A Roadmap for Startups: Discovering Your Market (Part 2)
What does it really take to find your market and scale without guessing?
In Part 2 of our conversation with Guillene Teboul-Ribiere (CEO and long-time business consultant for technology startups), we move from founder mindset to market strategy. Guillene shares how startups can uncover the right customers, design for scale across verticals, and avoid one of the most common mistakes: hiring the wrong kind of people at the wrong time.
Customers, Scaling, and the Difference between Explorers and Hunters
Finding your Market
Guillene developed a structured methodology for market discovery she calls her "Frankenstein method." It is grounded in effectuation, an approach to entrepreneurship that accepts uncertainty as the starting point.
"Effectuation assumes you don’t know your market, or even your final product. You start from your technology and imagine all possible use cases.” And she adds: “The customer use cases, not the use cases for software designs.”
The first step is to map two things: the types of people you could help, and the ways they might use your technology. Ranking the options in this matrix gives you a hierarchy, and this becomes your first hypothesis. It’s biased, but it gives you direction. Then you start calling people. Not to sell. To learn.
“The goal is to get in contact with as many relevant people listed in your target group as possible and have conversations with them to understand what they do, how they do it, and the issues they are facing.” In other words, you put your assumptions to the real-world test. “The first time you do this, you’ll usually hear that the problem you imagined doesn’t exist.” But rejection during exploration is useful, and the people you talk to will often refer you elsewhere.
The key is to treat rejection as fuel. With each iteration, you narrow your scope and specify your use cases. Over time, something shifts: three or four people describe the same problem that you can solve. And once you have clearly identified those people, that’s when you’ve broken into a market.
"What matters is not what you think, but what the market says. If three unrelated people express the same need—you’ve found something."
This approach doesn’t come easily. It can be difficult for founders to understand because as researchers they look at the technology through the lens of technical potential. Also, going out into the market and not knowing whether you will be accepted or rejected is outside of most people’s comfort zones. She warns, however, that "This is the step that determines if a company will survive. Those who go out, speak to people, and accept rejection tend to make it. Those who don’t, hit the wall."
Scaling through Diverse Verticals
According to Guillene, real scale doesn’t come from going deeper into your first use case. It comes from designing products that can travel across industries, not just customer segments. "You scale by going far, not near. Going from automotive to medical, for example, gives you more new insights than moving from electric to combustion cars."
Her advice: build modular products with shared core components that can be adapted to different contexts. When one vertical reveals a valuable feature, reuse it elsewhere. Let each market teach the product something new. Then, as features developed for one sector prove useful in another, the product matures and scales naturally. "Eventually, one of those verticals will pull you in. I never know which one, but it always happens if you explore widely enough."
She encourages founders to:
Design intentionally for multiple verticals, using shared, reusable components beneath the surface—even if each product looks different on the outside.
Reinvest valuable features discovered in one vertical back into others to strengthen your overall product ecosystem.
Explore multiple verticals, let each product learn, and eventually one aligns so well with a market that it scales. You can’t pick it upfront—you discover it through iteration.
Explorers and Hunters
One of the most common early-stage mistakes? Hiring the wrong kind of business person too early. Guillene draws a sharp line between two essential roles in a startup’s lifecycle: business developers (explorers) and salespeople (hunters).
Explorers are the ones who go out and learn. They test hypotheses, talk to people in different sectors, discover patterns, and help shape the offering. Hunters, by contrast, execute against a validated strategy. They scale something that already works. Hiring a hunter before you've figured out what you're really selling is a common mistake. You need explorers first. People who are curious, flexible, and good with ambiguity.
In Guillene's model, the right type of person at the right time is critical. A good explorer is indispensable in the discovery phase. A skilled hunter is essential once the product is ready to scale.
The Bottom Line
You don’t start with the perfect plan—you start with what you have and where you are. Discovering your market isn’t about proving your original idea right; it’s about testing assumptions, embracing uncertainty, and listening to real-world feedback.
“If you think about what business is,” Guillene says, “it’s two people meeting—one with a problem to solve, and the other with a solution. So if you don’t go out and meet people… how can you make that happen?”
The most successful founders don’t force-fit their product into a market—they adapt, and they surround themselves with the right people: explorers to uncover new markets, and hunters to serve the ones they’ve already validated. Knowing which one you need—and when—is what makes the difference.