People go to The Cheesecake Factory because they are hungry, not because they crave the best sourdough vegan pizza in town.
Speak to hunger and you fill the dining room. You also invite complaints from diners expecting a different experience.
The Cheesecake Factory succeeds as a deliberate choice. The founders designed a menu long enough to prevent group arguments. That model works.
You probably built a Cheesecake Factory by accident.
You engineered a robust product. It has a wide feature set and impresses people during live demos. Yet the website traffic bounces.
The Identity Trap
When someone suggests narrowing your focus, the immediate counterargument revolves around money. Cutting features allegedly loses customers. Narrowing the audience supposedly shrinks the addressable market.
This logic is fear with a spreadsheet attached.
Identity drives this resistance. You spent years architecting something technically complex. Narrowing the scope feels like a betrayal of that craft. It suggests any junior developer could have coded the simplified version over a weekend.
Your engineering peers will look at the stripped-down product and ask, "That's it?"
Your peers respect complexity. Your customers only care about the single mechanism that solves their immediate problem. You cannot optimize for both audiences.
Funding a Leaky Bucket
Funding accelerates the crisis.
A fresh capital raise pays for a marketing team and new campaigns. Traffic and signups spike, creating the illusion of traction.
Good marketing aimed at the wrong audience simply funds your churn rate. Incompatible users arrive, half-solve their problem, and abandon the software. The team interprets this as a product failure and codes more features to plug the perceived gaps. The menu grows. The positioning blurs further.
By the time the board recognizes the crisis, the disease is two years old. The rot started the day you decided not to decide who this was for.
The Pain is the New Grind
Waze founder Uri Levine titled his book Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution. Name a specific problem using the exact language of the person experiencing it. The people carrying that pain will find you. They will explain exactly what they need.
AI makes building software nearly free. Anyone can ship code. The scarcity has shifted entirely to problem discovery. The work is identifying a sharp pain and describing it back with enough precision that the person experiencing it stops and thinks: that's me.
The pain is the new grind.
Speak to the person who has been looking all week for exactly what you make. They will trust you before the demo even begins.