Being close to a problem can make you dangerously confident about the buyer. Ayse Guvencer calls it the domain expert trap: once you’ve lived with the pain yourself, it’s easy to assume other people will want to solve it the same way.
She came to that view after moving from agency work and roles at Google and Sage into advising early-stage companies. She expected to focus on marketing, and the work soon pulled her back into the product because teams were sometimes trying to sell around assumptions they hadn’t tested.
She now works on those questions through ELVT Advisory. In one reporting-software project, buyer conversations showed that the team built something more complicated than the problem people thought they had. Those conversations led them to strip the product back.
In this episode, we get into how your own instinct can narrow your view of the market and how much weight to give enthusiastic early customers. We also look at the research that can expose a weak idea of who your customer is before more money goes into product or sales, including what to ask people who churned.
🔗 Find Ayse on LinkedIn, ELVT Advisory & Founder’s Stack Trace
Key takeaways
1️⃣ Early enthusiasm can mislead you
Early adopters are useful because they’ll tolerate an unfinished product and tell you what they want next. Their enthusiasm can also keep you building features the wider market doesn’t need. Treat those requests as evidence to investigate, then test them against the problem buyers are actually trying to solve.
2️⃣ Expertise needs outside evidence
Solving a problem yourself gives you a strong starting point, while also narrowing the range of solutions you can imagine. In the reporting-software example, buyers were already handling the problem with simpler workarounds. Use your experience to start the investigation, then find out whether other buyers see the problem the same way.
3️⃣ A job title won’t define your ICP
Two people with the same job title can be in completely different buying situations. Look at what has changed enough to create the need, then work out who else influences the purchase. A role name alone tells you very little about whether somebody is ready to buy.
4️⃣ Category creation has an education bill
Creating a category means paying to educate buyers before you can sell them the solution. That is a heavy burden for an early software business with limited resources. If the problem already exists inside an established market, focusing on a segment of that market can be a much cheaper route.
5️⃣ Talk to the customers who left
Start with people who still use the product, then make time for those who left. The second group can show you where expectations broke. Interview five current customers and five who left, using open questions and enough silence to hear the answers you didn’t expect. At one startup, former customers were offered a €20 Amazon gift card for a 15-minute call.
Also mentioned in this episode:
• The Kano model: A framework for prioritising product features by how they affect customer satisfaction.
• Steve Blank’s Customer Development Manifesto: The customer-development principles behind getting out of the building and testing assumptions with real buyers.
• Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore: The book behind the episode’s discussion of moving from early adopters to mainstream buyers.
In this episode
00:00 Episode highlights
01:51 Marketing wasn't the starting point
03:11 When buyers don't understand the product
05:26 Which features deserve to survive
08:24 The domain expert trap
11:59 From early adopters to enterprise
15:27 The market was bigger than expected
18:20 Diagnose the business problem first
24:02 Category creation gets expensive fast
26:43 Reaching buyers without blasting them
30:27 The 10-customer reality check
33:44 Where instinct still matters
