Advanced founders rarely struggle with ideas—they struggle with making those ideas investable. In another Elite Founders session, a founder arrived after a long night fixing a critical product issue, alongside a fresh rejection from a competitive accelerator program. On paper, the story sounded strong: real users, organic adoption, paying customers, and introductions to influential people in their space.
Yet the accelerator passed.
As we unpacked it, something subtle emerged. This wasn’t just about pitch polish or connections. The founder could articulate the product, the features, the roadmap—almost like checking every box in a standard startup checklist. But when asked, “Who are the 10–20 users that embody your original vision, and what situation are they in?” the answer was diffuse. “They’re very diverse. People use it for all sorts of stuff.”
For investors and accelerators, that’s a feeling problem, not a spreadsheet problem. They’re looking for companies they can accelerate, where the ICP, use case, and value proposition already cohere into a clear “this is who it’s for and why it wins.” Our work in Elite Founders is to build that coherence long before you walk into those rooms.
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Beyond Traction: The Clarity Advanced Founders Are Judged On
Once you’re past the idea stage, the bar moves. Having users, some revenue, and a compelling vision is now the starting line—not the finish.
What accelerators and investors are quietly evaluating is:
- Do you understand where you’re exceptionally useful compared to alternatives?
- Can you point to a specific type of customer, in a specific situation, where your product clearly wins?
- Does your story communicate that in a way that feels inevitable rather than accidental?
Without that, traction starts to look like randomness. Tens of thousands of signups, but no clear “who.” Revenue that grows, but no explanation of why certain customers pay more, stay longer, or use the product more deeply. It becomes hard for anyone outside the company to see how to pour fuel on the fire.
In this session, we contrasted “service” with “hospitality”: you can technically deliver all the right components—features, onboarding, support—and still have a business that feels flat. The same is true in fundraising. You can answer every question on the checklist and still leave people thinking, “I don’t quite know what this really is yet.”
That gap is what we target in Elite-level work: fusing ICP clarity, value proposition, and GTM into a single, coherent feel that sophisticated stakeholders immediately pick up on.
Designing the “Feel” of a Scalable Business
Our approach is not to teach founders more isolated tactics. It’s to train them to coordinate skills into a system that has a clear, repeatable feel.
We often work with elements like:
- Desired outcome → ICP → Sales channel coherence
- Focus & divergence in the value proposition (what you double down on vs. ignore)
- Systematic qualification of users instead of generic “user counts”
- Narrative design that connects data, story, and lived customer rituals
In this session, one line from our coaching team became a pivot point:
Founders often look at a lot of the things they’re doing as checking boxes, but this isn’t just skills, it’s skills and coordination. It’s blending those together so that it has a feel to it.
We used that as the backbone for redesigning how the founder saw their user base. Instead of celebrating “diverse usage,” we had them identify a small group of users who used the product repeatedly, for the same underlying reason that matched the original inspiration. Those users became the seed of a sharpened ICP.
From there, the work shifted to language and structure: how to describe that ICP in a way that investors instantly understand; how to align the product roadmap to deepen value for those users; and how to adjust the go-to-market so acquisition, onboarding, and retention all point at the same archetype. The goal isn’t to be narrow forever—it’s to become so clear that expansion becomes a deliberate strategy, not a default drift.
The Elite Mindset Around Preparation and Opportunity
Instead of asking, “Why didn’t they pick us?” we ask, “What would this have looked like if our ICP and value story were so clear they couldn’t ignore it?” That leads to a deeper question: “If we truly believe we can build a viable company, what clarity do we need now so we’re not dependent on any single accelerator?”
This is where preparation and opportunity genuinely meet. You may still choose to work with accelerators or big-name funds, but you’re no longer relying on them to define your story. You’ve already built the internal fidelity—the clear sense of who you serve, in what situation, and why you win.
We’re not sharing the session details here, but if you’d like to learn these systematic frameworks, request a tryout session.
Inside Our Championship-Level Discussions
In this room, high-performance founders weren’t talking about basic funnels. They were working through topics like:
- Choosing a single initial ICP from a wide, diverse user base
- Translating lived user behavior into an investable narrative
- Separating “supportive fans” from true ideal customers
- Aligning product roadmap with the most promising use case
- Building customer relationships that increase lifetime value through “feel,” not discounts
- Using examples from beloved brands to understand focus and divergence
These are championship-level conversations: not “How do I get more users?” but “How do I design a business that feels obviously investable to the right partners?”
Step Into an Elite Founders Tryout
If you’ve reached the point where “more features” and “more users” aren’t the bottleneck—and you know the next step is clarity, coordination, and story—then Elite Founders is built for you. Our tryout sessions are where we test that fit on both sides.
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.
