Every time I see a startup pitch for funding, the founders include an assessment of the size of the market, they are going after. The more detailed ones also give an assessment of the size of that market, they believe they can make their own and why.
It is all well and good. Sometimes I might even think that the slide is in the boilerplate department, where it’s there because it’s expected, but it’s not the most sexy or informative slide.
But what I have learned is that it is actually more important than that. That if you get this wrong or don’t think enough of it, you can potentially end up in a place, where you and your startup find yourselves stuck between a rock and a hard place.
Why that is has something to do with the first share of land, you grab in your market – the beachhead.
Normally, when we talk about beachheads, we refer to them as a representation of the segment you go for first in order to prove your value proposition and achieve the illustrious Product-Market Fit. It’s your assessment of where the best match between your customers pain and the relief, you can bring to the customer, is the best at this particular stage of your startups life.
You go after a beachhead, because you want to get traction ASAP to show your investors – and potentially also the first significant revenue to show for it. And it makes total sense.
But – and this is a big but – if you’re not mindful about the bigger market opportunity, your specific plans to get there and the narrative about what you’re doing right now, you run the real risk of getting stuck in the midst of what otherwise might look like a success.
What could potentially happen, if you’re not careful, is that your beachhead becomes your market. That what was once thought of as the first small slice of a big cake becomes the entire cake.
If that happens you may develop a super strong position in a niche market, but you will never be able to scale your business to the bigger market opportunity, you will need in order to find investors, who are willing to put up the ressources required to be there. In other words you risk turning into an ok business on the longer term rather than an amazing business. Which – without saying anything bad about ok businesses in general – just seems like a wasted opportunity.
And this is where we come back to the role of the beachhead.
It is super easy to get excited about your beachhead, when you start seeing traction in it. You naturally want more, and you want to build on the early success. And you can do that, but you need to control the narrative.
You need to keep telling yourself, your investors and everybody else who might listen that what you’re currently doing is NOT the end goal but just a beachhead. That while you’re killing it in your beach head, you understand the fundamental dynamics and value of your product in a larger context for different segments of customers, and you’re well on your way towards branching out.
Thus, your narrative and your operations becomes about the beachhead based on what a beachhead should be; a stepping tone towards making real landgrab in land. If you can balance the two stories about what’s happening now and where you’re taking it, you’ll have a much more compelling story to tell. Not least to the investors, you will need to enable you to get the ressources you need to make real landgrab and fulfill the potential, you set out to fulfill.
If you don’t get this right, the risk is that you end up becoming a de facto niche player doing a stellar job in too small a market that no investor really sees the upside in. And if that happens being able to move the needle and move inland will become infinitely harder. Just don’t go there, when there is an alternative that is so much better by just being more conscious about how you stay the course.
(Photo by frank mckenna on Unsplash)