The product had been live for three months. The founder had run the playbook properly: posting in the right communities, reaching out directly to people who matched his ideal customer, a public launch that landed better than he expected.
Signups climbed steadily off the back of it, and as the free trial numbers grew, he built his seed-round math around a standard assumption for an early SaaS product, something close to one in five trial users eventually converting to paid.
Three months and a few hundred free trial signups later, not one had converted. Not below plan, not slower than hoped. Zero.
He hired us a few weeks before his pitch to find out why, and to fix whatever could still be fixed before he stood in front of investors.
We ran the technical checks first
We put the product through the kind of pass we run at EnactOn before telling any founder they're investor-ready: automated QA, a full audit of the codebase, the works. It came back clean. No crashes, no security holes, nothing sitting anywhere in the product that would make a user hesitate. If code quality alone decided who pays, this thing would have had customers in its first week.
A flawless product with zero paying customers is its own kind of puzzle, and it's one we've learned to recognize quickly: when the build is solid but nobody's buying, the problem is rarely the product itself. It's who the product was built for.
So we asked him something simple: who is this actually for?
He started listing people. Freelancers, small agencies, solo founders, teams inside bigger companies, maybe students eventually, possibly enterprise down the line. Almost everyone, in other words.
That answer was the real finding. He'd built something that could plausibly help a lot of different people, and he'd marketed it the same way, casting one wide net instead of aiming at anyone specific. A net that wide pulls in attention. It doesn't pull in customers, because nobody in that crowd ever feels like the product was built with them in mind, and "could be useful to almost anyone" has never gotten a single person to pull out a card.
What the signup data confirmed
To check whether that held up, we looked past who'd signed up and at who'd actually stuck around. Most of the volume behind his one-in-five assumption had come straight from the public launch: people curious about a tool built for "almost everyone," who tried it for a session or two and quietly drifted off. A much smaller group, people who'd come in through his direct outreach to one specific type of team, kept coming back week after week, using it the way someone uses a tool they actually depend on. That group was less than a tenth of total signups, and it was the only place a real business was hiding.
He'd been throwing the net wide because wide nets feel like less risk. But that's exactly what was sinking the launch: casting for everyone meant landing nobody in particular. Sizing the actual audience before scaling acquisition is the step that would have caught this early, and it's the one most founders skip because the broad numbers already feel like progress.
What we changed with two weeks left
We pulled together the users who matched that narrow, high-engagement profile: eighteen people, out of a few hundred signups. He rewrote his messaging to speak to that one specific team, not the broad pitch that had worked for the launch crowd, and reached out to each of them personally with real pricing attached.
Six paid before he ever opened his pitch deck.
Six isn't a big number, and we told him that plainly. But it's six people who match exactly the kind of customer he'd be describing to investors, not an average pulled from a crowd that was never going to buy in the first place. That's a very different story to walk into a pitch with.
Why this happens more than founders expect
We see versions of this often enough that it's stopped surprising us, and the wider numbers agree: a lot of early products stall not because the product is weak, but because "built for everyone" quietly becomes the go-to-market plan, and a plan with no specific buyer in it never converts one.
A few things worth doing before your own raise, if this sounds close to home. Pick the one type of person you're building for, and if your honest answer sounds like a list instead of a single group, that's worth fixing before you scale anything. Break your signups down by source and by how deep people actually use the product, since an average across a mixed crowd can hide a real business sitting inside a much smaller group. And know what a typical SaaS build actually costs at each stage, so the roadmap decisions you make afterward are based on real numbers instead of a guess.
None of this happened because the founder was careless. He built something solid and marketed it well, it just wasn't aimed anywhere in particular. That's an easy thing to miss from the inside, because a wide net always looks fuller than a narrow one, right up until you check what's actually still in it.
Has anyone else watched a founder build for "everyone" and end up with paying customers from nowhere in particular?
