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You built the product. But what commercial evidence do you have?
A working MVP is a meaningful milestone. It proves you can build.
It does not yet prove:
- Who has the strongest reason to buy;
- Which use case creates enough value to change behaviour;
- What message makes the right buyer lean in;
- How you will create those conversations naturally, and repeatedly.
This is where many early-stage B2B founders get stuck.
The product has features. There may be a few encouraging conversations. Perhaps even early users, but the route to market is still made of assumptions.
A simple way to separate progress from evidence is to ask four questions:
- Can you name the buyer, not just the market?
- Can you describe the costly problem in their language?
- Do you know why they would act now rather than later?
- Do you have a repeatable way to reach and progress them?
If any answer is vague, the next move is not more activity, it's a tighter commercial test.
The goal is not to be certain before selling. It is to replace the biggest assumptions with real buyer evidence before scaling the wrong motion.
What is the least proven part of your current route to market: buyer, problem, message or channel?
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An early discovery call can lose its value before the demo starts.
The founder asks a few broad questions, hears that the product is interesting, then spends the remaining 20 minutes explaining features.
The call ends with: “Send me some information.”
That is not a bad conversation, but it is an incomplete one.
Before you show the product, aim to understand five things:
1. Current workflow: How is the problem handled today? Are there any gaps?
2. Cost: What does that create in time, money, risk or missed revenue?
3. Priority: Why is this worth changing now, if at all?
4. Decision: Who else would need to care before anything changes?
5. Next move: What would a sensible next step need to prove?
The practical difference is stark.
“That is interesting” tells you the buyer is polite.
“Our service director has asked us to reduce this before the next renewal cycle, and they need to see whether it integrates with the current workflow” tells you what to do next.
For the next five calls, write down your hypothesis before the conversation: who has the problem, why it matters and what you expect the next step to be.
Afterwards, record what the buyer actually confirmed, challenged or changed.
That turns discovery into a learning process rather than a succession of demos.
Which part of a first call is hardest for your team: getting past the current workflow, establishing impact, finding the decision owner or agreeing the next move?
The most dangerous brief a developer can get from a founder usually boils down to four simple words: give me a site
Founders are swamped and struggling to grow their business while working 12-hour days. They don't want to debate page structure or content flow
They want an architect who can handle the entire problem from A to Z. I saw this exact dynamic on a recent project for luxury golf simulators
The CEO had tried to build a platform himself, couldn't make it work, and told me to skip the wireframes. If you bypass planning here, you end up rebuilding the layout three times
I ran my standard research and wireframing process anyway. I simply presented the work differently
Instead of asking for a strategy review, I showed him the wireframe and asked if it matched what he imagined. We finalized the architecture immediately
I also optimized the booking flow so visitors stop abandoning it halfway. The platform launched with seven fully custom pages in under two weeks
When clients are overwhelmed, you don't force them to learn your workflow. You just do the heavy lifting behind the scenes
The test for a tagline is simple. Can someone who's never heard of your company read it and tell you what you sell?
If they can't, it's not doing work. It might be doing something else. Setting a mood. Sounding confident. Filling space on a hero section.
But it's not helping a buyer understand what you do.
The best taglines I've seen in B2B are almost boring. They describe the category, name the buyer, or state the outcome. No metaphor. No wordplay. Just clarity.
"Accounting software for small businesses." You know exactly what it is and who it's for.
If your tagline needs an explanation, the tagline is the explanation.
Spot on. A tagline should explain the product not act as a puzzle buyers have to solve.