Shared post from Cognel:
💰The most expensive startup mistake: choosing the wrong customer.💰
Building the wrong product is expensive.
But building for the wrong customer is often even more expensive.A good product can be adapted.
Months spent learning from the wrong market are much harder to recover.
We've noticed that many founders treat customer selection as an intuitive step.
Something they "figure out" along the way.
Yet customer selection is arguably one of the highest-stakes decisions a startup will make.
Your first customers shape:
🔹 Product features
🔹 Pricing
🔹 Positioning
🔹 Your fundraising narrative
🔹 Future opportunitiesAnd when you can explain how you chose your customer—not just who you chose—fundraising becomes much easier.
Investors are far more likely to trust a decision when they can understand the reasoning behind it.
Maybe customer discovery should start earlier than we think...
Not with interviews.
But with a structured way to identify who is most likely to care in the first place.
#CustomerDiscovery #DeepTech #Startups #Accelerators #Innovation