Why doesn't the team with the best technology always win the market? After years of looking at deals, I've become increasingly certain of one thing: the most expensive misunderstanding founders have is treating market entry as a product problem. We're conditioned to believe that "if the product is good enough, it will sell itself." It sounds right, and it matches the engineer's instinct — build the best thing, and the market will respond.

Many founders have customers — yet every deal feels like a grind: long sales cycles, constant complaints, relentless price pressure, and problems that keep surfacing after the contract is signed. Their first instinct is "the product needs more work" or "the sales team needs to push harder." But the real problem sits further upstream — they opened the wrong door from the very beginning.