Keeping the beach peaceful: getting military language out of startup segmentation

Being an entrepreneur isn’t easy. We (and hopefully a well-matched co-founder or two) face the daunting task of finding a valuable problem to solve and a market willing to pay to solve it. It’s lonely at first, but that loneliness shouldn’t last long once we start to connect with our early adopters. These brave souls validate our ideas, provide critical feedback to improve our offering, and serve as evidence to investors that we are addressing valuable, immediate, and pervasive problems that people are willing to pay to solve. With so much riding on early adopters, it’s critical that we know where to look to find them.

This starts with brainstorming a list of potential market segments and evaluating each against a set of common criteria. If we’re solving a sufficiently valuable problem, it’s likely that there are multiple market opportunities for our solution. But we can’t sell to everyone all at once: we need focus. So we pick just one of those segments to start with; one that really needs our solution, and who we can serve successfully. We’re looking for the best possible fit.

There’s a lot riding on this single, focused initial segment. Much of our success depends on getting it right. As such, we talk about it a lot in entrepreneurship.

Most often, this segment from which we draw our initial users is referred to as the beachhead market. I first encountered this term reading “Disciplined Entrepreneurship” by MIT’s Bill Aulet. “A beachhead market is the place where, once you gain a dominant market share, you will have the strength to attack adjacent markets with different opportunities, building a larger company with each new following,” says Aulet.

The term beachhead comes from military strategy - notice the words “strength” and “attack” in the quote. A beachhead is “a defended position on a beach taken from the enemy by landing forces, from which an attack can be launched" as in D-Day in Normandy in WWII where Allied troops landed on the beaches of Normandy in their initial surge to liberate Europe.?This military story opens the beachhead market chapter in Disciplined Entrepreneurship.

As widespread as the term has become in entrepreneurship circles, I don’t use it myself and I hope I can encourage others to follow suit. In our world where war claims the lives of millions of humans and ongoing armed conflicts dominate headlines and break our hearts, we don’t need war terminology in entrepreneurship. Starting a venture is hard, but it’s not war. I don’t want to attack adjacent markets: I want to hone my product-market fit and expand to serve other markets using a repeatable, scalable go-to-market approach.???

Instead of “beachhead market,” I’d like to propose my alternative which I use with my entrepreneurship class at the Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts University (DEC) : “corner-piece market.”

Imagine it’s a cold rainy afternoon and you (perhaps with a friend or two) decide to pass the time with a jigsaw puzzle. You open the box and dump 1000 pieces out onto the cleared dining room tabletop. Where do you start? Do you just pick up the first piece at hand and try to find its match? No. You search for one of the four corner pieces. Corner pieces are easy to spot amongst the hundreds of other pieces. And once you have one, you can start expanding outwards as each piece leads to the next and the next. Over time, you build the entire puzzle from that initial, clearly identifiable piece.?

This is how I explain the concept of an initial focus segment to the future entrepreneurs in my class. From a large set of potential customers, it’s imperative that you employ a strategy to decide where to start. You need a segment that is clear and distinct and discoverable so you can target your efforts to reach them - just like the corner piece is easy to pick out amongst all the puzzle pieces. You need a segment from which you can expand to similar segments - just like the corner piece fits into adjacent pieces so you can start to build the full puzzle. And you need a segment around which you can build a repeatable go-to-market process based on core similarities of each customer within the segment - just like you can be sure that each corner piece will always have an edge piece on two sides that you can continue to build from.

The metaphor of the puzzle corner piece gets us away from relying on war terminology, and still gives a simple way to think about finding an initial, ideally-suited target market segment for our business. Good luck finding yours!