When I started Mirage, I went hunting for “desperate” customers to validate direction. The playbook for enterprise seemed straightforward: cold outreach → design partners → first cohort. It worked. But then I learned a crucial lesson that turned my assumptions upside down: desperation != urgency.
In enterprises, the person feeling the pain rarely controls the budget. Executive buyers get looped in, procurement cycles kick off, and committees form. If a problem isn’t truly urgent, these deals turn into molasses. The litmus test: Are you selling a painkiller or a vitamin? Corporate bureaucracy can move at lightspeed when there’s a bleeding wound and an immediate fix. Everything else gets stuck in the machine.
Being a Strong Founder Makes This Worse
“If you’re a strong founder, you can sell anything. You can get weak product-market fit out of almost any idea, and that’s a problem.”
— Immad Akhund (Mercury’s Path to Product-Market Fit)
It’s never been easier for a strong founder to fall into the fake product-market fit trap. If you’re a strong founder, you will undoubtedly be able to sell something. This problem compounds when you believe you’re fishing in the right pond, raise a bunch of money, and double down on an idea that will have a middling outcome. You didn’t sign up to build a small business. You signed up for venture scale or bust.
Order Taking
The best signal of an outsized outcome is when sales feels like order taking. It’s hard to describe until you’ve felt it, but customers start lining up. You won’t be selling anymore; your customers will be buying.
My take: go slow to go fast. Don’t spin up marketing and a sales team until you feel that pull. If you can’t close $1M without marketing spend and 10 AEs, you might be building something middling. Don’t get distracted by desperation if you can’t find urgency.