Advanced founders rarely struggle with getting some traction—they struggle with deciding where that traction should actually count. In one recent Elite Founders session, a founder had just run a live product activation: a new, caffeine-free warm beverage served in a creative destination hub.
The feedback sounded like a dream. People lined up. Visitors tried to pay for samples that were meant to be free.
On paper, it looked like a perfect problem: too many opportunities, not enough capacity. Underneath, something critical was missing: a clear desired outcome, a precise day-part use case, and a specific ideal customer profile. The founder wasn’t just collecting demand; they were collecting noise.
That’s where Elite Founders works differently.
We’re not impressed by “everyone loves it.” We train founders to architect the underlying system that turns live enthusiasm into a focused ICP, a repeatable buying ritual, and a GTM that can be scaled with intention.
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The Hidden Cost of Not Picking an ICP
For advanced founders, this isn’t a “nice to have” problem. When your product resonates with multiple segments and situations, not choosing has a real cost.
First, you start misreading encouragement as validation. People at events are kind, curious, and supportive. They’ll tell you they love your product, they’ll happily cheer on your journey—but that doesn’t mean they’ll build a ritual around it or buy repeatedly once they’re home. Without a defined ICP and time-of-day use case, it becomes hard to distinguish novelty from true demand.
Second, your GTM becomes a series of disconnected tests. One week, you’re chasing wellness-focused consumers; the next, outdoor enthusiasts; then people looking for a functional afternoon boost. Each experiment makes sense in isolation, but there’s no unifying lens to sort which experiments deepen your core strategy and which are just distractions.
Finally, investors don’t just look at traction; they look at clarity. They want to see that you know where you’re exceptionally useful compared to alternatives—why someone would choose your product instead of a familiar warm drink, a functional beverage, or a comforting nightly ritual. When your ICP is “everyone who liked it at my activation,” the story feels fuzzy, even if the numbers look promising.
This is why we treat ICP selection as an elite challenge, not a basic marketing exercise. The stakes are your focus, your unit economics, and your long-term GTM architecture.
Turning Rituals into Data: Our Systematic Training Lens
In Elite Founders, we don’t ask founders to “go talk to customers” and come back with vague opinions. We train them to design discovery so every interaction sharpens the ICP.
Our systematic methodology often includes elements like:
- Desired Outcome → ICP → Channel alignment
- Focus and divergence in the value proposition
- Signal vs noise filtering in early customer data
- Designed discovery loops instead of open-ended feedback
In this session, one line from Scott Hindell became the backbone of the work:
“Any successful, sustainable business model has a really clear idea of what they do exceptionally well compared to the alternatives for an important need, want or desire that’s not adequately satisfied.”
We used that lens to redesign the founder’s experiments. Instead of handing out random samples and hoping people scanned a QR code, we had them structure a simple funnel: only people who already enjoyed the product in person could claim a small bundle shipped to their home, in exchange for contact details. Then, once those people reordered, the founder would schedule short, structured conversations focused on when they were drinking it, why they chose it over alternatives, and what role it played in their week.
No open-ended “tell us what you think.” No generic surveys. Every question was tied to a hypothesis: Is this a mid-afternoon functional ritual? An evening wind-down? A travel-only memory? Over time, those designed loops turn warm anecdotes into crisp ICP definition—and a GTM motion that can be repeated and scaled.
From Being Liked to Being Exceptionally Useful
The elite mindset shift in this session was simple to say and hard to live: stop chasing being broadly liked and start obsessing over where you’re exceptionally useful.
That meant treating every enthusiastic reaction as a sorting input, not as proof that “we should be everywhere.” It meant noticing which people naturally folded the product into a recurring ritual—and building around them, even if that meant saying no to flattering invitations that didn’t fit the strategy.
This is where advanced founders move from “cool brand” to “systematic business.” They stop collecting random wins and start designing for consistent, ICP-aligned usage.
We’re not sharing the session details here, but if you’d like to learn these systematic frameworks, request a tryout session.
Inside the Room: What High-Performance Founders Actually Tackle
In this single conversation, founders worked on topics like:
- Distinguishing novelty from true demand in live activations
- Designing sampling funnels that produce ICP signal, not just sales
- Mapping time-of-day and functional vs emotional drivers into GTM choices
- Using contribution margin (time, energy, money) as a filter for opportunities
- Structuring customer conversations to capture real rituals, not surface opinions
- Deciding when not to accept “free” distribution offers that dilute focus
This is the level of discussion our sessions orbit around: not basic “product-market fit” talk, but the precision work of turning messy, real-world enthusiasm into a disciplined growth architecture.
Experience This Level of Precision Training
This is championship-level coaching for founders who already have traction and want systematic clarity. If you’re ready to move from “everyone likes us” to “we know exactly who we’re for and why they choose us,” Elite Founders is built for that kind of work.
Founders Meeting
This level of systematic training represents what advanced founders experience in Elite Founders sessions. Want to experience the methodology that’s helping founders build systematic revenue machines?
Join Alessandro at our next Founders Meeting to see our coaching approach.
During the session, you can request a Tryout of Elite Founders membership—we believe in showing founders our training depth before asking for commitment. Limited seats – we keep these intentionally small:https://maccelerator.la/en/live-presentation/
Tryouts available for qualified founders – RSVP soon.
