🧠 Stop pitching to people who will never buy
84% of the market buy—yet you're spending your finite resources trying to convert them anyway. Let's fix that. Here's the pyramid that finds the 16% actually desperate enough to buy now.
Hey friends 👋
You’re six months in. $150K of runway down.
You’ve shipped features customers asked for. You’ve had dozens of “great conversations” that ended with “circle back next quarter.” Your pipeline is full of “interested” prospects who ghost you after the demo.
Then, a moment of clarity: these people were never going to buy in the first place.
They said your solution was “interesting.” They agreed they had the problem. Some even gave you feature requests. But none of them were desperate enough to pull the trigger. You just spent six months and half your runway trying to convert the unconvertible.
It’s not surprising. Not really.
Because only 16% of any market will adopt something new. If you’re not explicitly filtering for them, you’re burning 84 cents of every dollar on people who will never buy from you.
It’s called the diffusion of innovation. And it can be your superpower.
Let’s dive deep 👇
Most founders treat the market like they have infinite time to educate and convert everyone.
They’re working on “awareness”.
It’s a trap, but sounds reasonable: “we’re targeting everyone who has this problem.”
Big market, big opportunity.
Except in the early stage, “everyone who has the problem” is the kiss of death. A startup has finite money and finite focus, and overly broad targeting dilutes your potency to nothing.
The diffusion of innovation tells us that innovators and early adopters make up 16% of any market. The other 84% — early majority, late majority, laggards — won’t buy anything new until it’s already proven, safe, and probably required by their boss.
So when you’re targeting “all small businesses with inventory problems,” you’re spending your limited runway pitching to people who need 10 case studies, 6 months of consideration, and a guarantee you’ll still exist next year.
We ain’t got time for that 💩
The adoption curve isn’t gradual for startups. It’s binary: someone is in the 16% who’ll buy new things, or they’re in the 84% who won’t.
And the 84% won’t become the 16% just because you have a better sales pitch.
Specificity wins.
Say you’re a SaaS founder building project management software.
You can target all small businesses that need to track projects — massive market, looks big on a TAM slide.
Or you can target accounting firms with 10-30 employees who’ve jury-rigged QuickBooks, three shared Google Sheets, and a Slack channel into a project tracker because nothing fits their client billing workflow.
The first group is 10,000 companies. Maybe 1,600 are early adopters. But you have no idea which ones, so you spray and pray.
The second group is 200 companies. But you know they’re desperate — they’ve already hacked together a broken solution. They’re searching for alternatives. They have budget because this pain costs them real money every week. And they’re easy to find.
That’s potency. That’s where your finite resources actually move the needle.
Find your 16% with the early adopter pyramid.
Steve Blank gave us a framework that should be tattooed on every founder’s forearm: The Early Adopter Pyramid.
Level 1: They have the problem
Table stakes. They experience the pain you’re solving. So do 10,000 other people. This is where most founders stop thinking — “They have the problem, so they’ll buy the solution!”
Nope.
Having a problem doesn’t mean caring about it. Your inbox is a disaster. Your garage is full of junk. Your passwords are all “Password123.” You have these problems. But you’re not buying solutions.
Level 2: They know they have the problem.
Now we’re filtering. They don’t just have the problem — they know they have it. They’ve named it. They’ve complained about it. They’ve mentioned it in team meetings.
This matters because awareness is expensive to create. If you have to educate the market that they have a problem, you’re doing two jobs: creating the category AND building the product. Early-stage startups don’t have resources for both.
You need people who already know they’re bleeding.
Level 3: They are seeking out a solution.
This is the bare minimum to even be interested in a solution. They’re not just aware — they’re searching. Googling it. Asking in Slack communities. Comparing options on G2.
If they’re not actively looking, the problem isn’t severe or urgent enough.
“Nice to have” problems kill startups.
You need “I lose sleep over this” problems.
Level 4: They hacked together a “solution”.
Desperation rears its ugly head.
They’ve already invested effort trying to solve this themselves. They’ve built a Zapier chain held together with duct tape. They’ve repurposed tools never meant for this use case. They’ve hired someone to manually do the thing that should be automated.
This is proof of urgency.
They’re already paying the “pain tax” — spending time, money, or sanity on a broken workaround. They know the value of a real solution because they’re living the cost of not having one.
You’re looking for things like:
“We export data from System A, clean it in Excel, then import it to System B every Monday.”
“Our intern spends 10 hours a week copy-pasting between these tools.”
“I have a shared Google Sheet with 47 tabs that runs our entire operation.”
These people are desperate. They’re already bought in spending resources to solve the problem. They just need something that actually works.
Level 5: They have the resources.
Urgency without resources is still a no. They need budget (or authority to create it), time to implement, mental bandwidth to onboard, and the capacity to switch from their current broken solution.
The “broke and desperate” trap is real. A solo founder with $200 in the bank and 90-hour weeks might have urgent pain, but they can’t buy your $500/month SaaS and spend 20 hours onboarding.
Resources aren’t just money — they’re attention, organizational slack, and the ability to change behavior.
It’s time to head into the lab.
Say 10,000 companies have your problem. Run them down:
Has the problem: 10,000
Aware they have it: 3,000 (70% don’t notice or care)
Actively looking: 800 (most just live with awareness)
Hacked a solution: 120 (signals real urgency)
Has resources to buy: 47 (the intersection of desperate and able)
That’s your early adopter market: 47 companies.
Not 10,000.
And that’s exactly what you want. Because you can actually reach 47 people. You can learn their specific pain. You can build for their exact use case. You can close deals in days instead of quarters.
The math makes most founders uncomfortable.
But 47 desperate early adopters beats 10,000 “interested” contacts — every time. Because the 47 will actually buy.
Not eventually. Right now.
Next week in Part 2: You’ve got the framework. Now how do you actually find those 47 people? Two battle-tested approaches — one for when you know your market, one for when you don’t — and why most founders screw both of them up.
Until next week,
—jdm