#12. The Discomfort Of Focus.

A recent getaway to Biarritz, France (Sep 25). Photo credit: Greta Kvitten

Since our recent exit, I’ve been thinking a lot about what went well and what we could have done better. On the latter—what are the flawed mental models I held largely as a result of being a first-time founder? I thought I would share my thoughts on the area I personally found to be most challenging: Focus.

Learning to trust in the arc of focus, that is, reducing short term opportunities with the confidence this will generate greater long term results, has been really hard.

The ICP Dilemma

If you ask what I’d have done differently when building our company, being more disciplined when defining and pursuing our initial ideal customer profile (ICP) is top of mind. As I’ve seen from friends around me, you learn faster, reduce competition and are more likely to produce genuine customer love.

Earlier this week, a Data Director at a Fortune 1000 Insurance company responded to our product demo with: “I hate it when vendors show me something that exactly solves my problem.” That’s a special moment as a founder.

I think, however, we could have made it here sooner.

My flawed beliefs on focus

Several limiting beliefs nagged at me each time we attempted to narrow down on serving one specific persona.

Myth 1: Narrowing is a one-way door

I feared that committing to the wrong persona would mean no way back. Most startup decisions, however, are reversible. The paradox is typically that you can’t learn what’s true until you commit. I’m quite sure that if you shift your website branding, try a new sales pitch, or adjust your user interface for a few weeks, very few people will notice. Even fewer will care.

Myth 2: Narrowing limits the potential size of our market

Most agree that narrowing now allows you to go broad later, but the act of focusing asks us to give up short term opportunities and have faith in future upside. For new founders trying to trust this arc of product-market-fit, holding on to a few reference points may bring peace of mind:

Veeva Systems: Initially built software for sales reps in pharmaceutical companies to manage drug approvals in regulated markets. They are now a publicly traded company and the primary content management system for the Life Science sector.

Patagonia: One of my favourite stories—the company that built custom climbing equipment designed to not scar the rock face. I bet 1 in 5 of my friends now own something from Patagonia.

However, I do think it’s helpful to accept that you might not end up going broad in the way you anticipate. If you cling to your vision, you may feel a paralysing incompatibility between going niche now and keeping the door open to your long-term intended market. Your vision is just a hypothesis, and the best founders will always find the right way to expand.

Myth 3: Narrowing is less ambitious

I recently met a founder who’d identified a clear problem in a niche market that he finds deeply interesting. He knows his company won’t be “VC-backable”, yet he’s confident that he can create a cash-flow positive business with major impact in his chosen domain. His story gave me energy.

I often equated broad market with big ambition, but I think the wiser person would channel their ambition into the way they do something. Big reach, if it happens, is then just a by-product. Focus on becoming an exceptional founder—meaning, learn to love the process of building something that people want and learn to create a life that gives you energy along the way.

The most inspiring people I know express their ambition through depth, mastery, and authenticity—in whatever field that is. In contrast, I’ve met extremely successful entrepreneurs who are mostly driven by the need to prove something to the world. No matter how great their accolades, channeling ambition in this way will never address the underlying lack of peace from which they operate.

Executing on focus

If you become comfortable with the need to focus, two questions likely emerge:

Where should I focus?
How niche is too niche?

Where to focus: The Discovery Hourglass

You likely won’t know where to focus without some kind of discovery process, which could be modelled as three stages of an hourglass.

Exploration: Start broad. Talk to many different personas. Collect volume and diversity of input.
Focus: Go all-in on the one persona who can’t live without you—and have the discipline to drop everything else.
Scaling: Expand to all other personas that share the same profile as (2).

I think there are two questions that really matter when conducting exploration:

What needs to be true for this to be the persona we go all-in on?
How can I test those criteria as quickly as possible?

Our mistakes early on weren’t in going broad across personas, they were going broad without ever forcing a yes/no call. During exploration, bring structure and be explicit. Know what and who you are testing. Write down the knowledge gaps and how you will close them. Define decision points, timelines, and qualification criteria up front.

A dynamic decision framework

Your criteria for continuing to spend time with a persona should reflect your current context. Some criteria for Question 1 above might be:

To what extent is this a reproducible use case?
How significant is the benefit to the customer in using our solution vs. existing tools?
To what extent would they be genuinely upset if we disappeared tomorrow?

But sometimes you’ll have more immediate needs e.g., fundraising. In that case, your criteria may shift to:

Could I spin this into a compelling success story for the next raise?
Is there someone inside the company who will champion us to investors, even if the long-term fit is uncertain?

An example of how not to do this

Shortly after YC, we managed to secure our first proof-of-concept (PoC) with a leading financial services company. It’s hard to overstate the time and energy we spent on them in the months that followed. The excitement of having a “real customer” blinded us—the only question we asked was: How do we do everything possible to make this PoC a success?

The better mindset would have been: We’re competent, we’re willing to invest heavily—but only if certain conditions are met. In this case, two obvious conditions that we failed to test up front were (i) The customer is willing to pay $X within the next 6 months if we solve their problem, and, (ii) The customer has the people and resources to support long-term adoption of our solution. Needless to say—they did not end up being a good fit.

Build the success story backwards

Whilst a background in management consulting can lead to bad habits as a founder, one area that translates well is pursuing a Day 1 Answer: Based on everything we know, what’s our best hypothesis today of the value proposition narrative?

Formulating this short story as early as possible forces specificity, sheds light on knowledge gaps, and creates a vehicle for testing the wider market response.

Slide 1: [Persona] typically have these problems: […]
Slide 2: This is the cost to [Persona] in not solving these problems
Slide 3: Here is a new and novel way that [Persona] could think about their world
Slide 4: Here is the benefit to [Persona] if they do it this way
Slide 5: Btw, here is our solution that enables this

Basing this on a real person—someone you’ve spoken to or are doing early work with—is the best way to reach the necessary level of specificity. The key idea is to build and share such narrative with the broader market before you’ve succeeded with that first customer. This approach helped us spot that the seemingly ‘killer use case’ we’d found with an early healthcare PoC customer was far less interesting to the rest of the market than we had believed.

Side note: The sales narrative above draws from the Challenger Sale methodology, which emphasises the goal of creating a clear educational “aha” moment for the customer—an insight that shifts the buyer’s perspective on how they see their world.

Managing distractions

A year into Deasy, we’d doubled down on a use case that had received good initial validation. But, despite our commitment, there remained temptation to explore parallel areas in case they may be an even better fit. Many friends of mine seem to experience this.

It’s helpful to understand if such temptation is rooted more in a lack of conviction in the current path, or the human tendency to believe the grass is always greener. As

Elizabeth Gilbert adds, it’s also a case of admitting whether you’re someone with a habit of not completing things. There is a big difference a momentary lack of excitement when things feel tough (which they often are), versus acknowledging a fundamental issue in your space, like market headwinds or a distinct lack of founder-problem fit.

Alternative investments of time often seem attractive to me because I have an incomplete view of what they entail. I once spent many months thinking about whether to start a YouTube channel. Once I finally got started, it took no more than a few hours to see this was not for me. I’m now inclined to give ‘new ideas’ some attention in order to see them more clearly and often unburden myself from the romantic fantasy that I risk dressing them up in. All paths have their unique challenges. I like the question: What problem would I rather have?

My friend recently sent me a great essay: Why speed matters, which speaks to the reference points we create around the effort required to complete a given activity. If we believe that validating an idea takes months, then testing new hypotheses will always feel very expensive. The goal of the hourglass model above is not to find the right problem to work on, but instead to become exceptional at proving and disproving hypotheses.

How niche is too niche?

When discussing the ‘go narrow to go broad’ mentality over dinner last week, my friend understandably questioned: “How niche should you go?”.

I was told in the past: if your focus doesn’t feel uncomfortably narrow, it’s probably still too broad. I believe that’s generally good advice. Another way could be to do the math. If your next milestone is $1M in revenue, keep cutting the market definition down until you can say: if we capture ~10% of this segment, we’ll hit our target. I think if you’re really focused on a niche, 10% feels reasonable.

Example: My partner runs a floral business in New York and dreams of buying a property in Europe to host international weddings. She doesn’t need to be the best florist in New York or own the best venue in France. Instead, if you frame the ICP: “Tri-State (NY/NJ/CT) residents planning ultra-luxury ($500K+) destination weddings in France, during the May–Sep peak season”, that’s roughly 30–40 couples per year. Capture 10%, and you’ve got a $1M business.

A note on remembering your worth

Beyond frameworks and questions, I believe that one of the best ways to improve your capacity to focus is by internalising your worth as a founder. Instead of viewing early-stage sales as an attempt to convince someone to work with you or buy your service, we should adopt the stance: Let me find all the reasons that this person is not going to be a good customer for me. Let me celebrate every single no so that I can leave room for the 1 or 2 hell-yes customers. The speed, commitment and intelligence that you bring as an early stage founder mean that these customers are lucky to work with you.

Learning to love focus

Focus is fundamental to every part of founder life, not just in finding your ICP. Most people would agree that if you can learn to love cold calling you’ll have a big advantage given that most hate it. I think the same is true for being ruthlessly focused. If you can learn to welcome the discomfort that accompanies the art of going narrow, you might find a hidden superpower.