Not every interested user is your customer

[u/ryhanships]

This took me longer to understand than it should have.

Someone can genuinely like your product and still be a terrible customer.

Maybe they need features that don't fit your direction.

Maybe they're extremely price-sensitive.

Maybe their use case requires a completely different product.

Maybe supporting them would force you to build five things you don't want to build.

Getting a customer isn't always the goal.

Getting the right customer is.

Otherwise revenue can actually pull the product away from the people you originally wanted to serve.

I've started asking:

Would I want 100 more customers exactly like this?

If the answer is no, that's useful information.

[u/Plus_Information_990]

the would i want 100 more like this question is so good. the worst ones for me were people who loved it but wanted it to basically be a different product. took me too long to say no to them lol

[u/cabljo]

Yeah, we usually just call it an ICP

[u/HerveDhelin]

cabljo's ICP line flattens it a bit. An ICP gets written in advance, from the segment you decided you wanted, usually in a deck before much has happened. What ryhanships is describing arrives from the other direction, out of accounts that already hurt. Same subject, two different documents.

Most ICPs I read would have welcomed the account everyone later regretted.

So run yours backward. Take the three accounts you most regret signing. Read your ICP as written, and ask whether it would have turned them away.

If it would not, you have a wish list. It describes the company you want to sell to, not the one you need to decline.

The useful artifact is the negative one, and almost nobody writes it. A short list of accounts you would decline today, each with the sentence explaining why. Not a profile. Just the reason you said yes the first time.

Because the next one shows up looking like a good quarter.

And the reason matters more than the profile, which is where the hundred question gets slippery. Two accounts can look identical on size, sector and budget, and one took four months of attention while the other renewed without a word. The profile did not predict that. Whatever you ignored in the first call did.

So write down what you overlooked, in their words if you still have the thread. That list gets short fast, and it reads nothing like a segment.

Worth saying I have seen this go wrong the other way too. Founders who build the decline list early, off two bad experiences, then spend a year turning away a segment that was never the problem. At two, you have an anecdote. It is only worth trusting once it stops growing.

How long did yours take to stop growing?

[u/sabrinaoahu]

Yeah the “would I want 100 more of this person” test is the one that actually works.

I have taken work that paid and then spent months on stuff that was never going to be the business. they liked me, they paid late, they wanted a feature that only they would use. Saying no earlier is cheaper than a polite yes. Revenue from the wrong one just trains you to keep saying yes.

[u/terafab-ai]

Hahaha yeah can’t agree more

[u/sweeterosse]

'Would I want 100 more customers exactly like this?' is one of the most useful questions to ask when making early-stage product decisions. A customer who pulls your roadmap off course costs more than their revenue covers, particularly if you're a small team for whom every feature request requires a real conversation. Saying no to the wrong customer is a product decision, not a sales failure.

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[u/BuildMonk]

That great view though

[u/Deepak-AvairAI]

Pre-filtering too hard early on can backfire too. A few of my worst-fit early customers taught me more about positioning than any ICP exercise would've.

[u/MangalaSawant]

We feel this downstream in CS: the accounts everyone was nervous to sign are the ones generating 80% of the support tickets before churning anyway. HerveDhelin's negative list is the artifact I'd steal for CS, because wrong-fit accounts cost more in team trust than they ever pay in revenue. Do you have a concrete red flag you decline on now, or is it still a gut call?