u/Adrenaline_Junkie__

Said no winning founder ever. Amazon sells everything now, but they started with books. Just books. One category, one customer. Swiggy is everywhere today, but they started in one neighborhood in Bangalore with a few guys on cycles. Every company that scaled wide started suffocatingly narrow.

Think about it like dropping color powder into a swimming pool. The water changes color immediately. Drop that same amount into the ocean, and it disappears before it even hits the surface. The powder didn't change, but the container was too big. Your ideal customer profile works the exact same way. A message built for everyone lands for no one. That same message, sharpened for 50 people with the exact same burning problem, becomes a movement.

I see so many founders stuck in the building phase because they are trying to solve for the ocean before they have even mastered a single pool. They burn through runway trying to appeal to a broad audience, only to find that their product is too generic to actually solve a specific pain point. You have to capture one pool first. Then find another. Keep going until you have enough traction to handle the ocean. Founders who try to start with the ocean never make it to the second pool.

When I work with early stage founders to refine their go to market strategy, this is usually the hardest hurdle to clear. It feels counterintuitive to ignore 99 percent of the market, but that focus is exactly what gets you to your first ten paying customers. Are you currently trying to sell to a specific niche, or is your value proposition still broad enough that it could apply to almost anyone?

Call me dumb for asking, but I have been thinking about this a lot lately. Millions of people order food every day in India, so obviously they found product-market fit. But here is the thing. Finding that fit did not make them stop watching their users. Take the IPL season. Someone at their office clearly noticed that people were ordering during matches, not before or after. They were watching on Hotstar, switching to Swiggy, placing an order, and missing a wicket. That tiny friction was a clear behavior pattern.

So they did not just sit on their hands. They partnered with Hotstar and built the ordering process directly into the viewing experience. No new product, just a sharper understanding of what their user was actually doing at 8pm on a Tuesday. That is product-market fit in motion. It is not a one-time discovery. It is a continuous conversation with your customer. The founders who stay relevant are not the ones who found fit earliest. They are the ones who keep asking one question long after they think they have the answer.

That question is simple. What is my customer doing right before they come to me and right after they leave? The answer to that will always show you something you did not know. A friction you did not see, or a partnership you had not considered. I spend my days helping early-stage founders figure out these exact gaps, and it is usually the simplest behavioral observation that unlocks the next phase of growth. PMF is not a destination. It is a habit of watching closely.

What is the one behavior your users have that you are currently ignoring because you think you have already figured them out?

I see this all the time with founders who have a working MVP but can't seem to get traction. They define their ICP as small business owners, or worse, anyone who needs their tool. That is not an ICP. That is just a list of people who might have a credit card. When you try to speak to everyone, you end up speaking to absolutely no one. You become a background noise that gets filtered out of an inbox immediately.

Take a founder I worked with recently. She was selling financial tracking software. Her response rates were stuck in the single digits because her messaging was watered down to appeal to consultants, retail shops, and agencies all at once. We forced a pivot. We stopped targeting small business owners and started targeting women-led service businesses in their third year of operation. The ones who just hired their first three employees and were suddenly drowning in cash flow complexity. The second she started naming their specific, painful reality, her response rate jumped from 8 percent to 23 percent almost overnight.

She didn't change a single line of code. She just stopped being vague. If your messaging feels like it could apply to a random person on the street, it is too broad. You need to identify the exact moment of friction that makes someone desperate enough to pay for a solution right now. It is about finding the one group that feels like you are reading their diary when they visit your landing page.

How do you currently handle your ICP definition? Are you still casting a wide net, or have you narrowed it down to a specific persona that actually converts?

I see so many founders burning their runway because they think their product is for small business owners. That is not an audience. That is a demographic bucket that is far too wide to actually target. I was working with a founder recently who had a financial tracking tool. She was sending out outreach emails to store owners, boutique founders, and freelance consultants. She was getting replies, but they were mostly people asking if she did something else or just ignoring her entirely. It was frustrating to watch because she had a solid tool, but her message was just leaking everywhere.

We sat down and forced ourselves to narrow it down. We stopped talking to small business owners and started talking to women leading service businesses in their second or third year. Specifically, the ones managing a team for the first time who realize their cash flow visibility is a total disaster. The difference in the response rate was wild. It jumped from 8 percent to 23 percent in about a month. She didn't touch a single line of code. She just started describing the exact pain point of a very specific person, and suddenly, they felt like she was reading their mind.

Most of the time, the problem isn't the product. It is the fact that your messaging is trying to be everything to everyone, which means it ends up being nothing to anyone. When you can articulate someone's problem better than they can explain it themselves, they assume you have the solution. If you are struggling to get traction, take a hard look at your ICP. Are you actually talking to a person, or are you just talking to a category?

What is the biggest mistake you made when you first defined your target audience?

i have spent the last five years working with founders across india, from early stage bootstrapped teams to those with a bit of funding. i see a recurring pattern that ruins more startups than lack of capital or bad tech. it is a timing problem. founders usually reach out to me only after the product is built, the money is gone, and they have spent six months hearing nothing but silence from the market. they want me to fix their marketing or their sales, but the real issue is that they skipped the hard work at the start.

Most of these founders are sharp and hardworking. they are not failing because they are incompetent. they are failing because building feels like progress. writing code or designing a landing page is visible, tangible work. talking to potential users, facing rejection, and admitting that your core assumption might be wrong is incredibly uncomfortable. it is slow, messy, and humbling. so, naturally, people avoid it. they rush to build because it is safer than finding out nobody actually wants the solution they are obsessed with.

The founders who actually move the fastest are not the ones who ship the most features. they are the ones who stay curious longer than feels comfortable. they resist the urge to build until they have real, painful evidence that they are solving a problem that people will pay to fix. i spend most of my days helping people pivot back to this mindset, trying to undo months of wasted effort. it is much cheaper to change your mind before you have committed to a roadmap.

Have you ever caught yourself building something just to feel productive, even when you knew deep down you had not validated the core problem yet? how do you force yourself to keep digging for insights when you just want to get to work?

I have spent the last five years working with founders across all sorts of industries and stages. I have seen some brilliant tech and some really messy pivots. But the one thing I keep seeing over and over is not a strategy problem. It is a timing problem. Founders come to me after the product is built, after the money is spent, and after six months of silence from the market. The first thing I have to do is not fix the go to market plan. It is go back to the beginning and ask questions that should have been asked before a single line of code was written.

It is not because they are bad founders. Most of them are sharp, hardworking, and genuinely passionate about what they are building. But somewhere along the way, the building felt more urgent than the understanding. I get it. Building is visible. It feels like progress. Talking to customers feels slow, uncertain, and uncomfortably humbling. But the founders I have seen move the fastest are not the ones who built the most. They are the ones who stayed curious the longest before they committed to a solution.

That is the whole job at the early stage. Stay curious longer than feels comfortable. Everything else follows from that. I spend most of my time now helping people undo the work they did too early because they were afraid to stay in the validation phase for just a few weeks longer. It is painful to watch a team realize their core feature is a hallucination of what the market actually needs.

How long did you force yourself to stay in the customer discovery phase before you started building your MVP? Do you think you built too much too soon, or was your timing about right?

Last month, we were on a user interview call with a freelancer who seemed like a perfect fit for our tool. About twenty minutes in, he stops and says we should really pivot our features to target offline businesses like yoga instructors and local tutors. He was super passionate about it, and it sounded like a logical expansion. We nodded, took notes, and ended the call feeling like we had a major breakthrough. But after we hung up, the reality set in. If we had actually followed that advice, we would have had to gut our entire roadmap to build features for a workflow we know nothing about. We would be splitting our limited resources between two totally different markets, and our messaging would become a confusing mess that appeals to nobody.

I see so many founders fall into this trap. They think that being customer-centric means saying yes to every feature request or market pivot that comes their way. But that is how you end up with a product that does five things poorly instead of one thing perfectly. PMF isn't about collecting a laundry list of features from whoever happens to be on a call with you. It is about identifying the specific group of users whose problems you are uniquely qualified to solve and then having the brutal discipline to ignore everything else. It is easy to confuse noise for signal when you are desperate for growth.

After spending years helping founders refine their roadmaps and find their actual niche, I have realized that the most dangerous feedback is the kind that sounds like a good idea but pulls you away from your core identity. You have to be willing to be wrong, but you also have to be willing to tell a potential user that their idea just isn't for you. It feels counterintuitive when you are trying to acquire users, but it is the only way to avoid building a product that nobody really loves. How do you guys decide when to pivot based on feedback and when to just stay the course?