Who Are You (Really) Talking To?

When you explain what your startup does, who exactly are you explaining it to?

Is it the end user? The actual buyer or decision-maker? An influencer? A potential partner? Or are you just pitching to your mom to see whether the message is even clear?

Whoever it is, you need to know before you open your mouth.

Not in the sense of building detailed personas and assigning them a name, a job title, a coffee order, and a personality type. That's a different exercise. What matters here is understanding their pain well enough to pitch how you alleviate it.

A practical example: a developer on a team might want to save time or automate a repetitive process so they can focus on what matters more. Budget savings aren't their priority; that's someone else's job. But their team lead? That person cares about both time and money, plus team output and collaboration quality.

Your product might solve both. But your pitch, your sales enablement material, and your message all need to be tailored to whoever you're actually talking to. Get it right, and they understand your value clearly. Get it wrong, and you're wasting time, money, and energy on conversations that lead nowhere.

So before the next pitch, take a minute and actually ask: who am I really talking to?