How Startups Close the Gap of Being Too Early to Market
Being early isn't a verdict. Four ways to survive the wait between a real market and a ready one without going broke being right.
A journalism professor once told our class that it’s almost impossible to be right on time. You need to decide if you’re going to be early or late, and we couldn’t be late.
Most of us can’t afford to be late here, either.
Last week we tested to make sure that demand exists in the market. We know it’s there but something is sitting between the buyer and the purchase:
Belief blocker: buyers don’t fully understand or trust the category yet
Enablement blocker: something outside our control is in the way
While proof points like case studies and testimonials and references can break a belief blocker, data isn’t going to crack an enablement blocker.
This post is about surviving an enablement blocker, backed by an uncomfortable amount of first-hand experience.
1. Position for the future
You can see the wave forming but there’s still time before it breaks. While you wait, that time goes into authoring the category’s vocabulary and future standards. When buyers and practitioners finally show up, the terms they use to think about the problem are the ones you wrote.
dbt launched as data warehouses moved to the cloud. But a warehouse is just infrastructure and nobody had worked out the discipline to operate one at a high level. As a founder put it, the industry “treated data analysts as low-level, non-technical people.” That needed to change for dbt to be successful so the team spent the slow ramp championing an analytics engineer role and defining how the job should be done. As the cloud data stack went mainstream and every company suddenly needed that function, dbt was the pioneer behind the definition.
We had a similar scenario at Recurrent. The used EV market was too small in the US for most to care about but we could see a wave coming: years of new-EV sales meant a flood of vehicles on short leases that would be returned as used cars. We spent the gap codifying the language and success metrics that the industry would one day want to use. When buyers and sellers finally arrived, the playbooks they wanted were already written.
Test it: Write the sentence your buyer will use to describe this problem two years from now. Then work backwards to find the missing pieces: tech, titles, terms, etc. At the very least, you’ve just outlined your content calendar. The goal is hearing those terms repeated by prospects and competitors.
Lesson: A visible gap between today and demand on the horizon can give you just enough time to author the category’s language and success criteria. Whoever defines how buyers judge the category is the obvious default when the judging starts.
Common misstep: Don’t mistake your conviction for future demand. Name the external signal that demand is actually forming (lease-return volume, search queries, a regulation’s effective date) before you fund a year of positioning activities.
2. Relocate to the current opportunity
A chokepoint that blocks demand is only one point. Sometimes you need to go to where it doesn’t exist, even if that somewhere is not the ideal customer or region or deal size. Start there, get momentum, then use that to expand.
Ramp wanted to replace the goliaths of corporate spending with something better and more modern. Although a great idea, it required an even greater switching cost for their prospects.
For a large enterprise, that meant procurement cycles, migration downtime, uncomfortable risk. Switching costs were an incredible hurdle, but only for established companies. A startup in its infancy had nothing to change or break. Ramp shifted its focus down-market (to startups) and only moved upmarket once it had built the controls and integrations to lower enterprise switching costs.
Waymo ran the same logic on geography. It didn’t launch where revenue potential would have been the highest. It launched in suburban Phoenix where flat roads and blue skies and lax state regulations flattened likely blockers. It was years before it took on hilly, foggy, dense, regulated (and lucrative) places like San Francisco.
Test it: Instead of asking who your ideal customer is, ask who has nothing in the way: nothing to rip out, no one to convince, no missing piece they’re waiting on. That may not be the customer you set out to win, but that could be why the segment is still available while you wait on other blockers to clear.
Lesson: You don’t have to clear the blocker everywhere. You need the one place it doesn’t exist, then a route from there to the rest of the market.
Common misstep: Don’t lose sight of the desired destination. You’re relocating to fund survival but the risk is getting stuck there so go in with that in mind.
3. Build or partner to unlock demand
Some blockers can be built around, either independently or by partnering with someone who also benefits from removing that blocker.
Cursor is an AI coding editor that sits on top of incredibly expensive models. When its suppliers, OpenAI and Anthropic, launched their own coding tools, Cursor’s vendors became its competitors. It couldn’t out-spend them to build a rival model, so it announced an acquisition by SpaceX, which now (somehow) owns the Grok models. Cursor’s bridge got it across the blocker, but it wasn’t a moat.
Common misstep: Be careful not to rent a core piece of your product (or moat) from a company whose roadmap runs through you, too.
4. Create momentum with competitors
The Belief Blocker scenario from last week was about one buyer’s doubt, which you can often clear yourself with a pilot project or case study data.
Industry-wide doubt exists too, held by analysts, investors and incumbents. Sometimes the best solution is making the space so obviously real and investable that bigger players enter to help you establish the market. Big names attract analyst coverage, drive awareness with marketing budgets you could never match, and de-risk the decision for early adopters.
Harvey’s AI-native legal product is a helpful example. When the trusted legacy legal-tech brands (Thomson Reuters and LexisNexis) started shipping their own AI products, they helped to alleviate the natural concern of every firm’s managing partner: “Is AI actually safe to use on legal work?”
Incumbent marketing budgets and reputations cleared the industry-wide doubt that Harvey could not have done on its own, and suddenly every firm was looking for a legal AI tool. Harvey was positioned to win the ones who wanted the best product because the AI-native option had better UX and value to users. The incumbents brought the demand so Harvey could capture it.
(The thing I’m watching now is if Harvey can protect itself against the inevitable bundling from incumbents. Think: Slack vs Teams)
Test it: You often can’t control which incumbents show up. Before you make it attractive for them to enter your market, identify the advantage (moat) you’ll still have when they show up with a good-enough version and a bigger budget. That’s where your energy should be going while you wait.
Lesson: A slice of a big, validated market beats owning a sliver of a tiny, unproven one. Let incumbents build the market for you.
Common misstep: Be careful of welcoming giants before you’re defensible. Leadership roles are tough for pioneers to recover once they cede them.
A way across the demand gap
The four moves are more of a diagnosis than a menu.
If the blocker will clear on its own with some time, position for it.
If it’s already gone in some corner of the market, relocate there.
If it won’t clear and you can afford the fix, build it.
If it’s too big for any startup to move, enlist the giants who can.
Under all of them sits one constraint: stay cheap enough to still be standing when the wave arrives. It won’t matter how incredible the market demand has become if you can’t survive long enough to harvest it.
Arriving too early is simply a gap to cross. As that journalism professor reminded us, early was the only option for us. Make the most of it.