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Instead of assuming your market entry plan will succeed, we actively try to break it in the following ways:
- Market reality check: Do real customers actually have the problem you think they have—or are they just ‘interested in theory’?
- Willingness to pay: Will anyone pay for your solution at a price that supports a business, or only express polite enthusiasm?
- Competitive reality: Are there entrenched alternatives (even non-obvious ones) that make adoption harder than expected?
- Adoption friction: How hard is it really for a customer to switch or change behavior?
- Technical feasibility: Can the product actually be delivered/integrated reliably within a client’s constraints (time, cost, expertise)?
- Unit economics: Does the math still work when you include real-world costs (sales cycle, support, deployment, churn)?
We intentionally introduce stress into the proposed launch strategy, such as:
- Talking to skeptical or ‘hard no’ users, not just the friendly ones
- Testing pricing early (not just value claims)
- Comparing against incumbent solutions, not just ideal scenarios
- Running pilots with minimal guidance to see real usage behavior
Startups don’t usually fail because they didn’t execute well—they fail because:
- They addressed a problem that wasn’t painful enough
- They built something people wouldn’t switch for
- They overlooked a deep operating practice of their target market
