What every AI founder should do before dumping money into demand gen

Why early-stage founders must validate ICP, positioning, and narrative before spending a dollar on paid ads or outbound sequences.

👋 Hey! It’s Alicia Carney. Welcome to Customer Focus - a free newsletter to help you accelerate growth by putting your customers at the heart of your business.

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Quelle surprise – AI has lowered the barriers to launching a startup.

With a fleet of tools like Replit or Lovable, anyone with an idea can spin up a product faster than ever. That’s exciting! We’re seeing creativity and innovation unlocked from people who might not have been able to build a company even one year ago.

But, I’m seeing a danger in how quickly founders are moving.

I’m talking to too many founders sprinting straight into growth tactics – ads, outbound sequences, campaigns – without building the foundations that make those investments pay off.

This moment matters

The surge in new startups means more opportunity… but also, more risk.

We all know the harsh reality: ~90% of startups fail.

But more often than not, this is not caused by bad ideas or an absence of quality talent. It’s down to GTM missteps. Founders underestimate how critical it is to stress-test commercial viability, not just product viability.

I’ve led several workshops for VC portcos over the years. The same question always comes up from founders, “What channel should I invest in?”

The reality is, I can’t answer that – and if you’re asking, it usually means you don’t know your ideal customer profile (ICP) yet either. Without that clarity, any channel is guesswork. The worst thing you can do at this stage is spray and pray.

👉 In Customer Focus: Defining and Validating Your ICP, I break down why ICP clarity comes first, long before channels.

Product marketing foundations explained

When I say “foundations,” I’m really talking about four things:

• ICP clarity: Who exactly is your buyer? How many of them exist in the market? How aware are they of your solution – or even, the problem that you’re trying to solve? Do they have proven willingness to pay?

• Competitive positioning: What bold stance are you taking in the market? Are you prepared to double down on it through brand voice, product roadmap, and commercial strategy?

• Narrative: How do you speak to both the head (business case) and the heart (emotional value)?

• GTM focus: Which strategies actually make sense for your buyer set and expectations?

This isn’t about polish. Sometimes I get the sense that some founders consider this optional, like something to address later down the line, once the first few customers are won.

Investing in these foundations is, critically, all about speed. The faster you validate who your buyer is and how to reach them, the faster you accelerate learning. The faster you build momentum.

Example: Freckle’s focused conviction

Let me give a example. Freckle, founded by Nathan Merzvinskis, Harish Subramanium, and Griffin Drigotas, is a product I admire because it was born out of clear market insight. The founders saw that Clay was winning customers in data enrichment but frustrating them with usability. That’s the opening: proof of willingness to pay + a pain point worth solving.

When they first launched, the team positioned Freckle as the “Clay-alternative for non-technical users.” The messaging was incredibly effective. Bold, punchy, and clear. 300 companies signed up in just 48 hours.

But they learned quickly that this wasn’t the right audience. Most of those early adopters had kinda random use cases and weren’t set up for long-term success on the platform.

So Nathan and his team ‘took a punt’ (as the Brits say!) and opened up their entire waitlist of +1,400 people to see what would happen at scale.

The bet paid off.

Through hand-holding folks through onboarding, absorbing every ounce of direct feedback, and monitoring data patterns, they discovered their real ICP wasn’t non-technical users at all. It was tech-savvy GTM operators at growing startups – the same people who knew Zapier, webhooks, and how to stitch systems together, but didn’t want to spend weeks mastering Clay.

The result: Freckle evolved its positioning really, really fast.

Freckle is not “for people who can’t use Clay,” but “for people who shouldn’t have to.”

GTM teams at growing startups became their core ICP, and the clarity in messaging, pricing, and focus enabled them to scale past 2,500 customers and raise their next funding round with conviction.

What I admire most here is Freckle’s relentless customer-first mindset. They were bold enough to take a strong positioning stance early on, then self-aware enough to recognize when it wasn’t connecting with their ideal buyers. That combination of courage, focus, and adaptability is rare, and ultimately helped them iterate faster than the average startup with unfocused GTM foundations.

Read the full story here (+follow Nathan! He’s great at building out loud).

👉 I shared a similar case study in Customer Focus: Positioning Your Way to PMF.

The founder trap: “I already know my customer”

Recently, a founder told me: “I know my customer, I know how to speak their language. Right now I just want to focus on demand gen, building sequences, and closing deals.”

But looking at their website, it was clear the ICP understanding was fuzzy and the narrative was too focused on ‘ease of doing business’ versus ‘what’s in it for me?’ value to the buyer personally. This is common. Founders assume clarity when what they actually have is untested assumptions.

That’s where a hypothesis-driven, experiment-based approach matters. Build a hypothesis about your ICP. Test it. Stamp out assumptions. Iterate until you have conviction. Only then do you materially speed up sales cycles.

👉 Notion VC has a great template for how to approach getting uncomfortably narrow with your ICP – perfect for early stage founders.

A practical framework for early-stage founders

Here’s the order of operations I recommend:

1. Define & validate ICP: Who are you serving, how many are there, and will they pay?

2. Craft positioning: Take a bold, high-conviction stance that sets you apart.

3. Develop narrative: Speak to business value and emotional resonance.

4. Select GTM strategy: Choose channels and tactics that align with your ICP’s behavior and expectations.

5. Test & learn: Use growth tools to validate messaging, not to bypass foundations.

👉 If you’re not sure where to start, see Customer Focus: Easy First Steps for Voice of the Customer.

Common pitfalls

• Spray and pray: Spending on ads or sequences without knowing who you’re speaking to.

• Overestimating your customer: Assuming they’re more sophisticated than they are. (See Building Momentum: Don’t Overestimate Your Customer).

• Scaling upmarket too early: Chasing enterprise logos before you’ve nailed a core ICP.

• Fear of narrowing: Avoiding focus because it feels limiting. (See Customer Focus: Uncomfortably Narrow).

The takeaway: avoid ‘hurry up and wait… for growth’

Rushing into growth before building foundations is like running a race without tying your shoes. The fastest path forward isn’t more channels – it’s conviction in who you serve and why they care. That conviction accelerates learning, speeds traction, and reduces risk for both founders and investors.

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Any follow-up question from this article? Know another great startup with early GTM focus like Freckle? Send me a message – I’d love to chat.