You've Chosen Your Focus. Now Let the Rest Leak.
Why saying no to revenue is harder than choosing your focus—and how to do it anyway.
This is the third article in the Leaky Bucket series on product strategy. In The Leaky Bucket Product Framework, I introduced the core problem: product teams exhaust themselves patching holes across too many market segments. In The Focus Decision Every Founder Avoids, I outlined how to choose which segments deserve your focus.
This piece addresses what comes next: managing the segments you’re leaving behind.
Introduction: The Decision Is Made. Now what?
In the previous article in this Leaky Bucket series, Focus decision every founder is afraid of, I explained how to choose which sides of the bucket to focus on. But you'll still have customers, features, and revenue in the non-focus segments. As Antti Latva-Koivisto pointed out, those segments keep leaking.
The framework’s answer is radical: those segments shouldn’t exist in your product anymore. But you can’t just flip a switch and make them disappear. Your transition needs a strategy.
The Three Types of Non-Focus Segments
1. The Revenue Trap
The first type is the most difficult one: high-value customers that fit the old positioning. These pay well but pull the company in the wrong directions. It is a revenue trap; it is hard to give up the revenue even though the strategy says you should. For example, enterprise deals that require custom development that is outside the new focus.
2. The Legacy Anchor
If you've been in business for a while, you'll have legacy customers, who remember the early days when you said yes to everything. They're loyal to a version of your product you're no longer building, but they are also hanging on to a product that you are no longer developing.
3. The Accidental Win
Some customer segments have become customers by accident, not by design. The product just happens to fit a certain need well. They're low maintenance and generate revenue with minimal effort. The temptation is obvious: why not just keep them?
Four Transition Strategies (Choose One Per Segment)
Strategy 1: The Controlled Sunset
This strategy works for segments that you definitely don’t want to serve any longer, and you would rather lose the revenue than continue the service. Typically these are low-value customers with high maintenance.
This segment's transition is clear, but it requires strong conviction. You announce the end of life and stop developing features for them. Refer customers to competitors. Offer partial refunds if contracts allow. Document the migration path so that customers understand you aren't abandoning them and are assisting them in finding a better fit.
Strategy 2: The Feature Freeze
The second strategy is suitable for profitable segments that generate revenue but don’t require active development. Price the service to account for the maintenance costs.
With careful management it is possible to milk this “cow” segment almost indefinitely and collect revenue that supports the development of other, more strategic segments.
Example: Intercom still sells their legacy live chat to SMBs while focusing product development entirely on their customer platform for the mid-market. The SMB product works and generates cash but receives zero new features.
Strategy 3: The Premium Exit
Some high-value customers cannot be lost right away, even if they are not strategic in the long run. Raising your prices is a good indication that your focus has shifted, but you must accept that some will remain even at the higher price. For the rest, you may need to provide white-glove migration to competitors. Introduce them to your former competitor. Offer to port their data. Make the exit graceful; they'll remember how you treated them.
Strategy 4: The Product Split
This option should be used only in rare cases where there are two (or more) viable focus segments, each of which is large enough to sustain a product. It necessitates separate code bases and product lines, as well as an acknowledgement of the increased workload. This is rarely the right answer. If you think you need it, revisit your segment selection.
The Sales Problem: Saying No to Revenue
Immediately after making the strategic choice, a non-focus deal worth €50k walks in the door. Sales definitely wants to close it, as the money is “for us to take”. How do you maintain the discipline?
The Three-Question Filter
Use this three-step thought process to determine how to proceed:
Does this customer fit our “only” statement as described in The Focus Decision Every Founder Avoids? Because this is a non-focus transaction, it is likely that the customer does not meet our ideal customer profile. Then ask
Will serving them improve our performance in our focus segment? Even if the customer is not in the focus segment, their use cases may benefit us with the focus customers. If this also fails, consider what the opportunity cost is.
If we say yes, what focus-segment work will die? Are we winning or losing in the long run if we take the non-focus customer?
What Actually Happens (The Uncomfortable Part)
Some customers will churn immediately, which was expected and part of the plan. Revenue will dip. The question is whether you've chosen a focus segment with enough depth to more than recover that loss within 12-24 months.
Internally, you will experience resistance from all functions. They have successfully built a product and a customer base which you are now breaking apart. The logic remains: shallow coverage everywhere loses to deep coverage somewhere. Repeat it until it sticks.
It's a good test for the leadership team to see if you can walk away from non-focus deals with confidence.
Won’t the Bucket Still Leak Empty?
The metaphor has a flaw: in reality, a bucket with holes anywhere will empty eventually. But the framework isn’t about accepting permanent leakage; it’s about removing those sides of the bucket entirely. Over 12-24 months, the non-focus segments disappear. What remains isn’t a circular bucket with some holes patched. It will be a fundamentally different shape, built for depth instead of breadth. The filling rate (new customer acquisition in your focus segment) must be greater than the remaining leakage, or you have chosen the incorrect segment.
The Holes Will Leak. That’s the Strategy
The leakage in the non-focus segments is not a failure but by design. Focus requires sacrifice. The non-focus segments must churn. That's not a bug; it's the strategy working. Over 12-24 months you will be in a stronger position with focus, depth and defensibility of your core segments.
Next in this series: How to prioritise which patches to apply first within your chosen segment.