Selecting the right customers = your biggest growth lever
Happy Monday Founders,
Everyone talks about product-market fit.
takes it further and talks about the four fits: product/market fit, market/model fit, channel/model fit, and product/channel fit.These fit frameworks are great heuristics but the reality is a bit more complex.
Everything is linked.
I’ve been riffing on a framework for my growth consultancy and wanted to share a rough draft of a second order effects analysis-
What you will find is that your target customer selection is the SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT STRATEGIC DECISION YOU WILL MAKE.
Naturally, the second most important lever is the problem(s)/use cases you choose to solve.
This might seem obvious to some, but I see a lot of startups and software companies that start by building a solution to a problem FIRST, without a specific customer in mind. This approach is not necessarily wrong, but it makes things a lot harder.
Your customer choice cascades into everything else: which problems matter, which channels work, how big your market is, who you're competing against, what brand resonates, and how they buy.
So what’s the takeaway? Choose your customer like your company depends on it — because it does.
PS: I’ve rebranded this newsletter to ‘Customer Acquisition Engine‘ - expect actionable channel playbooks, growth strategy deep-dives, customer journey optimisation, and go-to-market frameworks.
PPS: If you’re an early-stage B2B SaaS founder, check out the Agile Founders Slack community.