Hey, {{first_name | Founder}}!
Founders often build from inside a rational prison.
You know your product perfectly, so you expect users to behave according to your logic. But real users operate from their own anxieties, habits, and incentives.
A logical product can still fail because your market does not live inside your mental model.
When founders try to fix this, they usually run a generic market sizing exercise. They look for the largest, most representative segment. That is how you end up with a product that everyone says is "interesting," but no one is desperate to buy.
Your first ICP should not be the biggest segment. It should be the hungriest one.
Every market has a white-hot center: a subset of people whose pain is intense enough to pull an imperfect v1 forward. They might not be the obvious target, but their demand is already creating motion.
The useful discovery question is not, "Who could use this?"
It is, "Who is already behaving like this problem is urgent?"
Find the white-hot center first. That is where retention, dependency, and word-of-mouth actually start.
P.S. Distribution Scan (just updated) finds where to get the first 100 customers for your startup. Run your free diagnostic here: https://distributionscan.com/go/email