The human brain is capable of incredible things. I’m a firm believer that with enough time, effort, and the right mindset, you can master anything and keep growing. Of course, depending on your natural strengths, mastering a skill might happen at a faster or slower pace. But here’s the thing: we also need to accept the limitations of what a person can achieve in a fixed amount of time.

I’ve noticed that with AI tools, everything is becoming more efficient. I can tackle a wider variety of tasks in a day. But being able to summarize a document, book, or podcast in 10 seconds doesn’t mean you’ve mastered a skill and suddenly reached your goal. This brings me to a crucial point about strategy expansion in startups.

We humans have a tendency to always want the next best thing. It’s not inherently bad; it’s what pushes us to evolve. But it can be a pitfall, especially when decisions are made to expand to a new market, customer segment, or product too early. And guess what? All the AI tools in the world won’t necessarily solve the problem of grasping mentally and physically this new workload.

My point is this: we shouldn’t start focusing on multiple strategies in startup mode when the organization isn’t ready for it. Let me break this down with an example of targeting a new customer group as a startup (< 15 people).

Let’s start at the core – the product you’re selling and building. Your founder, product manager, and product teams need to figure out the underlying needs, problems, and pain points for both target customer groups. Adding an additional customer target means doubling your research efforts. Assuming you want to divide your time equally, you’ll need an equal number of customer conversations with both groups each week.

I aim to talk to at least one customer every week. It could be about software issues, feature requests, potential solutions, or an onboarding call with Customer Success. Here’s what I’ve learned: you need to dig deep with lots of customers to really strike gold. I’m talking about uncovering subtle needs, hidden pains, daily contexts, and workflows. That’s how you build a solution they’ll want to adopt (and pay for). But focusing on two groups simultaneously? That means investing twice the time in emails, calls, planning, and processing these conversations.

But it doesn’t stop there. This impacts more than just product and development, it affects every team in your organization. Let’s talk marketing, for instance. They’ll need to target and understand both customer groups. Think about it: community building, brand recognition, solution messaging – all of it needs to be done twice, because you can’t use the same messaging for different groups.

Not only does the marketer’s time investment double, but your paid advertising budget does too. And events? If these customer groups attend different ones, that’s another doubling of resources. Then your product marketer needs to analyze which content resonates with each group. You see where I’m going with this?

Now, let’s also address the sales team challenge. Whether you’re doing Account-Based Marketing (ABM) or general outreach, having different types of customers makes things trickier. You need to tell a different story for each group, as they have different needs and will focus on different solutions. Pricing will likely differ, offering variants means more context switching, and there’s a real danger of building superficial relationships.

The trap here? Sales and marketing might start diluting their messaging to try and appeal to everyone, but end up resonating with no one. You’re forced to become more generic, and it becomes harder to build deep relationships. In essence, you’re asking your sales team to master multiple playbooks simultaneously.

So, before you jump into targeting multiple ICPs, ask yourself: Is your startup really ready for this level of complexity? Sometimes, focusing on doing one thing exceptionally well is the smartest strategy for growth.

P.S. Don’t get me wrong – I’m not discouraging teams from exploring new opportunities. By all means, keep your eyes open for that next big thing. If you do spot traction in a new segment, be prepared to go all in. Real results come from wholehearted commitment, not half-hearted attempts.