Today's entry is one of those uncomfortable ones where the agent is right and I'm not going to do what it suggests.

This is the whole point of building in public. So here it is, in full.

What Instant Crush told us this morning

Our segmentation scored 6 out of 10. Here's the agent's actual output:

• Position now: Your buyer picture is clearer than before, but still too broad in public.

• Positive signal: The three product paths already match different decision situations in a useful way.

• Attention point: Your public audience still mixes several buyer types without a clear hierarchy.

• Next step: Choose one primary buyer and define explicit inclusion and exclusion rules.

• Competitive effect: Clearer targeting would help you look more focused than broader but less precise rivals.

And the longer explanation:

"This area scores 6 out of 10 because the segmentation is heading in the right direction. Instant Focus, Instant Direction, and Instant Alignment each point to a different buyer state, which is more useful than broad demographic labels alone. That shows the brand is learning how different buyers arrive with different needs. The problem is that the public language still blends small and medium brands, agencies, founders, leadership teams, and marketing teams. That makes the target market feel wider than it probably is. It matters because unclear targeting weakens problem fit, search language, and pricing confidence."

Read that again. It's textbook segmentation advice. It's what I'd tell a client. It's what I'd write in a deck. It's the kind of feedback a good CMO would give a founder.

The agent is right.

It's too early to start narrowing down

I've been close to Mendix, Easygenerator, Shypple, and a handful of other fast-growing startups. In every one of them, narrow segmentation didn't happen in the first year or two. It happened later, after enough customers had come through the door for patterns to emerge. You learn who your buyer actually is by selling to them, watching who renews, who refers, who thrives. Not by deciding it in advance and writing it on a slide.

There's a popular idea that the moment you start a company you should be able to name your "ideal customer profile" with surgical precision. In my experience, founders who do that early are usually guessing. The guess might be educated. It might even be partly right. But it's still a guess dressed up as a decision.

What we actually see, with our own eyes, is a real gap in the market: small and medium businesses who want to run marketing with the discipline, knowledge, and confidence of large, leading brands. Most of them can't afford a CMO. Most of them can't afford a strategy consultant. Most of them shouldn't be building their own marketing platform.

If I had to bet right now, the sharpest slice is probably:

• B2B services with small teams and complex sales

• SaaS companies at the post-survival, pre-scale stage

• Smaller agencies who can't justify building marketing tooling themselves

• But that's three slices, not one. And honestly, I don't yet have the data to know which is the sharpest.