Best Market
Not always the first, not even the one you would have expected.
I met an entrepreneur yesterday who blew my mind.
Two years ago, she was building a consumer app. Beautiful interface. Slick onboarding. The kind of product that wins design awards and gets featured in app store spotlights.
But the numbers weren't adding up. User acquisition costs through the roof. Retention falling off a cliff. Investors asking hard questions about monetization.
And yet. Instead of throwing in the towel, she did something brilliant.
She stepped back. Looked at what they'd actually built underneath all that pretty UI. Realized they'd created something much more powerful than a consumer product. They'd built infrastructure.
"We realized our tech was more valuable as infrastructure than as a consumer product," she tells me. "So we pivoted to B2B."
Same core technology. Completely different market. And suddenly everything clicked.
Enterprise customers who understood the value immediately. Longer sales cycles but higher deal sizes. Customers who stuck around and expanded their usage over time.
Ask her about the pivot now. She laughs. "We were so focused on our first market, we almost missed our best market."
Here's what I love about this story. It's not about admitting failure. It's about recognizing opportunity. Sometimes your technology finds its true home in places you never expected.
The market you start with teaches you what you're actually good at. But the market you end up in? That's where you belong.
Here's to those brave enough to follow their technology to its natural market. Smart enough to know that your first idea about where you fit might not be your best idea.
Keep exploring!
A detailed version of this post is also published on my Substack publication. If you liked this post, consider subscribing to get more such posts in your inbox.