Now that I’ve identified three target audiences, it’s time to dig into my core hypothesis. A statement like “my target customer doesn’t want to risk investing in an enterprise GTM team to enter the US market” is too broad. So, let me break it down into independent parts. First, I think my target customer wants to enter the U.S. market, but can’t access their target audience. And second, even if they can access their target audience, they struggle to get the insights that bring them closer to validating their assumptions. Each of these points represents a barrier that founders face, and Copilot is here to address those gaps with actionable insights and expert guidance right when it’s most urgent.
How I arrived at my hypothesis
I started Copilot after nearly 8 years in sales at General Assembly (GA) and another couple years at a small consulting firm. The former had me selling to a fuzzy ICP with an even fuzzier value proposition. The latter had me testing cold outbound for founders – I didn’t have a ton of faith in cold email as a singular entry point into a market then, and I certainly don’t have faith in it these days either. My hypothesis is that early stage international startups founders (a short description of my ICP from last week’s blog post) have difficulty getting enough validation to warrant their investments in setting up GTM operations in the US and trying to enter the US enterprise market.
The hypothesis
Conventional startup wisdom will tell you that you need to conduct market research and customer discovery before you build an MVP, yet this is often more difficult in practice than in theory, specifically for those breaking into the B2B sector. Without being deeply embedded in the target market or possessing a substantial network of ideal customer profiles, conducting customer discovery interviews in a B2B environment is exceedingly challenging. Founders waste considerable time and money, potentially resulting in burnout and failure before making meaningful progress or realizing a need to pivot.
This brings me to my first set of assumptions:
I assume that international founders have a difficult time connecting with their target profiles
I also assume that founders are bought into the idea of conducting customer discovery interviews in advance of entering a new market.
And now to another dimension of the problem: what about getting value out of a customer interview? In my experience, founders who come from non-sales backgrounds fail to conduct unbiased discovery calls. And it makes sense. The startup is their baby. They might have PMF or are approaching PMF in their market and they know the US is the largest market. Many founders recognize this is the market that will make or break their chance at becoming a unicorn company. So it’s really important that the people they interview tell them it’s a good idea. But niceties aren’t valuable. Insight into whether the interviewee recognizes that they have the problem your startup is trying to solve, would they buy a solution to that problem if it existed, how they search and discover those type of solutions, who else do they need to get buy-in from to purchase the solution and what they care about, and on and on.
Two more assumptions:
I assume that non-sales profile founders don’t know what categories of questions they should ask to inform key decisions like whether they should enter the market and how.
And I assume they don’t ask the right questions in those categories to get valuable insights from discovery conversations.
If the founder secures the interview and asks the right initial questions, synthesizing the data across multiple conversations while maintaining the contextual integrity of the interview is nearly impossible. In my experience working with early stage founders, they are easily pulled into new directions by feedback from customers without reaching a qualitative saturation point. They’re super motivated, and highly skilled, but they don’t think like trained researchers who understand how to analyze unstructured qualitative research and pull out key themes that persist across their dataset.
Breaking these into assumptions:
I assume that early-stage founders lack the skills required to synthesize and analyze qualitative data across multiple customer conversations.
I assume they make mistakes by heavily weighting single pieces of feedback which leads them to make the wrong decisions.
I assume that even if they do synthesize information across multiple conversations, they struggle to maintain the contextual integrity of the conversation.
Looking ahead
These are big assumptions that need to be tested in the market. Next week, I’ll share my plan to do exactly that.
The points you have made are so pertinent to any startup. What I have found is many founders do not and more likely cannot have an objective view of their "baby" as you call it. It is so difficult for founders to remove themselves from their product and see the realities of it. As you put it, are people willing to pay for it, and I think what you are building will definitely help founders answer that question. A biased view, hope and prayer does not bring paying customers, you need validation and confirmation of people actually wanting to buy your product.
Great post, looking forward to next weeks edition.