You're Burning Runway Building for the Wrong Person

Most founders think they know who they're selling to. They don't.

They're building features for the user. Thinking about company-level value. But the person who signs the check? They may be optimizing for something slightly different. It's subtle enough to miss, big enough to kill your path to product-market fit.

The three layers

• Layer 1: You need to understand value to the buyer. Not the product. Not the company. The buyer.
• Layer 2: The buyer is not the user. In B2B, the person using your product is rarely the person paying for it.
• Layer 3: The buyer's incentives aren't aligned with the company's either. This is the nuance that separates a flat pitch from genuine buyer interest.

Layer one sounds obvious and is where most pitch decks stop. They describe value to the company, which is the thing a buyer has to justify upward. It is not the thing that makes them act.

Layer two is where B2B products quietly fail. The user's complaint is not automatically the buyer's problem, and a roadmap built purely from user feedback can drift a long way from anything the buyer will pay to fix.

Layer three is the one people resist because it sounds cynical. It is not. A buyer with a number to hit is behaving correctly by optimising for it, and that number was set by their organisation, not by yours.

What this looks like in practice

At ShopBack, we convinced massive travel sites to offer 15% cashback. That's 15% to customers, plus our margin on top. It doesn't even matter if this cannibalizes sales.

Because who were we actually selling to? The head of affiliates. Their job: maximize transactions through affiliate channels. Their metric is affiliate orders, not company profitability. Cashback creates massive affiliate volume. More routing through affiliates means their numbers go up.

The person buying your product has an incentive to use it even if the company-level math is questionable.

This pattern repeats. In cybersecurity at Horangi: few care enough about cloud security to do something serious about it, but missing compliance blocks a rollout. Get this wrong, you're pushing on a string.

The diagnostic

Who are you building for? The user? The company? Or the person who signs the check?

If you can't answer what your buyer personally gets: what makes their job easier, their metrics better, their position stronger. You're building for the wrong person.

Write it as one sentence: what is different for that person on the Monday after they buy. Not for their company. For them. If the sentence needs a slide to explain it, you have not found it yet.