You launch your product and hear silence. No traction, no buzz. Painful reality check: Nobody needs what you built.

The hardest moment for a founder. It kills motivation faster than running out of money. The truth hurts: You spent months—maybe years—building something nobody wants. And worse, you don’t even know why.

Was the idea wrong or the execution poor?

Were you targeting the wrong customers or using the wrong channels?

Or does your product solve a problem nobody cares about?

Each question could take months to answer. If you're trying to solve multiple problems for many segments, it becomes impossible. Yet, that's precisely what most founders do.

More Isn't Better

Early-stage founders often believe a broader product means a bigger market. They build platforms offering different solutions to different segments. They're afraid if they niche down, they'll lose potential customers. This mindset from greed leads nowhere.

We learned this the hard way at Hints. Initially, it was a CRM co-pilot for anyone who hated updating CRMs. Sounds good, right? But "anyone" meant nobody felt we built it for them. Investors liked it, but clients weren't buying. Two years slipped away as we pivoted endlessly, chasing imaginary markets and tweaking messaging to no effect.

We threw it all out and asked one critical question:

“Who absolutely, undeniably needs what we’re building?”

The answer came quickly: Web3 founders, because their whole business lives on Telegram. There weren’t many CRMs for Telegram, and none were working within it. We became the first Telegram CRM app in their new marketplace. That was the beginning of CRMchat.

➡️ A CRM inside Telegram for Web3 founders. Not all investors liked it because the niche was too narrow. But..

We got Immediate traction

A simple website and a few social media posts led to paying clients within weeks. Within months, we ranked #1 on Google for "Telegram CRM." This traction gave us the critical thing every founder needs early on: confidence that we'd found product-market fit.

Surprisingly, we never lost the broader market despite being hyper-narrow. Non-Web3 customers came organically because it was clear our solution solved their problem, too, if they ran a business on Telegram. Today, many of our clients aren’t even Web3.

Avoiding a Dead-End Niche

Here’s a caveat many founders overlook. Some niches are dead ends. They can work for lifestyle or micro businesses but won’t allow you to scale a big VC-backed startup. In this case, choosing a small segment isn’t enough. It must have clear expansion potential.

The Web3 market wasn’t just small. It was our gateway into a larger market: all Telegram-based businesses. Then we’ll move to WhatsApp, aiming to become the biggest CRM inside messengers.

We found a market small enough to get first traction, with potential to expand to nearby markets.

The Bottom Line

If your startup is struggling for traction:

• Stop building for everyone.

• Find the smallest possible niche that desperately needs you.

• First, prove your value there.

• After initial success, expansion follows naturally.

• Once you gain traction, invest in SEO. The narrower the niche, the easier it will be to dominate search results and capture users looking to solve the problem.

In startup life, "more" usually means confusion. First, focus narrowly. Expansion comes later.

Until next Sunday,
George Levin
^{LinkedIn | Consulting}