You've built your MVP… now what?
Or, as I prefer to call it: oh crap, the person who said they loved my idea has gone really quiet, and I want to follow up but I don't want to look like a stalker.
Launching your first product or service can be really scary. The thing is, the launch isn’t the scary bit. The scary part is going back to that list of people you validated previously and saying to them… okay, now let’s talk pricing.
But bear in mind, this isn't an article about sales. It’s an article about your market.
I’m starting with the market because it's the most important part.
It's the market that determines what you build, who you build it for, which channels you use, and what business model you need.
Get it right and everything afterwards gets easier. Get it wrong, and by the time you launch you may find that all those people who swore they'd buy are nowhere to be seen - awkwardly avoiding you at networking events, ghosting your emails, suddenly very busy.
Not that I speak from experience, obviously (!)
A lot of what follows you might already know, and that’s cool. But what I am looking to do is share with you three ways to reframe what you already think you know about your customer… to give you some direction as you come out of MVP phase.
These learnings come from:
1) running Oh Blimey, where I help startups and businesses break into new markets
2) from working in-house at a startup that went through exactly this;
3) from living and breathing my own MVP launch right now. Here’s a little plug to Startup Game.
Spoiler: this article is in fact a workshop that I have presented as part of the Better Events team, and many elements are from my experience presenting on startup incubator and accelerator programmes. Feel free to book me for your cohort.
Lesson 1: Telling people your product has a big market doesn't sound impressive. It sounds risky.
A few years back I was working with a founder in Europe. He was (is) a seriously smart guy, and had developed a great concept. It was a training app for new conference reps, and he has raised a healthy seed round.
He came to me with a simple ask: “can you help me land the paying customers I promised my investors I already had?”
Sure, I said. Let's see. So I asked the obvious first question: who's the target customer?
He was proud of this bit. He'd done loads of work on it, he told me.
It was this person:
CEOs in Europe, who use Hubspot, and their company is doing $1M+.
Huh. Okay. Any more than that? Nope, that was it. So I asked: how many paying customers do you need, and by when?
100,000 by December. Oh - and I don't have much budget for “marketing”.
Cool. Cool cool cool.
He was proud of that enormous market because he thought it signalled confidence to investors - the bigger market, bigger sales potential, right? But a market that size does the opposite of reassure me.
It tells me you don't yet know who actually buys. And it leaves you with a genuinely hard question: how do you turn "every CEO in Europe" into one paying customer this month?
What he'd built was a persona - which is code for a tidy list of demographics. Personas are useful for understanding who to target, but they miss the thing that matters: why would someone stop what they're currently doing and switch to your solution?
So where do you start instead?
You look for the traits of a best-fit customer — the small, specific slice of that giant market who will move first.
They'll pay the most to get the job done best. Your product doesn't need to be perfect or pretty. It needs to help them complete a task or solve a problem — and there needs to be an actual exchange of cash. (Founders get wrapped up in only launching when it's perfect. By then it's too late.)
There's real market potential - obviously. A tight niche still needs enough people in it to build a business on.
They have a high urgency, and a low ability to solve it themselves. They feel the pain now, and they can't easily fix it on their own.
Nail those and you've swapped "100,000 CEOs" for a handful of people you can name, reach, and sell to.
(This is the point where, in the workshop, we run a few exercises to help you map your own best-fit criteria — more on that at the end.)
Lesson 2: Stop talking about features. Start talking about outcomes.
The second reframe is about how you talk about your product.
Time and again, I hear new founders describe what they've built as a list of features: it's AI-powered, it's SaaS, it's simplified.
And I get it, you're proud of the thing. But it's really hard to change someone's behaviour by reciting features at them, especially when you're up against bigger, more established players who can out-feature you all day long.
One of the most effective things you can do to win those early customers is to talk about what they'll be able to do as a result of using your product.
A framework that helps here is Jobs To Be Done (JTBD).
The core idea is people "hire" products to make progress in their lives, and "fire" the ones that stop doing the job.
Nobody wants your features, they want the progress your features unlock. This part is important, especially when you’re super new to a market.
Let’s say you’re selling advertising services. Your customer isn’t buying ad space, they’re investing in a super expert creative who knows how to tell customer stories and has the know-how to complement a targeting strategy… that gets you brand awareness.
That’s what I suggest you sell - sell the progress, the outcome.
Trust me, you're suddenly far more persuasive than the feature list next to you. Read more on this by delving into how to apply marketing to the Jobs to be Done framework.
Look at how brands you know landed their first few customers, and you’ll start to see this everywhere:
Salesforce didn't sell you a database of contacts. It sold "No Software" - freedom from clunky on-premise tools.
LinkedIn Learning doesn't sell video courses… It sells the version of you that's ready for the next role.
Figma didn't sell design software. It sold a team designing together, in real time, without emailing files back and forth.
Lesson 3: It's all in the positioning.
Now we get to positioning… and specifically, working out which context to sell into first.
A common mistake new businesses make - especially when the pressure's on to land paying customers - is assuming they have to compete against every kind of competitor at once.
You don't. You only need to win one battle first. And the thing that helps you choose it is positioning.
Positioning is one of the most misunderstood - and, let's be honest, most butchered-by-marketers - terms out there.
The simplest way to describe it comes from April Dunford: positioning is how you answer "why choose us, right now?" Here’s some more thoughts on April’s approach to positioning for startups.
So how do you use it?
Work out why you're the best option to help someone achieve a specific outcome.
Look at the different types of competitor and figure out which context makes your solution the obvious choice.
And — a little Game of Thrones, I know — you do this while quietly exposing your competitors' weaknesses.
You pick the fight you're destined (or less dramatic, best placed) to win.
To work out which competitor to go up against, you need to know the three types you're up against whether you like it or not.
All three are competing for your customer's attention:
Direct competitors - another product that does basically the same thing you do. The obvious rival.
Indirect competitors -a different type of product that solves the same problem a different way.
Replacements - the sneaky one. The manual workaround, the spreadsheet, the intern, the "we just don't bother." Often your biggest competitor isn't a company at all; it's the status quo.
Spoiler alert: it's the customer who tells you which bucket you live in — not you.
You might think you're a slick, direct competitor to the market leader, while your customer is mentally comparing you to a spreadsheet they already trust. Listen for that. It changes everything about how you position.
(In the workshop, this is where we'd walk through a real example — mapping your competitors into those three buckets and choosing the context where you're most likely to win.)
So, where does that leave you?
Trade the giant, impressive-sounding market for a specific, reachable best-fit customer.
Stop selling features and start selling the outcome - the progress people are desperately looking for an alternative to help them with
Position yourself against the one competitor you can beat right now, in the context where you win.
Do that, and the buyer who went quiet becomes a lot easier to understand — and a lot less likely to ghost you at the next networking event.
If you want help doing this properly - with the exercises that turn each of these lessons into your own answers - that's exactly what I run as a workshop at Oh Blimey.
Come and map your market with me. Get in touch
