One of the hardest lessons for founders is accepting that the market doesn’t care about your vision as much as you do.
You can spend months crafting the perfect product narrative, refining your positioning, and obsessing over what you believe you’re building. Then customers arrive and describe your company in completely different terms.
When I sat down with Jonathan Mortensen, founder of Confident Security, this was one of the insights that stayed with me long after the conversation ended.
Jonathan shared a lesson he learned while building one of his previous startups: you’re in the business your customers think you’re in, not the business you think you’re in. The company began with one vision, but customers consistently bought it for another reason. Instead of resisting that reality, the team embraced it, repositioned the company around what customers actually valued, and found a far stronger product-market fit.
It’s a deceptively simple idea, but one I think many founders overlook.
Product-market fit isn’t something you define in a pitch deck.
It’s something your customers define through their behaviour.
Jonathan also spoke about the trade-offs every startup faces. The more novel your product, the easier it is to command attention and premium pricing. But if you’re building something incremental, success depends far more on distribution, marketing and execution. Every company is making that trade-off, whether they realise it or not.
The conversation reminded me that startups aren’t just about building products; they’re about learning. Every customer conversation is feedback. Every rejection is information. Every product iteration is another opportunity to get closer to what the market actually wants.
Jonathan recommended the book Skunk Works, which tells the story of Lockheed Martin’s legendary engineering team. His biggest takeaway wasn’t about aerospace: it was about iteration. The world’s most advanced aircraft weren’t designed perfectly the first time. They were the result of rapid experimentation, continuous learning and relentless improvement.
The same principle applies to startups.
The founders who build enduring companies aren’t always the ones with the best original idea.
They’re the ones humble enough to let the market reshape it.
Until next time,
Firas Sozan
The PMF Playbook