Should startups position and package narrowly for a specific segment or broadly across the market?

Daniel Erickson · Jun 5, 2020

Founders should target the largest segment that has the highest PMF score, even if that segment is small, and expand from there rather than starting broad.

The most passionate users — those who would be most disappointed to lose the product — give you a foothold you can expand into a larger market from.

Scope: applies to the segmentation phase of finding PMF

11:34 20VC: How To Scientifically Measure Product-Market Fit, How To Efficiently and Accurately Segment Users Into Cohorts, Why Investors Analysing CAC's at Pre-Seed Is Not Useful & How To Determine Between Customer Feedback to Accept vs Reject with Daniel Eric

Jordan Van Horn · Aug 17, 2022

Even horizontal products must focus their early reps on a narrow set of accounts rather than chasing large enterprises they aren't ready to serve

You have limited hours in a day and can only talk to so many people, so you must prioritize the highest value ones; early Notion lacked things like single sign-on needed to sell to banks

Scope: applies to early product stage

9:58 20 Sales: Three Reasons Why Sales People Fail | The Two Things That Matter When Hiring Sales Leaders | Why Revenue, Discounting and Price Do Not Matter in the Early Days with Jordan Van Horn, Revenue Leader @ Monte Carlo

Hugo Barra · Nov 9, 2022

For horizontal products you should pick your likely champions/ambassadors and tailor the story to them first rather than marketing to all segments at once; only once the product is 'a thing' can you afford to dilute the message

Power users who really care want to feel you are focused on them, and they are the ones who will carry the product through its lifecycle by talking to friends

Scope: especially in the one-to-ten stage before the product has massively taken off; story can be tailored per channel later in press and paid marketing

33:56 20 Product: Hugo Barra on Lessons Building Hardware Products at Android, Xiaomi, Oculus, and Detect; Feature Kings vs. Budget Kings; 996 Work Culture in China; There Are No MVPs in Hardware; The 3.5-Hour Recruiting Interview

Harry Stebbings · Nov 9, 2022

Choosing an initial customer segment is fundamental — it determines your tags and messaging and is how you actually reach product market fit

Focus on one segment is what gets you to product market fit within that segment

34:50 20 Product: Hugo Barra on Lessons Building Hardware Products at Android, Xiaomi, Oculus, and Detect; Feature Kings vs. Budget Kings; 996 Work Culture in China; There Are No MVPs in Hardware; The 3.5-Hour Recruiting Interview

Maggie Hott · Dec 14, 2022

Founders make a common mistake trying to be everything to everyone and chasing giant enterprise logos like Walmart too early

Procurement at that scale takes well over a year, sales cycles are long, competition for attention is intense, and an early product probably can't support or staff such a customer

27:24 20 Sales: Webflow's Maggie Hott on When to Start and How to Scale the Best Outbound Sales Team, Why Founders Should Not Hire a Head of Sales First, The Must Ask Questions When Hiring Sales Reps and How To Structure the Process

Harry Stebbings · Jan 16, 2023

Founders should target an initial audience so specific it seems outrageous, then expand from there

Scope: framed as advice he often gives founders

21:20 20VC: a16z's Jeff Jordan on The Ultimate Guide to Investing in Marketplaces, Two Core Features to Look for in All Marketplace Investments, Why Fragmented Supply is so Important & Lessons from Airbnb, Pinterest and Instacart on What Makes the Best Cohorts

Jeff Jordan · Jan 16, 2023

Marketplaces should launch by serving a narrow, specific community extremely well and add use cases on top of that later

Early on the only way to find product market fit is heavy experimentation on both sides to see who it resonates with best; Airbnb started with 20-something budget-and-community-minded travelers and only later became a mass-market brand

Scope: applies to the earliest product-market-fit stage

25:41 20VC: a16z's Jeff Jordan on The Ultimate Guide to Investing in Marketplaces, Two Core Features to Look for in All Marketplace Investments, Why Fragmented Supply is so Important & Lessons from Airbnb, Pinterest and Instacart on What Makes the Best Cohorts

Cliff Obrecht · Jan 27, 2023

Rather than attempting the big global idea immediately, it was right to first solve a narrow real problem people had

They didn't believe they could create the big global thing from Perth with no venture capital, so they picked school yearbooks where he had seen coordinators genuinely struggle

Scope: reflecting on their own path from Fusion Books to Canva

4:22 20VC: Canva Co-Founder, Cliff Obrecht on The Journey From 100 VC Rejections to a $40BN Company, Why Good Enough is Not Good Enough, The Secret to Hiring Non-Obvious Talent and Relationships to Money and Why They Are Giving Away Billions

Cliff Obrecht · Jan 27, 2023

Choosing an initial audience with the most acute version of the problem — social media marketers for visual content — was a key driver of Canva's early growth

Social media is a visual content beast that constantly needs feeding, so that audience had the biggest need for visual content creation

26:16 20VC: Canva Co-Founder, Cliff Obrecht on The Journey From 100 VC Rejections to a $40BN Company, Why Good Enough is Not Good Enough, The Secret to Hiring Non-Obvious Talent and Relationships to Money and Why They Are Giving Away Billions

Cliff Obrecht · Jan 27, 2023

Start niche and go wide: solve one group's problem extremely well, then expand into adjacent industries and professions with the same problem, rather than boiling the ocean

This is what Canva did, and it answers the VC objection that the initial market looks too small

27:55 20VC: Canva Co-Founder, Cliff Obrecht on The Journey From 100 VC Rejections to a $40BN Company, Why Good Enough is Not Good Enough, The Secret to Hiring Non-Obvious Talent and Relationships to Money and Why They Are Giving Away Billions

Guy Podjarny · May 24, 2023

Horizontal products must pick a specific subset of users to be amazing at first; you cannot be everything to everyone without being crap at all of it

Every problem is more complicated than it looks once you unravel the customer's full use case, and go-to-market needs a group of people who talk to one another to create a flywheel

Scope: platform vision can still be everything-to-everyone as an aspiration

19:23 20VC: Why Being First To Market Does Not Matter, Why You Do Not Have Defensibility on Day 1, How to Analyse Market Size and Present it to Investors, Vitamins vs Painkillers; Do Vitamins Survive Recessions and Good vs Great Messaging with Guy Podjarny @ Sn

Ilir Sela · Aug 4, 2023

Slice's model could win in many categories, but deliberately constraining focus to pizza independents is the right strategy until it earns the right to expand

Constraint is what allows them to be the best-in-class partner for these independents

Scope: expansion contemplated later, once earned

42:13 20VC: Why "Hire Great People and Get Out of the Way" is Total BS, Why Your Upbringing Can Make You a Worse Leader & A Bentley, Two Nissan Cubes and Becoming One of Macedonia's Largest Employers; The Story of Slice with Ilir Sela

Howie Liu · Aug 25, 2023

Airtable should have guided its early adoption toward team-centric use cases, especially large teams, rather than letting a wide range of adoption happen diffusely.

Team-scale use cases monetize better and open up more aggressive go-to-market models.

Scope: retrospective judgment on his own company

3:55 20Product: Enterprises are not Adopting AI Yet, When Will AI Break Into Enterprise, What are the Blockers, What Do Enterprises Need from AI & Why Services Companies Will Win in the Next 10 Years of AI Implementation with Howie Liu, Founder & CEO @ Airtabl

Howie Liu · Aug 25, 2023 · hedged

For horizontal products whose use cases are not self-evident, early verticalization into a few use cases matters more — while preserving platform optionality so the product isn't hard-coded to those narrow cases.

Early on, when the market is still figuring out what the thing is, going deep on a few use cases and fully solving them is what gets you across the chasm.

Scope: applies mainly where use cases are not self-evident; acknowledges these are pithy abstractions that get harder when specific

5:42 20Product: Enterprises are not Adopting AI Yet, When Will AI Break Into Enterprise, What are the Blockers, What Do Enterprises Need from AI & Why Services Companies Will Win in the Next 10 Years of AI Implementation with Howie Liu, Founder & CEO @ Airtabl

Harry Stebbings · Oct 16, 2023

The single biggest mistake companies make pre product-market fit is failing to focus on a narrow enough customer segment; they should target an almost impossibly small audience and earn the right to do the next thing

Scope: applies pre product-market fit

22:33 20VC: The Two Biggest Mistakes Every Founder Makes, Why Founders Are Not Ambitious Enough Today, Why Having a Narrow Target Customer is Dangerous & The Three Possible Outcomes in Company Building with Matthew Prince, Co-Founder @ Cloudflare

Ed Sim · Jan 10, 2024

Founders should start on a narrow path solving one end user's problem 10x better and only market the platform vision, rather than trying to build a platform from the beginning

A 10-person company cannot sell a platform and compete against giants; it's not the TAM you start with, it's the TAM you exit with, and you want a founder who can start in one place with the option to jump into three others

Scope: applies to the average, unknown founder rather than proven repeat founders

36:34 20VC: Did Figma Kill M&A Markets in 2024, The Three Biggest Mistakes Made in Growth Investing, The Three Requirements Companies Need to Go Public in 2024 with Ed Sim and Jamin Ball

Harry Stebbings · Mar 20, 2024

Narrowing the scope of your ICP wins you more customers, because the product fits them better so they love it more and refer more friends

A narrower ICP means features are more aligned to those customers, and their friends are a bigger pool than you think

12:25 20Product: Why Process is Killing Your Product Team and How to Remove it | Three Product Decisions Every Team Needs to Make | Why the Best Companies Build Movements and Lessons from Shopify and Atlassian on How to Do It Right with Jean-Michel Lemieux

Jean-Michel Lemieux · Mar 20, 2024

Startups should give a small number of customers a couple of things that are genuinely great rather than trying to give everyone everything

Companies die from indigestion before they die of starvation — founders have too many ideas and instinctively try to serve everyone, and doing less buys time to figure out what comes next

Scope: in the first couple of years

12:48 20Product: Why Process is Killing Your Product Team and How to Remove it | Three Product Decisions Every Team Needs to Make | Why the Best Companies Build Movements and Lessons from Shopify and Atlassian on How to Do It Right with Jean-Michel Lemieux

Harry Stebbings · Apr 12, 2024

Packaging and verticalized sales playbooks are among the biggest problems in sales; trying to be everything to everyone means resonating with no one.

39:38 20Sales: The Biggest Sales Lessons Scaling Brex to $400M ARR, Why Startups are Doing Outbound Wrong and How to Fix It & Why Demand Gen is the Bottleneck for all Startups and How to Solve it with Sam Blond, Former CRO @ Brex

Sam Blond · Apr 12, 2024

Brex's explicit narrow positioning as 'the first corporate card for startups' — versus Divvy's card-for-any-business approach with the same underwriting model — is what won it meaningful market share.

An innovator's dilemma approach: attack a small segment with a highly differentiated product, take huge share there, then expand.

Scope: in that specific example

40:02 20Sales: The Biggest Sales Lessons Scaling Brex to $400M ARR, Why Startups are Doing Outbound Wrong and How to Fix It & Why Demand Gen is the Bottleneck for all Startups and How to Solve it with Sam Blond, Former CRO @ Brex

Harry Stebbings · Jul 15, 2024

An overly wide ICP and insufficiently tight product marketing are a common and serious cause of companies failing to land their first 100 customers.

He has repeatedly seen this pattern in companies he works with.

56:30 20VC: Why We Are in a Bubble & Now is Frothier Than 2021 | Why $1M ARR is a BS Milestone for Series A | Why Seed Pricing is Rational & Large Seed Rounds Have Less Risk | Why Many AI Apps Have BS Revenue & Are Not Sustainable with Saam Motamedi @ Greylock

Saam Motamedi · Jul 15, 2024

'Everything great starts small' is a misnomer — great companies start in a very narrow concentric circle inside a large, fertile market, with intentional sequencing outward.

Markets are concentric circles; Palo Alto Networks started as an add-on to a firewall but the founder had intentionality about expanding into bigger circles in fertile territory.

61:58 20VC: Why We Are in a Bubble & Now is Frothier Than 2021 | Why $1M ARR is a BS Milestone for Series A | Why Seed Pricing is Rational & Large Seed Rounds Have Less Risk | Why Many AI Apps Have BS Revenue & Are Not Sustainable with Saam Motamedi @ Greylock

Harry Stebbings · Sep 13, 2024

The biggest problem he sees in their portfolio companies is an ICP that is too broad, which makes product marketing insufficiently concise and stops it resonating with a target market

Marketing that isn't concise enough doesn't resonate with a small enough target market

22:59 20Product: What Facebook, Monzo and Deliveroo Do and Do Not Do To Build Great Products | How to Structure Product Teams For Success | Is Simple Always Better in Product and The Art vs Science of Product Design with Mike Hudack

Harry Stebbings · Dec 13, 2024

The biggest mistake founders make today is widening their target market as launch approaches out of fear of non-adoption, ending up meaning less and less to more and more people

A broadened message resonates with no one

29:57 20Growth: How to Scale to $30M ARR Bootstrapped through Content and Brand | The Ultimate Equation to Success in Sales and Why Most Founders Suck at Sales | Why You Should Overpay People and What That Means with Guillaume Moubeche @ Lempire

Guillaume Moubeche · Dec 13, 2024

The best companies are the ones built for a very specific use case, which is why Lempire is now narrowing to teams of four to a hundred sales reps

Being the best tool on the market for a defined segment is achievable in the current economy

30:16 20Growth: How to Scale to $30M ARR Bootstrapped through Content and Brand | The Ultimate Equation to Success in Sales and Why Most Founders Suck at Sales | Why You Should Overpay People and What That Means with Guillaume Moubeche @ Lempire

Jake Saper · Mar 10, 2025

Horizontal AI tools like generic autocomplete in Gmail will be commoditized by incumbents, while narrow, use-case-specific tools that work very well earn the right to expand into more defensible products

A narrow tool that solves a specific problem extremely well becomes a landing wedge with the buyer, whereas horizontal features get absorbed by platforms

Scope: applies to the AI era; the narrow tool has to work really well

55:34 20VC: Lessons from Investing $2BN and Returning $8BN in Cash | Why Most Venture Partnerships are Broken | We Sold Salesforce Early and Lost Out on Billions | Are The Best Deals Always Expensive and Competitive with Jake Saper @ Emergence Capital

Ishan Mukherjee · Apr 4, 2025

The right PLG strategy is extreme focus: divest everything else and concentrate go-to-market on the single audience where your brand is already the default

At New Relic there were ~100k developers who joined the workforce 2008-2014 for whom New Relic was still the hot brand; reallocating all investment to unlock that latent demand was like drilling into an oil reserve

Scope: drawn from the New Relic experience

4:05 20Sales: How the Best Sales Teams Use AI to Win Enterprise Deals | Sales Teams Will Be Dramatically Smaller | How to Ramps Sales Reps Way Faster | Why Unpaid Design Partners are BS | Why this Generation of Sales is Soft with Ishan Mukherjee @ Rox

Luke Harries · May 23, 2025

ElevenLabs' original plan — build the world's best audio AI models and then sell to everyone (consumers, creators, developers) — was a terrible go-to-market plan

Building a best-in-world AI audio model was something no one had done, and selling to everyone lacked focus

Scope: his view at the time of the pitch, which he now regrets

4:44 20VC: ElevenLabs Head of Growth on Why You Do Not Need PMs | The 7-Part Launch Playbook That Gets 700K+ Views Per Product | The Truth About CAC, Payback & Performance Marketing in AI with Luke Harries

Anton Osika · Aug 18, 2025

The right customer to start with is people who will build businesses but were held back by not being able to code or hire engineers; serving everyone else follows naturally from that

It flows from Lovable's mission, and adoption trickles down because those builders also help friends and family build simple websites

Scope: value extraction is explicitly not the primary consideration

22:29 20VC: Lovable CEO Anton Osika on $120M in ARR in 7 Months | The Honest Truth About Defensibility and Unit Economics for AI Startups | The State of Foundation Models: Long Grok, Short OpenAI, Why | Replit vs Lovable vs Bolt: What Happens

Harry Stebbings · Sep 8, 2025

Founders should be much more targeted in their ICP with a clear view of the customer and user, rather than horizontal from day one.

Scope: stated as the advice he would have given ElevenLabs

46:11 20VC: ElevenLabs Hits $200M ARR: The Untold Story of Europe's Fastest Growing AI Startup | The Real Cost of AI from Talent to Data Centres | How US VCs are in a Different League to Europeans | The Future of Foundation Models with Mati Staniszewski

Harry Stebbings · Jun 27, 2026

Founders who fear launching to no adoption dilute their message to appeal to everyone and end up shipping a mid product that means nothing to anyone

Trying to make the product bland enough for everyone strips it of meaning for any specific user

15:27 20VC: How We Got Fred Wilson, Benchmark and Index to Invest $94M | Why Robinhood's Strategy is Wrong | Why 1-1s are BS and What Every Founder Gets Wrong About Equity | Why Taste Beats AI But How AI Kills Org Charts with Paul Erlanger, CEO @ fomo

Paul Erlanger · Jun 27, 2026

fomo must stay trading-first and be the best trading app, because top traders won't use it otherwise, with social features layered on over time

Social features currently serve trading by giving transparency into what the best traders are doing; obfuscating what the app is good at would lose the top traders who anchor it

Scope: direction of travel is toward becoming more social over time

45:45 20VC: How We Got Fred Wilson, Benchmark and Index to Invest $94M | Why Robinhood's Strategy is Wrong | Why 1-1s are BS and What Every Founder Gets Wrong About Equity | Why Taste Beats AI But How AI Kills Org Charts with Paul Erlanger, CEO @ fomo

Mike Mignano · Jul 6, 2026 · hedged

Product focus is what drives enterprise penetration — Granola's advantage is doing only notes, while startups that try to do many things struggle to sell into enterprise

Being really focused has helped Granola penetrate enterprises, unlike startups spreading across many use cases

38:47 20VC: Why Now is the Time for the Application Layer | Why OpenAI & Anthropic Won't Win the App Layer | Why Startups Should be TokenMaxxing | Why VCs Should Reduce Weighting on Price & Ownership in an Age of AI with Mike Mignano, USV

Mike Mignano · Jul 6, 2026

Startups selling into the enterprise should enter with a single, narrowly focused product and only expand horizontally after they're in the door

A broad initial product forces the enterprise to give up many incumbent tools at once, whereas a single focused product (e.g. meeting notes) is an easy yes and lets you claim being the best at that one thing

Scope: about getting the initial foot in the door; expansion comes later

39:08 20VC: Why Now is the Time for the Application Layer | Why OpenAI & Anthropic Won't Win the App Layer | Why Startups Should be TokenMaxxing | Why VCs Should Reduce Weighting on Price & Ownership in an Age of AI with Mike Mignano, USV

Alex Atallah · Aug 10, 2026

Meta's Muse still lacks a defined niche and its breakout moment will come when it can claim to be clearly best at a specific thing

People don't know when to use Muse Spark or what its core advantages are; it is currently positioned as a generally capable model

43:15 20VC: Will OpenRouter Sell for $10BN to Stripe? | Why Chinese Open Models Are Beating America—and What Happens Next | Why Enterprises Are More Fearful of Anthropic and OpenAI Than China | Is the Routing Layer Becoming a Commodity with Alex Atallah

Matt Swulinski · Aug 15, 2026

The way past audience fatigue is to unlock one niche audience at a time — prove the economics and repeatable funnel for one ICP, then move to the next

You hit fatigue in whatever you're currently targeting, so continued scaling comes from going down audience by audience with tailored creative, landing, onboarding and product experience

37:13 20Growth: How to Build a $100M Growth Engine: Lessons from Wispr Flow and Superhuman | Why You Should Do Paid Ads Today and How To Do Them | How to Build the Best Referral Programs and How to Crush UGC with Matt Swulinski

Harry Stebbings · Jun 5, 2023

A concentrated end-customer profile improves a company's product marketing and messaging

21:53 20VC: The Largest Venture Backed D2C Consumer Exit; PillPack: $0-$300M Revenues in 5 Years & The Biggest Lessons Scaling the B2B Business to $300M in 2.5 Years with TJ Parker, Co-Founder @ PillPack

Harry Stebbings · Aug 31, 2023 · hedged

The speaker's working belief is that the more a conversational product specializes, the deeper and richer the conversation value it can provide — which raises the open question of how to deliver high enough quality at such generality.

Scope: framed as the view he was trained on

12:06 20VC: Spending $2M to Train a Single AI Model: What Matters More; Model Size or Data Size | Hallucinations: Feature or Bug | Will Everyone Have an AI Friend in the Future & Raising $150M from a16z with Noam Shazeer, Co-Founder & CEO @ Character.ai

Harry Stebbings · Apr 12, 2024

Greater specialization produces higher conversion rates in acquisition channels because the messaging is more targeted.

More targeted messaging resonates better with a narrower audience.

41:20 20Sales: The Biggest Sales Lessons Scaling Brex to $400M ARR, Why Startups are Doing Outbound Wrong and How to Fix It & Why Demand Gen is the Bottleneck for all Startups and How to Solve it with Sam Blond, Former CRO @ Brex

Harry Stebbings · Aug 23, 2024

Verticalization helps a lot in go-to-market because it allows content to be customized to the specific segment

Selling to a single vertical like restaurants lets you tailor content much more effectively

47:22 20Sales: How Snowflake Built a Sales Machine | Why You Have to Hire a CRO Pre-Product | Why Most Sales Reps Do Not Perform | Why Hiring Panels are BS in Interviews | Why Remote Sales Reps Do Not Care About Their Development with Chad Peets

Harry Stebbings · Sep 13, 2024

Product marketing aimed at a narrowly defined segment converts far better and generates more word-of-mouth than broad positioning

A tightly specified audience (e.g. 30-40 year old high-income Filipino expats sending large sums home) makes the messaging resonate and spread inside that community

Scope: illustrated with money transfer as the example category

23:40 20Product: What Facebook, Monzo and Deliveroo Do and Do Not Do To Build Great Products | How to Structure Product Teams For Success | Is Simple Always Better in Product and The Art vs Science of Product Design with Mike Hudack

Kipp Bodnar · Sep 28, 2022

A horizontal product can have a single resonant brand story, because the best stories find the universal truth across a diverse customer base — something customers believe but are afraid to say out loud.

Very different customers share the same underlying problems; HubSpot's inbound marketing story worked because people knew direct mail didn't work but needed permission to admit it and an alternative offered without shame.

Scope: requires pairing the emotional benefit with practical ways to act on it

24:52 20Growth: Hubspot CMO Kipp Bodnar on Why the Best Marketers Think Like VCs | Why the Best Companies Do Not Start with Product Marketing | New Channels; When To Do, How Much To Spend, How To Test, When To Stop

Noam Shazeer · Aug 31, 2023

Versatility and usability are not in opposition; the standard product-management advice to pick verticals and narrow down is the wrong approach for this technology.

Narrowing cuts down the use cases, which is the opposite of what they want; the goal is something usable but very general purpose.

11:34 20VC: Spending $2M to Train a Single AI Model: What Matters More; Model Size or Data Size | Hallucinations: Feature or Bug | Will Everyone Have an AI Friend in the Future & Raising $150M from a16z with Noam Shazeer, Co-Founder & CEO @ Character.ai

Aman Narang · Aug 21, 2024

Restaurant software needs overlap heavily across segments and geographies — food truck, cafe, full-serve or enterprise chain — because the underlying job is operations, workflows, speed, efficiency and governance

Every restaurant is trying to turn tables faster, move the line faster, make the kitchen efficient and prevent theft, and that doesn't change by segment or country

Scope: about in-the-four-walls product needs

36:50 20VC: Five Lessons Scaling Toast to $14BN Market Cap | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make in Fundraising, Hiring and Selling with Aman Narang, CEO @ Toast

Mike Hudack · Sep 13, 2024

Failing to be tight about your initial target market is a laziness — though a very broad initial target market is fine if the value proposition and the user motion you want are universal and super clear

Scope: exception when value prop and desired user motion are universal and crystal clear

23:12 20Product: What Facebook, Monzo and Deliveroo Do and Do Not Do To Build Great Products | How to Structure Product Teams For Success | Is Simple Always Better in Product and The Art vs Science of Product Design with Mike Hudack

Mike Hudack · Sep 13, 2024

A product with a genuinely universal value proposition can reach massive global penetration without narrow segment targeting, spreading virally out from pockets of acute pain

WhatsApp grew off people with expensive international texting and greedy domestic telcos, who spread it to others with the same pain; because it is innately social the network then completes even for people without that pain point

Scope: he only 'half agrees' with the narrow-ICP view; requires the value proposition and desired user motion to be universal and clear

24:07 20Product: What Facebook, Monzo and Deliveroo Do and Do Not Do To Build Great Products | How to Structure Product Teams For Success | Is Simple Always Better in Product and The Art vs Science of Product Design with Mike Hudack

Chad Peets · Aug 23, 2024

Building a sales organization around a single vertical is a bad approach because it caps the size the company can reach

A vertical-only product limits your TAM — if healthcare is all you can sell into, you have no alternative if you don't crush it

Scope: acknowledges some companies have succeeded with a vertical approach

7:41 20Sales: How Snowflake Built a Sales Machine | Why You Have to Hire a CRO Pre-Product | Why Most Sales Reps Do Not Perform | Why Hiring Panels are BS in Interviews | Why Remote Sales Reps Do Not Care About Their Development with Chad Peets

Harry Stebbings · Jul 27, 2026 · hedged

There is a valuation level above which legal alone is not enough for Legora — raising at $10B may be fine, but beyond some price it needs to succeed outside legal

At a $10B valuation the legal market alone doesn't support the price

Scope: fine at lower valuations

31:26 20VC: Leading Anthropic's First Ever Round | Will Open Source Threaten Anthropic's Business | Do Margins Matter in a World of AI | Why Triple, Triple, Double, Double is Not Good Enough Today | Why Series A is Hard Today with Matt Murphy @ Menlo

Matt Swulinski · Aug 15, 2026

Superhuman's growth asymptoted because it was hyper-focused on a single ICP — early adopter tech founders — behind a premium immediate paywall, and that TAM is finite

the early adopter tech founder audience is not infinite, so without proactively opening new ICP layers you inevitably hit a ceiling

Scope: notes the founder audience is ever growing today because everyone can be a founder; was clearly finite two to three years ago

28:51 20Growth: How to Build a $100M Growth Engine: Lessons from Wispr Flow and Superhuman | Why You Should Do Paid Ads Today and How To Do Them | How to Build the Best Referral Programs and How to Crush UGC with Matt Swulinski

David Meyer · Nov 1, 2023

A classic startup failure mode is taking incoherent customer requests after early product-market fit signal, expanding to serve all segments at once and becoming nothing to anyone

Customers dangle big rollouts in exchange for features that don't fit the focus, so you end up chasing large enterprise and SMB, practitioner and business buyer, prematurely

Scope: choosing the wrong narrow focus can also make you implode — that's the balance

32:51 20Product: Why You Should Not Go Into Product Management, Why the CEO is Always the CPO, How to Build the Best Product Teams & Why You Should Hire People Who Aren't In Product Already with Databricks SVP Product, David Meyer

Harry Stebbings · Nov 1, 2023

Startups progressively widen their target customer out of nervousness that traction won't come, and loosen their product-market tightness with every expansion

The aperture creeps from BI analysts in SMBs, to all analysts, to a freemium tool for everyone, to prosumer, driven by fear that traction won't happen

33:26 20Product: Why You Should Not Go Into Product Management, Why the CEO is Always the CPO, How to Build the Best Product Teams & Why You Should Hire People Who Aren't In Product Already with Databricks SVP Product, David Meyer

Harry Stebbings · Jan 31, 2024

The biggest mistake early-stage founders make is broadening their ICP as launch day approaches out of fear that no one will use the product

Fear of no adoption pushes them from a specific persona to 'anyone who needs a to-do list'

Scope: framed as what Harry sees most often in early-stage founders

53:26 20VC: The Metrics That Matter in SaaS Today; Why CaC Payback is Flawed & CAC Ratio is Better, Why You Need to Hire Three Sales Reps at a Time, How to Forecast in 2024 & Biggest Mistakes Made Forecasting & How to Make Customer Success Sell More with Dave K

Martin Mignot · Aug 11, 2025

Revolut's decisive advantage was its insertion point — selling a specific trigger (avoiding FX fees on a trip abroad) rather than asking people to switch banks

Switching bank accounts is a huge pain and no one wants to do it, so a narrow, obviously valuable wedge is what let them grow quickly and organically for years, even though Nik's ambition from the start was the global money app

52:02 20VC: Figma, Scale, Wiz: Inside Index's Decacorn Factory | Decision-Making, Investment Process, Biggest Lessons, Biggest Misses | Why Gross Margin is a Fallacy at Seed | Never Turn Down a Deal on Price with Martin Mignot, Partner @ Index Ventures

Harry Stebbings · Aug 11, 2025

The winning consumer fintech strategy is to offer 'snacks' first rather than trying to sell the main meal, so customers come back for progressively more

54:02 20VC: Figma, Scale, Wiz: Inside Index's Decacorn Factory | Decision-Making, Investment Process, Biggest Lessons, Biggest Misses | Why Gross Margin is a Fallacy at Seed | Never Turn Down a Deal on Price with Martin Mignot, Partner @ Index Ventures

Harry Stebbings · Aug 15, 2026

'The AI employee for everyone' was a bad tagline; a specific vertical framing like 'the AI video editor' or 'the AI copywriter' would have been better

'AI employee' doesn't communicate what the product actually does — tasks? creative? — whereas a vertical label is instantly legible

Scope: speaking as an investor in the company

38:16 20Growth: How to Build a $100M Growth Engine: Lessons from Wispr Flow and Superhuman | Why You Should Do Paid Ads Today and How To Do Them | How to Build the Best Referral Programs and How to Crush UGC with Matt Swulinski

Kim Graves · Jun 27, 2025

At PLG companies with broad distribution, solution design starts out very general, and the way to get repeatable patterns is to keep the sales team tightly focused on the most successful customer types.

PLG distribution spans students, communities and B2B customers across all industries and departments, so uniformity only emerges once you focus on customers who share patterns.

Scope: specific to PLG companies like Slack and Notion

13:37 20Sales: How to Layer Enterprise Sales on PLG | How to Sell AI Tools To Enterprises That Are Scared | Should Reps Own Their Own Pipeline | Mistakes All Founders Make When Moving From Founder-Led to Rep-Led Sales with Kim Graves

Carles Reina · Feb 14, 2026

Founders should take a broad approach within their vertical, targeting every sub-segment and persona rather than betting early on one narrow slice

Founders' intuitions about who will convert are usually wrong; the best companies start at one end and win traction somewhere they didn't expect, so broad targeting reveals what resonates

Scope: the vertical itself is often dictated by the product, e.g. a healthcare product must go to healthcare

12:01 20Sales: Inside ElevenLabs $330M ARR Sales Machine | The 20x Sales Comp Plan Reps Must Hit | How to Land and Expand in a World of AI | Why Product-Market-Fit is BS, Reps Should Not Be in the Office and Outbound is King with Carles Reina

Fabien Pinckaers · Feb 12, 2025

Management software will commoditize: eventually everyone will use the same CRM, accounting and website builder regardless of industry, the way everyone uses the same phone or Office suite

Once software reaches maturity, is perfectly integrated and very affordable, industry-specific dedication stops mattering — Office is the precedent where everybody uses the same Word, Excel and PowerPoint

Scope: framed as his vision, contingent on reaching maturity

20:21 20VC: The $5BN Company Built from the Belgian Countryside | The Story of Odoo: The Company with No Plans to Sell, IPO & Their Billionaire Founder Who Does Not Care About Money with Fabien Pinckaers, Founder & CEO @ Odoo

Fabien Pinckaers · Feb 12, 2025

Management software will consolidate to only one, two or three dominant players as the technology becomes a commodity

IT history repeats: many operating systems collapsed to Windows, iOS and Linux, many office tools collapsed to Microsoft Office and Google Workspace; management software adds business complexity on top of technical and UX complexity but will follow the same trend

Scope: today the market is still highly fragmented; frames Odoo's goal as being one of the survivors

70:38 20VC: The $5BN Company Built from the Belgian Countryside | The Story of Odoo: The Company with No Plans to Sell, IPO & Their Billionaire Founder Who Does Not Care About Money with Fabien Pinckaers, Founder & CEO @ Odoo

Harry Stebbings · Oct 16, 2023 · hedged

Advising founders to start with a narrowly targeted ideal customer profile is risky: it can attract people who treat the niche as the end state and lead to optimizing for it in ways that hamper the larger vision

Scope: compatible with being a hugely ambitious founder; concerns the starting customer set, not the vision

31:48 20VC: The Two Biggest Mistakes Every Founder Makes, Why Founders Are Not Ambitious Enough Today, Why Having a Narrow Target Customer is Dangerous & The Three Possible Outcomes in Company Building with Matthew Prince, Co-Founder @ Cloudflare

Matthew Prince · Oct 16, 2023

Starting with a narrow, specific product target is risky because it attracts people who mistake that target for the end state and pushes the team to build niche features that hamper the larger vision

Even if you say the journey is longer, recruits treat the stated starting point as the destination, and the company begins optimizing for it

Scope: casting a wide net and then deeply focusing on and learning from early customers is fine

32:09 20VC: The Two Biggest Mistakes Every Founder Makes, Why Founders Are Not Ambitious Enough Today, Why Having a Narrow Target Customer is Dangerous & The Three Possible Outcomes in Company Building with Matthew Prince, Co-Founder @ Cloudflare

Kevin Systrom · Feb 22, 2023

Consumer-facing messaging must be narrow and concrete even when the company's internal ambition is deliberately broad

You can't tell a consumer 'we make great products' — they need to know what you'll do for them — but defining yourself as, say, a desktop computer maker would be crippling to ambition

26:27 Consumer messaging must stay narrow and concrete even when internal ambition is broad

Adam Grenier · Mar 15, 2023

Horizontal customer bases should be marketed to with a pyramid messaging structure — broadest message in mass channels, progressively more specific messages in progressively more targeted channels

Better targeting allows more refined messaging, but you must stop subdividing when the addressable segment is too small to justify building creative for it

30:58 Pyramid messaging matches message specificity to channel targeting granularity

Daniel Erickson · Jun 5, 2020

How long to wait before expanding beyond your core segment should be driven by usage frequency: weekly-use products should wait a couple of months for data, while daily-use products can expand almost the same day they hit product-market fit.

You need the PMF score to be steady and enough data to know which segments to expand into, and data accumulates at the rate users interact with the app.

13:49 Expansion timing set by usage frequency data

Fabien Pinckaers · Feb 12, 2025

Industry selection should follow existing product-market fit — start with the industries the current product already serves well

The product they already have answers a lot of industries, so they started where they are good

48:47 Vertical selection should start from existing product market fit

Guy Podjarny · May 24, 2023

Messaging should lead with the customer's problem and end-to-end use case rather than the product itself, since customers care about the problem being solved, not the technology; being too narrow or claiming to be a broad 'platform' both fail.

The primary problem being addressed was that developers weren't embracing security solutions, so the ethos defined the company while the initial product was just the entry point

15:31 Messaging should lead with customer problem and use case not product avoiding both narrow and vague platform claims

Jeremy Liew · Feb 24, 2021

You should favour the broadest possible user population in consumer social because the bigger and broader the population, the bigger the eventual advertising opportunity

You have to think about the eventual business model at some level, and advertising monetization scales with population breadth

14:17 Broad user population favored in consumer social for eventual advertising monetization

Harry Stebbings · Jul 6, 2026

In education and medicine the biggest winners tend to be horizontal players rather than verticalized specialists

YouTube dominates education and health is already the second most used use case on ChatGPT

33:40 Horizontal generalists win education and health over vertical specialists

Noam Shazeer · Aug 31, 2023

Asking what category Character is in is the wrong question, just as asking what electricity or computers are 'for' is

It sells a very general-purpose tool, and general tools aren't for any one thing — fun or productivity

23:31 General purpose tools defy single category labeling like electricity or computers

Matthew Prince · Oct 16, 2023

Launching with an untargeted free product is what let Cloudflare discover its real early market; a narrow initial funnel and targeted marketing copy would have hidden it

They expected startups and individual developers to sign up, but the actual flood came from civil society and human rights organizations — the one exception to the rule that smaller budgets face fewer cyber threats — and they would never have thought to target that group

28:45 Untargeted free launch reveals real market segments that narrow targeting would hide

Harry Stebbings · Oct 16, 2023

Even if founders must sell a big vision, the present-day specifics matter for customer acquisition: customers want proof of efficiency delivered to existing customers, messaging they resonate with, and channel fit with how they buy

Super horizontal product messaging is much harder for a buyer to resonate with, and go-to-market has to fit how the customer engages with product buying

36:06 Customer acquisition requires present day specific proof not just broad vision

Harry Stebbings · Jan 31, 2024

Product marketing is much harder for horizontal products than verticalized ones

A vertical has one industry with shared pains and shared data, whereas a horizontal product like Notion or Airtable sells to developers, mothers and dentists alike

51:10 Horizontal products face harder product marketing since there is no shared audience context

Dave Kellogg · Jan 31, 2024

The biggest cause of founders wrongly broadening their ICP is external pressure from well-intentioned people who don't understand the business (financiers preparing a company for the public markets)

At Versant he watched the full cycle: no focus produced nothing, razor-sharp focus on telecom network management grew the business from $2M to $15M and got them to a $30M IPO, then finance people insisted on broadening to finance/healthcare/telecom with no regard for the marketplace and the stock went out at $6, fell to $3, and the company effectively died

53:59 External investor pressure to prepare for public markets forces premature icp broadening

Dave Kellogg · Jan 31, 2024

Every move to a new cell in the vertical-by-use-case matrix should be flagged as dangerous and difficult; founders should not expect to knock these expansions down like dominoes

The first replication of a use case into a new vertical is extremely hard because the prospect, not the vendor, has to believe the problem is the same; only after landing one can you start to replicate

56:15 Each new vertical use case combination is a fresh hard sell not a domino

Kieran Flanagan · Aug 10, 2022 · hedged

For virality-driven horizontal products, website positioning that tells a visitor 'this is for me' matters less than usually assumed, because users arrive via referral and word-of-mouth.

Users typically onboard through someone sharing the product rather than through the site's positioning; positioning becomes important at the monetization/verticalization stage

38:51 Website positioning matters less for referral driven viral products since users arrive via word of mouth not search

Des Traynor · Jul 18, 2022

For a horizontal product the answer is verticalized marketing: map industry times workflow, pick the most compelling sizable use cases from that grid, and market those extremely well

A horizontal tool has many use cases and many audiences, so you have to choose the intersections worth nailing rather than market generically

28:29 Verticalized industry by workflow mapping is the answer for horizontal product marketing

Des Traynor · Jul 18, 2022

Horizontal productivity tools inevitably end up focusing on B2B use cases because that's where the money is

There's not much money selling software to wedding planners but a lot selling to companies like IBM, so revenue pulls you back to business problems

29:30 Horizontal tools gravitate to b2b use cases because thats where the money is

Jean-Michel Lemieux · Mar 20, 2024

Serving both mom-and-pop shops and the largest brands is coherent because retailers should be segmented by complexity rather than volume — high- and low-volume merchants both tend to be low complexity

Low SKU counts and single websites mean a Kardashian store and a bakery share ~80% of platform needs; the only gap is checkout throughput, which is a solvable engineering problem

59:55 Segment by complexity not volume lets one product serve small and large accounts

Harry Stebbings · Apr 11, 2025

Vertical software is more attractive because virality comes more easily within those markets

Brands within a vertical carry weight with each other, so adoption spreads faster in those circles

20:17 Vertical focus accelerates viral adoption through tight networks

Mati Staniszewski · Sep 8, 2025

Go horizontal when launching something genuinely new where you don't yet know which customer subset matters but know the market is big; go vertical when you have domain expertise and a specific category you're trying to win.

46:36 Horizontal for new uncertain markets vertical for known domain expertise

Matt Swulinski · Aug 15, 2026

Starting with the broad 'AI employee' positioning was the right call for Viktor, and the framing can be inverted to concrete use-case stories once those use cases exist

The category is wide and there is no other positioning around knowledge work that differentiates from Claude and ChatGPT; the term is confusing only because it hasn't been used much, and you need a starting point to build the use cases that let you later say 'I hired Viktor and here's what he did'

38:44 Broad category positioning first then use case stories