I recently spoke to a founder whose AI business was growing fast.
He said:
“We have to put people on a waitlist. We simply can’t configure our software for clients as fast as we close them.”
At first glance, this sounds like a great problem.
+ Demand is there.
+ Revenue is coming in.
+ The team is learning quickly.
But then we talked about the product. It could do a lot.
+ Outreach.
+ Prototyping.
+ Client-specific workflows.
Several use cases across several industries.
So I asked him two questions: Where do you define the boundary of the job you do not want to do? And who is your ideal ICP?
He became quiet.
Then he said:
“Those are very good questions. Right now, we close deals from almost any industry. Tax accountants. Lawyers. SaaS companies. The projects all start well. But after a few months, we hit a wall. This has happened in every single project. We don’t know our ICP yet.”
That sentence matters.
Because this is where many ambitious companies get stuck.
Every new customer creates learning.
But every new customer also creates complexity.
Different buyer.
Different workflow.
Different blocker.
Different implementation.
Different success criteria.
At some point, the pipeline stops being a growth engine.
It becomes the strategy.
The founder made a fair point:
“All these different projects created a steep learning curve. Every project contributed to what we are able to do.”
He was right.
Market testing needs variety.
But scalable GTM needs constraints.
You cannot build repeatability while treating every customer as a new category.
You cannot scale a sales motion if every deal teaches you a different market.
You cannot reduce engineering pressure if every implementation expands the product boundary.
The hard question is not:
“Can we sell this?”
The hard question is:
“Where can we win repeatedly without reinventing the business every time?”
Exploration is useful.
But it is not a GTM system.
It is the phase before one.
The danger is not doing too many experiments.
The danger is not knowing they are experiments.
Do you know which GTM phase you are currently in?
Or does your current pipeline decide that for you?