IDEAS / POST
You Won’t Build the Future if You Can’t Make the Cash Register Ring
Why So Many Smart Founders Stall Out
A few days ago, I spoke with a founder building a genuinely promising product – a smart platform for people managing chronic health conditions. It’s timely, very much needed, and it works.
But he’s selling to the wrong audience. Institutional buyers, health systems, hospitals. The buyers who love your mission but need twelve committee meetings and two procurement cycles to even consider buying. The buyers who won’t get fired if they act slowly, but may get fired if they try something different.
To make things worse, this entrepreneur isn’t testing other customer profiles. The faces may change, but the profile (and the lack of burning need) remains the same.
I see this all the time. (In fact, I’m guilty of doing it myself!) Founders with talent, traction, and potential, hemorrhaging time and cash because their selling efforts are focused on buyers who aren’t buying.
These founders don’t need another deck. They don’t need to tweak the product. They need a methodical system for marketing / selling to different audiences, until they find one that has a ‘hair on fire’ need and a shiny new credit card to pay.
It’s not just me saying this.
I talk with the investors and M&A people founders are trying to impress. They all repeat the same complaint. Great product, wrong ICP, wrong positioning, misdirected selling.
It’s a chronic condition in startup-land. I could go into the founder psychology that it springs from, but that’s a topic for another day.
Suffice it to say that if it’s left untreated, it kills spirits, and far too many promising ventures.
How You Cure The Condition
There’s no easy, guaranteed, overnight fix. If someone promises that, they’re selling you a fantasy. Or a course on LinkedIn.
The real path? You test your Ideal Customer Profile on real buyers. You measure results. And if it doesn’t catch fire, you don’t double down. You change the ICP, the pitch, the delivery.
Then you try again.
This is hard. We tend to:
- Get emotionally attached to a single ICP,
- Mistake polite interest for real demand,
- Waste precious months chasing buyers who can’t or won’t move fast.
Breaking this pattern is harder than it seems, because it isn’t rational. We feel we understand the buyer, when in fact we confuse ourselves with the buyer. If we love our product, of course the ICP (whom we’ve subconsciously identified as someone who mirrors our psychological needs, if not our gender, interests and socioeconomic status) will love our product, right?
There are clear symptoms of this mindset. Here’s what I see, over and over:
- The engineer-founder who avoids marketing by endlessly tweaking the same product.
- The visionary who talks strategy but avoids the hard work of follow-up.
- The founder who hires a growth lead, then hands them an empty map.
They all suffer from the same root cause: I call it a comfort zone bias.
They retreat to what they know, not what the business needs. They confuse activity with progress. They mistake effort for execution.
But the beauty of harsh experience is learning. Case in point: one founder I’m working with is launching a new product to a new audience, with a new marketing pitch… before the product is built. He’s gauging response (the ‘hair on fire’ and ‘here’s my credit card’ response, that is) before sinking costs into building out the product. If there’s a market, creating the product to satisfy it will be the least of his worries.
It’s Simple. And Hard.
This is a gym, not a spa. You get fit by doing reps, not laying back and hoping someone will pamper you to happiness.
Set a simple system:
- Draft a hypothesis: a real customer, with a real problem, who can buy now.
- Build a pitch. Deliver it. See if it sells.
- If it doesn’t, limit the tweak cycle. Instead, focus on why the ICP isn’t buying.
- If it looks like you’re pushing water uphill, pivot to a new ICP.
- Track what builds traction. Drop what doesn’t.
It’s not sexy. It delivers hard blows to your ego, if you’re in love with your initial assumptions. And it doesn’t work overnight.
But it does work if you keep at it. And as it starts to work, you’ll build momentum. A very good thing.