We’re a small company selling into a narrow, heavily regulated market. There are maybe a few dozen buyers that really matter, and most of them are cautious about anything new. For a long time I treated getting our first real customers as a search problem. Looking at where those customers actually came from, I realized we’d been telling ourselves a story that doesn’t quite hold up.

The story went like this: in every market there is a small group that moves first, and our job is to find them, win them and let them pull the rest along. So that’s what we tried to do. We built lists, qualified contacts and started calling, and I was fairly sure the bottleneck was just finding the few open-minded people in an otherwise careful market.

A couple of quarters of outbound that mostly went nowhere forced me to look at this more honestly. When I checked where the customers we actually closed had come from, almost none of them came off a list of ours. They had found us. In most cases through free webinars on the regulatory problems they were stuck on, and the recordings we had left open on YouTube afterwards.

Not because these people were early adopters in any real sense. In a market this small there is no early-adopter segment to comb through to begin with. There are a few dozen relevant people, scattered, and most of them careful rather than curious. What actually did the filtering was the problem itself. Nobody invests forty-five minutes into a problem they do not have.

So we weren’t bad at finding them. There simply was no segment to find, at least not the way I had pictured it. The few that matter tend to surface on their own, as long as you are visible with something only a person who has that problem would bother to read.

What I’m taking from this: in a market this small you probably shouldn’t spend your energy going out to find your early customers. You make yourself findable instead and let the problem do the selecting, by publishing the one thing only someone with that problem would sit through. The second point is the more uncomfortable one. This only works when the offer is actually sharp enough, and when the inbound stays quiet, the honest reading is usually that what we offer doesn’t hurt enough yet, not that the market is too small. The manual work doesn’t disappear either. It just moves to the end, where you still close people one by one.

Open question I’m still sitting with: at what size does a niche become big enough that going out to find customers beats waiting to be found, and how do I reliably tell apart a market that is genuinely too small from an offer that simply isn’t sharp enough?