q3") with an owner, a deadline, and success criteria you can check as true or false. The connective tissue between the plan and the day-to-day.

infra/: what actually runs. Your live engine, declared as code: Connectors to your CRM and data providers, Models (your unified account and contact tables), Segments, Tools, Agents, and Plays. It deploys to your Cargo workspace with one command, and every change is previewed as a diff before it touches production, the way engineers review infrastructure changes. You don't write this code: you describe what you want, your agent drafts it, and you review the plan. And you rarely start from a blank file: scaffold a prebuilt cookbook (deduplication, contact sourcing, routing, meeting prep) straight into infra/ and edit its placeholders. The cookbooks are the menu; the manifest is where they land.

.claude/skills/: what your agent knows how to do here. Standard operating procedures your agent actually executes: plan my week, create a new motion, run the weekly review, clean up the context layer. Written once, executed the same way every time, by anyone on the team.

evals/: what keeps it honest. Test cases that catch a prompt change making your agents worse before it ships. Change how your qualification agent thinks, and the evals tell you whether it still qualifies correctly.

outputs/: what happened. The receipts. Every list built, campaign shipped, and research brief lands here, dated, append-only, tagged with the outcome it produced. Agents read recent entries before starting related work, so the engine learns from what happened instead of repeating it.

scratch/: yours alone. Experiments and half-baked ideas, invisible to the shared repo. The engine stays clean because the mess has a home.

The loop that makes it compound

1. Plan the week in cadence/, pulled from plan/ and open initiatives/.
2. Run the engine: enrichment, scoring, routing, and signal plays run continuously; outreach campaigns ship with a written hypothesis (segment, angle, trigger, expected reply rate) so results are judged against a bar you set in advance.
3. Archive results in outputs/, with outcomes attached.
4. Review weekly: what worked graduates into context/ as validated knowledge; what failed is recorded so it isn't retried blind.

Run this loop for a quarter and you have something no tool subscription gives you: a revenue engine that provably gets smarter every week, and that belongs to you.

60-second start

git clone https://github.com/getcargohq/cargo-manifest acme-gtm
cd acme-gtm && npm install
claude .   # or cursor, or any agent that reads AGENTS.md

Then tell your agent: "Read AGENTS.md and help me seed this repo for my company." It will interview you and fill the layers.

Have a Cargo workspace? Wire the engine: cd infra && npx cargo-ai cdk plan.

No workspace yet? Make one from the terminal. There is no separate sign-up step and no browser at any point: the first call emails a one-time code and exits, and the second creates the account and a workspace.

npx @cargo-ai/cli login --email you@company.com
npx @cargo-ai/cli login --email you@company.com --code 123456

Everything except infra/ also works standalone, so you can seed the repo first and wire the execution layer whenever you're ready.