Mistake #13: I built an elephant trap, and tried to hunt rabbits.
WeSupply's first customer was the retailer I used to work at.
100+ stores, a $100M business, running on a complex ERP, POS and WMS.
They paid well, the need was there, and onboarding was 1:1, fully custom to them.
So we built the product around them: no self service, lots of options, heavy duty software built for the enterprise.
The 2nd and 3rd customers were almost the same.
Not because we attracted our perfect customer, but because the product could not onboard anyone smaller.
More big customers came, and the revenue was amazing.
Most paid $50–100K a year, upfront, and the largest paid over $300K.
Churn was basically zero.
Then we tried to sell to smaller retailers, and they would not come.
Their onboarding looked nothing like a 1:1 enterprise rollout.
They had different needs.
And they wanted less complexity, not more options.
Rabbits don't walk into elephant traps.
It took us years, and a rebuild of a big chunk of the product, to go downmarket.
A blessing and a curse.
At WeltPixel, my other company, it was the opposite.
We sold to mice: $100 for lifetime access, with a $1–2K product upsold to a few.
85,000+ customers, low touch onboarding, self service, email support.
I sold both, and neither company could sell the other one's customer.
Here's what I missed:
The customer you hunt decides how you build the whole company, not just the product.
Not only the onboarding.
How they find you, how many of them you need, how they buy, what support they expect, and how long they stay.
Christoph Janz mapped this in his study of how to build a $100M SaaS.
He named each customer type after an animal and asked one question: who do you hunt?
CAC = what you can spend to win 1 customer.
Here is the road to $10M, and what each animal is like:
Mouse: 100,000 clients at $100 a year. Nobody sells, the product spreads virally. You can't afford massive CAC. Customer sees value in minutes, self-serve. After a year, about 25% of that revenue is still there.
Rabbit: 10,000 clients at $1,000 a year. Inbound and a funnel. CAC you can afford is under $70. Value in days, self-serve plus email. About 32% of the revenue survives the year.
Deer: 1,000 clients at $10K a year. Inside sales, outbound and partners. CAC you can afford is $1–5K. Value in weeks, with a guided onboarding. About 70% of the revenue survives the year.
Elephant: 100 clients at $100K a year. Enterprise field sales. CAC you can afford is $20K+. Value in months, with an implementation. 100% of the revenue survives.
Each animal is a different company, even when the software is the same.
Why it matters:
What you hunt decides if you can afford a hunter or not.
Mice and rabbits cannot pay for a salesperson.
Product needs to spread virally or organic.
Elephants pay super well, but deals take too long to close.
Unless you have a massive pipeline that closes elephants one after another, you run into cash flow issues.
We fixed our cash flow by hunting deer.
But it took us years to rebuild onboarding, support and the product to support both deer and elephants.
Deer were great, because they take weeks not months or years to close.
The sales process was similar enough so that we can coach our team and have predictable results and run it on their own.
Here is the big question.
Are you a deer hunter with a rabbit deal size, and your reps are selling like they're chasing elephants but you run mouse marketing strategies?
Revenue says rabbit, churn says mouse, CAC says deer, onboarding says elephant.
Do you know who you need to hunt?
Do you know how to hunt them?
Do you know how much you can spend to scale?
Hormozi says the company that can spend the most on customer acquisition wins.
Secret Sauce: Choose who you hunt. Then build the company that animal needs.
Best,
Virgil
PS: Mistake #14: Our average customer didn't exist.