This week I want to talkabout something most founders at your stage are sitting with but not saying outloud. This is the uncomfortable feeling that your marketing is running, butyou're not entirely sure it's working on the right foundations.

We should know this by now

There's a particular kind of discomfort that comes up once a business has found its footing.

Not panic. Not crisis. Just a creeping, slightly embarrassing realisation.

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The product works. There are real customers, some repeat business, maybe a few referrals. The team is running campaigns: paid, content, events, outreach. Some of it converts. A lot of it doesn't. And somewhere in the back of the founder's mind is a question they haven't quite said out loud: do we actually know why people buy from us?

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When I ask founders at this stage to describe their best customer (what motivated them to buy, what almost stopped them, what they tell colleagues when they recommend you) the answers are often surprisingly vague. Not because they're not paying attention. Because in the rush to get to market and keep moving, nobody ever built the habit of finding out.

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That's the insight gap. And it's more expensive than it looks.

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What the insight gap actually costs you

Most people assume the insight gap is a research problem. It isn't. It's a decision problem.

When you don't really know your customers, everything downstream gets harder:

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Your positioning drifts. You write messaging based on what you think the value is, not what your customers actually value. The two are often different in ways that matter.

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Your campaigns underperform. You're running activity (ads, content, outreach) using language that feels right to you, but doesn't land because it's solving a problem your best customers don't consciously recognise as theirs.

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Your CAC creeps up. You keep spending to find more customers, but you've never really interrogated why the best ones came to you in the first place. So you can't reliably replicate it.

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Your hire briefs go wrong. You brief a marketer based on what you think you need. They build a strategy based on that brief. Six months later you've invested heavily in a channel your best customers don't use.

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None of this is dramatic. It just quietly compounds.

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What good enough research looks like

Here's the thing about research once you're in-market: you probably have more to work with than you think. The insight already exists - in your sales calls, your churned customers, your campaign data. It just hasn't been organised into something you can act on.

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You don't need a big budget. You need a habit.

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Anna, our Head of Insights, does this with every new client. In the first two weeks, before any strategy conversation, she does three things:

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1. Read what's already there. Every business has a pile of insight nobody's looked at properly. Sales call recordings, support tickets, churned customer emails, review site comments, LinkedIn replies to your content. It exists. It just hasn't been organised into something actionable. Anna starts by going through it with a clear question in mind: what are customers saying they value, and what are they saying they don't trust?

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2. Talk to five customers. Just five. Not a survey. Not a feedback form. A 20-minute conversation with five people who chose you: ideally one who almost didn't. Ask: what made you look in the first place, what made you choose us over others, what would you tell a colleague if you recommended us? Five conversations will tell you more than a hundred survey responses.

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3. Write down your assumptions before you start. This is the one most people skip. Write down what you believe about your customers: their main pain point, their buying trigger, their biggest hesitation. Then go find out whether you're right. The gaps between what you assumed and what you heard are where the insight lives.

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That's it. No research budget required. A few days of focused time.

The one thing to do this week

Pick one assumption that's currently driving a marketing decision (a campaign, a channel, a message) that you've never actually tested.

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Not a hypothesis. Not a "I think they probably..." a specific thing you've been treating as true and spending money on the basis of.

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Then find out if it is.

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One conversation. One 3-star review. One honest look at why your last three deals came in.

You might be right. But if you're wrong, finding out now is worth a lot more than finding out later.

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Would love it if you drop me a line and tell me: what's an assumption about your customers you've been treating as fact but never actually tested?

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P.S. Next week we're going into structure — how to build the right marketing setup for your stage, why hiring a marketer too early is one of the most common (and expensive) mistakes, and what good looks like when you're in the messy middle. See you Thursday.‍