IDEAS / POST
Your Best Customers Love Your Product.
That's Why You're Stalled.
It was a full house at WebSummit.
Not surprising, considering the panellists: Jess Kirkman, Global Head of Brand Creative at Mattel, and Danny Rensch, Co-Founder and Chief Chess Officer at Chess.com. And they were talking about insanely successful products everyone knows and loves. Catnip to an audience of founders.
But my mind connects dots in non-obvious ways. I saw a profound, unspoken point being made beyond the ‘playbooks to success’ stories onstage.
Chess has existed since the 6th century. Barbie turned 67 this year. These are not scrappy, 18-month-old B2B platforms competing for enterprise contracts. The founders in that WebSummit audience, on the other hand, are building something new. If they’ve achieved traction, their issue is getting more traction. No doubt they’ve gotten this far with relentless innovation and feature-first, founder-led sales.
The idea that their product is already good enough – that the real work is shifting how buyers feel about it rather than what it does doesn’t register as a lever worth pulling.
This thinking gap isn’t new. It’s a well-documented chasm. Geoffrey Moore mapped it 35 years ago.
You Haven’t Misbuilt the Product. You’ve Mistold the Story.
The gap Moore identified sits between early adopters and the mainstream market.
Your early adopters are visionaries like you. They felt the same pain you did – the pain that sparked you to innovate the product in the first place. They bought your product when it was rough because they could see what it would become. They speak your language. They forgive your gaps. They evangelize without being asked.
Your mainstream buyers, if you’re selling B2B, are probably the CFOs and CEOs who run companies your early adopters work for. They’re also pragmatists. To paraphrase Moore, visionary early adopters are the ones who give high tech its start, while pragmatic mainstreamers are the ones who give it mass appeal.
Here’s the rub. Pragmatists don’t buy potential. They buy proof. They buy risk mitigation. They buy stories they can repeat in a board meeting that make them look smart for the decision.
If you can’t think like they think, and talk like they talk, your pitch leaves them cold.
When that happens, pipelines dry up.
And when that happens, founders tend to double down on the tools that got them this far. They hire more salespeople. They dial up innovation. They pump more into adwords. But somehow, the effort doesn’t deliver.
What Chess.com Sold (Hint: It Wasn’t New Chess Features)
Chess.com now has 250 million registered members. That number was 51 million at the start of 2020. The game of chess did not change once during that period. Not a single rule. Not a single piece.
Chess.com’s Rensch encapsulated it plainly at WebSummit: “Chess is perfect. Don’t change the game.”
So what changed? The emotional vocabulary around it.
The old Chess.com spoke to serious players, focusing on theory and tactics. Deep, precise, uncompromising. Exactly the kind of product a technical founder would build and love. And it worked beautifully, for a very specific tribe.
To get to the next level, they didn’t add features. They changed what the product meant. Building onboarding around encouragement rather than correction. Comforting newbies by saying “you played seven of your best moves,” instead of “you made three mistakes in that game.” Same chess. Completely different emotional experience. Their 2025 onboarding overhaul, built around this kind of reframing, opened a floodgate of new users. The product itself was untouched.
Once those users were in, they retained them by selling personal growth, belonging, identity. Chess as the thing that makes you smarter, sharper, part of something universal and human. The game was always that. They just shone a spotlight on it.
Here’s the B2B translation.
Your early adopters loved your product for the same reason Chess.com’s original users loved theirs: because they understood it deeply, and were thus pre-disposed to purchase.
Your next buyer, the CFO signing the enterprise contract, doesn’t care about the elegance, the complexity, the architecture. They care about what happens to their quarterly numbers, their risk profile, their standing in the next board review. Those are their seven best moves. Are you showing them those? Or are you still giving them the opening theory lecture?
The product is the proof. The story is what gets the purchase order signed.
The $1.4 Billion Lesson Mattel Almost Didn’t Learn
The Barbie movie grossed $1.4 billion worldwide, making it the highest-grossing film of 2023. And Mattel nearly killed it.
Greta Gerwig’s script included scenes that poked fun at Mattel, depicting executives as bumbling, self-important suits who didn’t understand their own brand. Mattel’s COO Richard Dickson flew to the London set to argue against one specific scene. Gerwig refused to cut it. After considerable internal debate, Mattel conceded.
That concession made them over a billion dollars.
Jess Kirkman, Mattel’s VP of Brand, described the inflection point: “The brand actually let go, and everyone was repping pink.”
That is, people were making their own pink outfits, bracelets, social posts. They weren’t advertising Barbie. They were expressing themselves through Barbie… a fundamentally different thing. 33% of opening weekend audiences were male, an audience the brand had never meaningfully reached before. Not because the marketing was clever. Because the story was finally open enough for people outside the original tribe to find themselves in it.
The lesson: the tighter you grip the narrative, the smaller your audience.
For a technical founder, this is a wonderful lesson: the mainstreamers you’re trying to reach don’t want the clarity and ‘one true story’ of a spec sheet. They want a story they can own for themselves. A CFO needs to walk into their CEO’s office and explain why they signed your contract in terms that make them look prescient, not reckless. If your pitch requires them to understand your architecture before they can make that argument, you’ve lost them.
Mattel reported a 16% increase in net sales in Q4 2023 – the quarter the film released. Letting go was a brilliant revenue strategy.
A Diagnostic for Your Story
Are you willing to let your customer define what your product means to them? Because that’s what crossing the chasm requires.
Here’s how you can get your head in the right space.
- Who did you actually write this for?
Pull up your last sales deck. Read the first three slides out loud. Is it an engineer’s tour of your product architecture, or does it describe a problem a CFO loses sleep over, in their exact words? If you’re not sure, send it to someone’s CFO and ask them to tell you what problem you solve. The answer will be clarifying.
- What does your product mean to the buyer (not what does it do for them)?
CFOs don’t sign contracts for elegant architecture. They sign to protect their quarterly numbers and look smart in the boardroom. CEOs want something they can point to as a strategic call that paid off. Those are powerful, emotional needs. Are you capturing them?
- How tight is your grip?
Can a customer explain your product in ten words… in their language, not yours? If they can’t, you your story isn’t resonating. Chances are, it’s too complex for your mainstream audience. Your best early customers can navigate complexity. Your next customers, the ones with the larger budgets and the longer sales cycles, won’t try.
The Thing Worth Taking Home
Chess.com didn’t fix chess. Mattel didn’t fix Barbie. They fixed the story around them, building it for a new, vastly larger audience.
The most durable growth strategies aren’t built on better products. They’re built on better meaning. Meaning that resonates with buyers who think differently than the people who bought from you first.
The instinct to add features, increase ad spend or hire another sales rep is understandable. Sometimes it’s even right. But if your pipeline has been unpredictable for more than two quarters and your best customers genuinely love you but can’t seem to bring you upmarket, the question worth asking isn’t “how do I fix my sales?”
It’s “does my story work in the rooms where the big checks get signed?”
Let’s Assess Fit
Marc Stoiber works with $1M–$10M ARR founders who’ve hit a growth wall. If you think he may be able to help, book a ‘Fit’ call.