Ninety-five percent (95%) of seed series companies face challenges with customer acquisition.
Think about that for a minute. If you can’t convert prospects, you can’t succeed. If your customer acquisition strategy is broken, your venture is broken. Full stop.
You don’t have to look far for proof of this - fewer seed stage companies are making it to series A than ever before. The failure of seed-stage companies has risen to above 60%, which means overcoming this customer acquisition gap is more important now than ever.
Founders get this.
But they’re being told to solve it by outcompeting during customer consideration. There are millions of articles written on customer acquisition strategy and the vast majority focus on outcompeting. Being better. Faster. Less expensive.
For a seed-stage company, this approach is borderline ludacris. Competing with an entrenched Category King or Queen as a complete unknown is an uphill battle at best, and more commonly a race to the bottom and ultimately, a ticket to oblivion.
It’s also a symptom of a bigger problem in startup culture called Market Myopia. Market myopia is opportunity blindness, where the ability to see the possibility of a new market is completely overwhelmed and obscured by the reality of the current market.
But as it turns out, if you can overcome market myopia, you can also overcome many of the issues plaguing customer acquisition.
All markets are built on unsolved problems that have real costs for real people. Problems that these real people would be willing to pay to resolve, if only they: (1) knew of the problem, and (2) realized there was a means for solving it.
The key to overcoming the 'Customer Acquisition Gap' is to identify and solve that costly problem nobody else is able to. Then you move from an unproven option in a pool of many (proven) options, to the only solution. You move from procurement-driven negotiations to something far more desirable - a line item in a budget.
So how do you actually go about doing this? We go into more details in the Play Bigger Founder’s Workbook, which is free to download.
And you can also feel free to reach out to us - we’d love to hear your perspective on the category acquisition gap, market myopia and how they are impacting your business.
Stay tuned as we talk next about driving urgency in the pipeline.
