The Focus Decision Every Founder Avoids
How to choose who you build for when sales, support, and growth all demand different things.
The Leaky Bucket Problem (and why it feels like everyone is right)
You’re staring at a bucket full of holes. Your users are leaking out. Sales wants enterprise features. Support is drowning in small business complaints. Your fastest-growing segment keeps hitting walls with your product limitations. Customer support is in a crisis. Everything feels urgent.
After watching teams chase enterprise deals, appease churn risks, and ship "urgent" fixes in parallel, I’ve learnt that the right focus is less about prioritising and more about choosing constraints.
To avoid drowning, you must make a decision, as outlined in the first section of The Leaky Bucket Product Framework. In practical terms, this entails selecting one or a limited number of segments that you excel at while allowing the remaining segments to deteriorate over time.
So which side of the bucket do you make watertight first?
This is the defining decision for product strategy, and most teams get it wrong. They try to plug a hole here, patch something there, and end up with a bucket that leaks everywhere instead of one that holds water anywhere.
The Three Traps: How Founders Usually Choose Wrong
Following the Money (Usually)
The enterprise deal is worth $500K. The small business customer is worth $5K. Easy choice, right? Except that enterprise deal requires 18 months of custom development, pulls your team in twelve directions, and creates technical debt that makes every future hole harder to plug.
Following the Squeakiest Wheel
The loudest customers aren't always the right ones. Occasionally they’re loud because your product was never meant for them in the first place. Sometimes they are loud because your contact is more vocal than others.
Following Your Gut
“We’re passionate about serving creative agencies” sounds excellent until you realise you have no special insight into their world and three well-funded competitors already own that space.
The Five Questions That Make the Decision Obvious
1. Where Do You Have an Unfair Advantage?
It's not just about having a competitive advantage but also about having an unfair advantage. Or as Philip Kotler defined it, to have a competitive advantage is a company’s ability to perform in one or more ways that competitors cannot or will not match. What do you know about a segment that would take competitors years to learn?
Do you come from this industry?
Do you have unique data or access?
Have you previously addressed similar challenges for this segment?
Do you have existing relationships or trust?
Example: Stripe focused on developers first because the founders were developers. They understood the holes that mattered—documentation, API design, error handling—better than anyone else could.
2. Which Segment Has the Highest Hole Density?
Some segments have three critical holes. Others have thirty. You want a segment where:
The holes are defined and understood.
Users can articulate what’s missing.
The holes are concentrated, not scattered.
Fixing one hole increases the value of fixing the next.
Red flag: If you can’t list the top 5 holes for a segment without research, you don’t understand them well enough yet.
3. What’s the Pain-to-Sophistication Ratio?
The ideal segment has acute pain but isn’t yet sophisticated about solutions. The ideal segment understands that they are experiencing significant issues, but they have not yet developed complex solutions or committed to competing products.
High pain + low solution sophistication = willingness to tolerate your early product while you plug holes.
Warning: Avoid segments that have already solved their problems with duct tape and prayers. They’ll expect you to replicate their Frankenstein setup, and that is not something you want to repeat to the next customer.
4. Can You Reach Them Efficiently?
The best segment in the world doesn’t matter if you can’t find it. Consider:
Do they congregate anywhere? (Communities, conferences, subreddits, Slack groups)
Do they have identifiable characteristics? (Job titles, company size, tech stack)
Can you afford the customer acquisition cost?
Will they talk to each other and create word-of-mouth?
Case study: Figma focused on product designers at tech companies—a segment that’s extremely vocal on Twitter, attends specific conferences, and influences each other heavily.
5. Will They Pay for Holes to Be Plugged?
Not all holes have economic value. Some segments will love your fixes but never convert to paid plans. Others will throw money at you for solving their specific pain.
Ask: When you plug these holes, does it directly impact their revenue, reduce their costs, eliminate existential risks, or otherwise improve your customers’ business? If not, reconsider.
The “Only” Statement: Your Focus in One Sentence
Once you’ve chosen your side, try completing this sentence:
“We are the only product built specifically for [SEGMENT]
who need to [CORE JOB]
because we [UNFAIR ADVANTAGE].”
If you can’t complete it confidently, you haven’t chosen your side yet—you’ve just identified a target audience.
Good example: “We are the only accounting software built specifically for creative agencies who need to track project profitability because we built our product architecture around billable hours and project-based work from day one.”
Bad example: “We are the only CRM built specifically for small businesses who need to manage customers because we care about small businesses.”
How to Identify If You Made the Wrong Choice (Early Warning Signs)
The Feature Request Chaos Test
Your decision was incorrect if your feature requests remain scattered across dozens of unrelated use cases after six months. One side of the bucket generates increasingly specific, interconnected requests.
The Competition Confusion Test
If you can’t clearly articulate why a competitor can’t easily serve your segment, you’ve chosen a side that’s too broad or too obvious.
The Sales Cycle Test
If every sale requires a custom explanation of how your product works for that specific customer, you haven’t focused enough. The right segments should immediately recognise what you built for them.
If You’re Already Serving Everyone: Two Ways Out
What if you’ve already got customers across multiple segments and you’re trying to plug holes everywhere?
You have two options:
Option 1: The Graceful Pivot Pick your side and slowly shift your positioning, feature development, and marketing. Some customers will churn; many will not. That’s the cost of focus. Better to lose 30% of customers and serve 70% brilliantly than keep 100% mediocrely. If your product is already suitable for the non-focus segments, you can often continue to sell to and milk them.
Option 2: The Honest Split Acknowledge you’re serving multiple distinct segments and create separate product experiences, pricing, or even brands for each. But recognise that this multiplies your hole-plugging burden.
Closing: Make One Side Watertight (and let the rest leak on purpose)
Choosing your side is not a one-time decision; it is a daily practice. Every feature request, every sales opportunity, every “quick win” will tempt you to plug holes on other sides of the bucket.
Resist.
The compounding returns of depth beat the fleeting wins of breadth. Make one side of your bucket completely watertight. The other sides can wait.
Or better yet, they can leak forever. That’s called positioning.
If you want a second brain on this decision: I work with founders and operators to pick the segment, define the “only” positioning, and translate it into a roadmap that sales and support can actually rally around. If you’re in the “everything is urgent” phase, this is usually the highest-leverage product work you can do.
Try this: List three potential segments for your product. For each, score them 1-10 on the five questions above. The winner might surprise you.