Every week, I advise founders on how to hit $10k MRR. On Tuesdays, I share my consulting notes from those private sessions. Learn from their mistakes so you don't burn your own cash.
You're targeting the wrong person in the room
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Hey Reader, During a mentoring session last week, a B2B SaaS team walked me through their go-to-market logic. They were targeting retailers in the CPG space. The reason? Retailers could mandate that vendors use the platform. Force the supply chain from the top. It sounded smart. It was a trap. I stopped them and asked one question: Who bleeds the most money when this problem goes unsolved? This is a pattern I see constantly in early-stage B2B. Founders confuse power with pain, and they are not the same axis. The powerful entity – the retailer, the enterprise buyer, the platform giant – has leverage, yes. But leverage doesn't create urgency. Pain does. The supplier bleeding money at the end of the quarter has every reason to fight for your product in procurement meetings, beg their finance team to approve the budget, and evangelize it to peers. The retailer with power? They'll park your request in a committee and move on. Your true champion is the one who can't afford the status quo, not the one who controls the room. Power players are convenient in theory. Pain holders are dangerous in practice – dangerous in the best possible way, because they become internal salespeople you never had to hire. The Clarity Filter Insight In B2B, build for whoever is bleeding the most money – not whoever has the most leverage. [Share on LinkedIn] [Share on X] Pull up your supply chain or buyer map today. Draw two columns: power and pain. If they're pointing at the same entity, great. If they're not – and they usually aren't – reconsider who you're building for. The deal you close with the pain holder will close faster, renew harder, and refer louder than the one you spent six months negotiating with the gatekeeper. Speak soon, P.S. Don't write code for a product nobody wants to buy. I built Traction OS to give you the exact 60-day roadmap, sales scripts, and validation templates you need to hit your first $10k MRR without guessing. From complete scratch or with an existing MVP. |
Clarity Filter
Every week, I advise founders on how to hit $10k MRR. On Tuesdays, I share my consulting notes from those private sessions. Learn from their mistakes so you don't burn your own cash.
Hey Reader, A founder I spoke with last week thought he had social selling dialed in. "I can ask a friend who knows an e-commerce manager to make an introduction," he said. I had to stop him right there. That's a warm referral. A perfectly valid tactic – but not social selling. Calling it social selling is like calling a taxi a road trip. Same road, completely different commitment. Here's what social selling actually looks like: Step 1: Find your exact ICPs on LinkedIn. Not broadly....
Hey Reader, A founder I work with was freezing up on every cold call. Not because he didn't know his product. Because every call felt like a performance review – him auditioning, the prospect judging. The pressure was killing his ability to actually listen. So we tried something that felt almost too simple. He started paying prospects $100 for a one-hour research interview. Not a demo. Not a pitch. A conversation where he asked questions, took notes, and genuinely tried to understand their...
Hey Reader, A founder I work with spent weeks validating his SaaS with Account Executives. The data was damning: AEs lose roughly 53% of their deals because they're prioritizing the wrong opportunities. But when he brought this up in conversations, prospects shut down. Not because they disagreed. Because they couldn't admit it. The problem wasn't the product. It was the pitch. He was, without realizing it, opening every conversation with: "You are bad at your job, and I have a fix." Nobody...