Last year a founder came to us for help with his fourth ICP in 14 months. Dental clinics, then physio, then vets, and when we met he was halfway into med spas. Every move had come with a deck about why the last market wasn’t ready.

For context, we’ve run an agency for 8 years. We started out building SaaS MVPs and these days do mostly GTM and AI automation work, so we meet a lot of founders who are sure the next segment is the one.

His product did appointment reminders and rebooking. We pulled the lost deals from all four segments and read them next to each other, and nearly every one had some version of “our front desk already handles this, it’s fine.” Dentists said it, and so did the vets and the physios. Those businesses have almost nothing in common, so it’s hard to call that a market problem.

Then I asked what prospects did instead when they said no. He had to go back through his notes to answer, and almost none of them had picked a competitor.…