🔀 Users ≠ customers

This week in The Pivot: sucking down effusive praise like french fries from users who have no ability to buy.

Hey friends 👋

Every Monday in The Pivot, we share one anti-pattern we’re seeing from founders in the Traction Lab ecosystem, and the quick redirect that makes all the difference—in just 250 words.

Here’s this week’s:

The anti-pattern: building for happy users, not buyers.

Founders are getting incredible feedback from people who use their product daily—product managers love the Slack bot, HR managers rave about the compliance platform, tech leads say the code review tool is brilliant.

So they build more features, run more pilots, collect more testimonials.

Then they try to convert… and discover that none of these enthusiastic users can actually buy. They need approval from a VP, a CFO, someone who’s never even seen the product and doesn’t feel the pain it solves.

The fix: respect their authority (or lack thereof).

Ask two questions about every person in your pilot:

1. Is it their budget that buys this?

2. Do they have authority to spend it?

If the answer to either is “no,” stop validating with them and start validating with whoever says “yes” to both.

Bring economic buyers into the conversation before the pilot even starts. Design your validation around their pain, not just the user’s pain. You’re not selling to the person who clicks buttons.

You’re selling to the person who signs checks.

The tool: the Economic Buyer Diagnostic.

Before any pilot, identify who controls the budget and has signing authority. Then ask: “What value do THEY get from this purchase, even if they never use the product?” Time savings for users isn’t enough—you need ROI for buyers.

Until next week,

—jdm

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