If Customers Won’t Pay, You’re Probably Ahead of Your Time

A lesser founder sees a product that nobody will buy and considers changing the product. A visionary recognises a timing problem. The market is not rejecting the idea. It is failing to arrive at the correct point in history.

This distinction is essential. A product problem requires work. A timing problem requires patience, a compelling narrative and somebody else paying the office rent.

Segment the feedback

Customers who like the idea are early believers. Customers who dislike it are not the target market. Customers who like it but will not pay are evidence of strong engagement. These categories cover most eventualities without requiring a sale.

If a customer says the product is unnecessary, ask what they would have said about the telephone in 1876. There is no need to establish whether your subscription service for digital desk ornaments is meaningfully comparable. The year does most of the work.

Build an education strategy

A market that does not want your product clearly needs educating. Publish guides explaining the problem, webinars explaining the guides and a certification demonstrating that someone has understood the webinar.

Do not allow the education business to become profitable. That could suggest you have accidentally discovered a different business, creating an uncomfortable discussion about what the original one was for.

Choose a patient metric

Revenue is impatient. It demands that something has happened already. Replace it with intent, awareness or the number of people who said “interesting” during a demonstration. Interesting is a remarkably durable metric because it has no agreed relationship with purchasing.

Keep your projections ambitious. The further away the revenue, the less anyone can sensibly argue about its precise size. A five-year forecast should resemble a ski jump viewed from the wrong end.

Stay close to the customer in principle

Continue conducting interviews, but gradually select participants who are better at recognising your vision. Friends, advisers and people hoping for a job tend to provide a more constructive account of product-market fit.

Eventually, you may need to close the company. Describe this as a decision to pause ahead of the market, which preserves the possibility that the market will one day catch up and apologise. Keep the domain name. Being right in retrospect is considerably cheaper than being operational in the present.