I asked 60 founders if my B2B idea was real. They agreed on one thing.
I posted a validation question here a couple of weeks ago and got more useful feedback than I expected. Here's the part that surprised me.
Four different people, independently, told me I had the buyer wrong. I assumed I was selling to the people who make the decision. They pointed out that those people already employ someone whose job this is, so to them I'm a curiosity competing with their own team. The person who'd actually pay is the one who has to defend the decision to a committee or a lender and has no independent read of their own.
That's a completely different sales motion, a different price, and honestly a different product. Nobody buys a number. They buy something they can put in a file and point at when someone senior asks why.
What I'm still working out: how do you get in front of the person who defends the decision, when everything about your funnel is designed to reach the person who makes it? If you've solved that in a B2B context, I'd like to hear how.
I’d probably stop trying to identify this buyer by job title and start identifying them by the moment they have to defend a decision.
For the next 10 interviews, I’d reconstruct one real decision backwards:
The acquisition channel may be hiding in that last two steps.
If the need consistently appears right before a committee review, financing conversation, renewal, acquisition, or internal approval, then the useful distribution surface may be whatever workflow already surrounds that event — rather than a generic channel where people with the right title hang out.
I’d also test the artifact itself as the acquisition object. Give five people a sample “defensible file” built around a decision they recently had to justify and see whether they immediately know who else inside or outside their company would need one.
That referral path may tell you more about the real buyer network than another 60 broad founder interviews.
Have you started asking people to reconstruct the last time they actually had to defend one of these decisions?
The person making the decision and the person defending it want completely different things from me. The decider wants to be right; the defender wants to not get blamed. Those are two different products even if the underlying data's identical. What I'm chewing on now is your exact question but in reverse, how to reach the defender when every instinct and every funnel is built to reach the decider. Still working that out. If you've cracked getting in front of the second person, I'm all ears
I haven’t cracked it either, but my current hypothesis is that the defender is easier to reach through the artifact they’re trying to produce than through their job title.
They may never search for “decision-defense software,” but they will look for things like a renewal brief, procurement response, investment memo, approval checklist, audit trail, or “how to justify X internally.”
So I’d test distribution around those moments:
templates or examples for the document they have to produce
search pages around the specific review/approval event
a sample defensible file that is easy to forward internally
referrals triggered by “who else has to sign off on this?”
The interesting signal might be who forwards the artifact, not who originally discovers the product.
If the decider finds you first but consistently forwards the output to someone else who then asks for more evidence, that second person may be the real defender channel hiding inside the existing funnel.
This line, I keep coming back to is that the signal is who forwards it, not who finds it. That's testable in a way job titles aren't, and it means my instrumentation is wrong, I've been measuring who opens things when I should be measuring what gets passed sideways and to whom. On the artifact as entry point idea: I think you're right that they'd never search for a category name but would absolutely search for the document they have to produce. That's a much more concrete surface to build around than "people with the right title." To your original question, no, I hadn't been asking people to reconstruct a specific decision backwards, and I should have been. "What triggered someone asking you to justify it" is the question I was missing, because that trigger is the moment I need to be present for. Going to be changing my interview script this week. Thanks
Yeah, I think you’ll learn a lot more from a few real decision stories than another batch of broad interviews.
The forwarding behavior feels especially worth watching. If the same kinds of artifacts keep getting passed to the same kinds of people, that’s probably telling you where the real path in is.
Glad this was useful. Curious what changes once you try the new interview script.
The buyer distinction is the part that really stands out. The person making the decision and the person who has to defend that decision can have completely different reasons to buy. I’d be curious whether those 60 conversations also changed how you’d describe the product itself, not just who you sell it to.
Honestly it changed the product more than the buyer. Once I accepted that the person paying is the one defending the call, not making it, the whole thing stopped being like "here's a score" and became "here's a file you can put in front of a committee and not get torn apart". Every line has a source and a date, and it says plainly what would change the answer. The number's just the cover page now. The evidence underneath is the actual thing they're buying, because that's what survives someone senior asking "why should I trust this." So same core problem, completely different deliverable. Good question though
I sent you an email a few days ago — not sure if you’ve had a chance to see it yet. Let me know when you get a chance to check it.
Hey Aryan, thanks for sending that over. Your point about defining the decision the evidence is meant to resolve before I start collecting it is the part that stuck with me, because you're right that I was about to go gather a pile of user conversations without being clear on what exactly they'd settle. I did start moving on the direct conversations, though slower than I planned, and I'll come back to properly over email with where it actually landed rather than a half answer here. Appreciate you following up and not letting me off the hook on it :)