Last week I edited a one hour conversation down to the version going on YouTube this week. It is a session from our Spike Series March online conference: Scott from our team interviewing a founder we have worked with for two years. The editing system I wrote about last week did the heavy lifting, so my job was mostly listening. When you edit, you hear the same conversation ten times. Around the fifth pass, one exchange stopped me.

The founder had validated his idea twice. Early users loved the product and got real, measurable results with it. Later, people in his industry kept telling him the same thing: "this is so needed". By every standard test, demand was proven. And still, for months, he won one customer a month while his team burned hours on outreach. On the panel he was not describing a validation problem. He was describing something else, and it may be apply to you as well.

Scott opened the session with another company we worked with: consumer health products, 30 million dollars in sales inside the first year and a half. They went out to raise and investors kept saying no. To the team it felt absurd. We have all this revenue, why will nobody invest? The answer was uncomfortable. They had grown fast, but they could not explain why it worked, so they could not show it would work again. Investors were not rejecting the numbers.
They were rejecting revenue nobody could explain.

The founder on the panel closed the same gap from the other side. What finally moved his sales was not more proof that the problem was real. It was resolution on how the yes actually happens.

Who inside the customer could quietly kill the deal: the specialist whose job his product seemed to threaten.

What message turned that person from a blocker into an ally: this tool makes you stronger, it does not replace you.

And which prospects could never actually buy, so they had to stop counting as pipeline. None of that is validation. All of it is clarity. Once he had it, one customer a month became one a week, then several a day, and the bottleneck moved from selling to onboarding.

Validation proves the problem is real. Clarity explains why the sale happens. Only clarity repeats.

Founders keep collecting validation because it feels good and it is cheap to get. Nobody funds it, and nobody can scale it.

Try this on your own pipeline this week:

1. Write down why your last five customers said yes, one line each. If the five reasons are all different, you have validation without clarity.
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2. Name the person inside your customer who can quietly kill the deal even when the buyer wants it. Write down what they are afraid of, and what your message says to them today. Probably nothing.
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3. Draw your floor. Which of your open conversations cannot actually buy this year, because of size, budget, or timing? Take them out of the pipeline count and look at what is left. That number is your real pipeline.

The full conversation is on YouTube: Worth the 30 minutes if the gap between proof and clarity sounds familiar.

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And on Thursday we are testing this live. Scott is running a free one hour working session on Zoom about the same question: who actually buys from you, and why.

There are four hot seats where we take a company’s real customer profile and pressure-test it on the call.

Register here: https://luma.com/ac7ngt5g

If you want one of the hot seats, register and then reply “seat” so I can flag you.

Alessandro

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Alessandro Marianantoni Founder at M Studio Weekly notes on what actually moves a founder's GTM. ​Recent LinkedIn posts →​

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