Why Midwest Founders Cannot Afford Broad ICPs

You’ve just raised a seed round. You have your MVP. A handful of early design partners are using the “product” and founder-led selling is chugging along. 

But then it starts to happen. Suddenly, you’re not closing new business. You try to pull yourself out of the sales process and hand it off to your small-but-mighty team, but pipeline is drying up and win rates are low.

Chances are, it’s time to re-evaluate your ideal customer profile, or ICP. And while it can be tempting to think of every possible group that could get value from your product (make the TAM big, baby!), broad ICPs can kill early-stage startups. 

And, unfortunately, this is especially true for Midwest founders. 

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Founder-Led Sales Works, Until It Doesn't

Most early-stage founders know they're going to be in founder-led sales mode for a while. It’s a rite of passage. As a founder, you're the best person to sell the product at this stage. You know the problem intimately, you can have real conversations with customers, and adjust your pitch in real time in ways a sales hire never could in the first year.

The problem isn't founder-led sales. The problem is founder-led sales with a vague ICP.

Here's what happens: a founder with a broad target market starts having conversations. Some go well, some don't. They close a few early design partners, those very early customers who are bought into the vision and are paying to pilot the product as well as provide feedback on useful features. Let’s say those early design partners (or early customers) are a healthcare company, a logistics startup, and a fintech. The pipeline feels like it's moving. But six months in, they can't replicate it. The wins don't have a pattern. The losses don't have a clear reason. And when they sit down to hire their first sales rep or brief their first marketing hire, they realize they can't explain who they're actually selling to — or, they present 8 different ICPs they serve.

This is an issue because, eventually you run into a problem where breaking past $1M in ARR becomes a challenge, and you might start to plateau — you’re adding new customers, but others are churning, all while the company burns resources and time.

When you’re raising a pre-seed or seed round, founder experience, product vision, competitive advantage, and market size might be enough. But once you have to start raising against traction around the Series A stage, you need to make sure that you’re showing signs of product market fit. You need to prove that your sales motion is beginning to grow in consistency. Broad ICPs tend to have the opposite effect on an investor — they signal that the company might not have a clear view on the market and who they’re selling to.

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The Midwest Funding Reality

According to the data, Midwest founders are at a funding disadvantage compared to their coastal peers.

Last year, the Midwest accounted for approximately 4% of all venture capital raised across the country. In the same period, California raised 22 times the funding of the six Midwest states that are covered on this site, a multiple that has never been higher — compared to an average of 7.5x over the prior fourteen years.

That gap doesn't just reflect where capital is concentrated. It reflects where the margin for error lives. A San Francisco founder with a vague ICP and a generic GTM motion might be able to raise another round on the strength of network, past experience, and access to capital, and there is plenty of all of these in the Bay. It’s almost certainly going to be harder for a founder in Indianapolis or Columbus or Minneapolis. Data from High Alpha’s 2025 SaaS Benchmarks Report confirmed this gap. While Midwest founders are able to raise just as effectively at the earliest stages, there are fewer breaking into the Series B and beyond milestones — of the 800+ respondents, 35.5% of founders outside the Midwest reported their last round as a Series B and beyond, vs. just 21.7% for Midwest founders. 

If you’re a Midwest founder, you’re in a race to find product-market fit. And the fastest path to product-market fit runs directly through specificity.

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Specificity Is the Strategy

Having worked with dozens of very early-stage companies, the pattern I've seen most clearly is that the founders who struggle are oftentimes the ones who are not specific enough about their ICP. 

But, a narrow ICP actually makes everything easier. Messaging is clearer. You understand the customers’ workflows better and referrals start flowing. 

Instead of targeting "all SMB software companies," you target "venture-backed B2B SaaS companies in the logistics space with 10 to 30 employees." That level of specificity sounds limiting, but it's actually liberating.

Specificity creates tighter feedback loops. You learn faster. 

When your ICP is broad and your messaging is generic, you can't tell why a deal closed or why it didn't. Was it the segment? The message? The channel? The timing? Everything is a variable. When your ICP is narrow, the signal becomes clear — even if the signal is “this is not working and we need to pivot.”

For a Midwest founder running lean on capital and operating far from the network density of the coasts, that speed is everything.

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The Compounding Cost of Staying Generic

Genericism has a cost that compounds quietly until it doesn't. It starts as a positioning problem: you try to be all things to all people, and cram every differentiator into every marketing and sales asset. Nothing resonates because it's trying to appease everyone. It becomes a pipeline problem — you're talking to the wrong buyers, running long sales cycles that go nowhere, burning runway on deals you were never going to close. And eventually it becomes a fundraising problem — you walk into a Series A conversation without the repeatable motion that investors need to see before they'll write a check.

The average time between seed and Series A has stretched to more than 700 days. That's nearly two years. Two years of unfocused GTM isn't a strategic detour, for a Midwest founder it's potentially a terminal one.

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What "Building the Muscle" Actually Looks Like

Getting specific doesn't mean staying small forever. It means earning the right to expand by proving you can win consistently in a defined segment first. Here's what that looks like in practice:

Start with the handful of customers who love you. 

Who are they? What do they have in common — industry, company size, tech stack, pain point, buying trigger? The pattern in your first customer cohort that’s highly engaged is more valuable than any market research report.

Let your ICP drive your community and event investments. 

This is where specificity pays immediate dividends. When you know exactly who your buyer is, you stop going to every conference and start going to the two where they actually are. You stop posting broadly on LinkedIn and start showing up in the one Slack community where your ICP talks shop. Every dollar and every hour gets sharper.

Treat every lost deal as a feedback loop, not a failure. 

Generic GTM produces noisy losses — you don't know what you're learning. Specific GTM produces clean losses. If you lose three deals in a row to the same objection, that's product feedback, pricing feedback, or ICP feedback. All of it is usable. None of it is available to you if you're selling to everyone.

Nail the narrative before you build the machine. 

Demand generation infrastructure, especially paid media (oh, how I’ve seen so many folks get burned!), only works if what you're putting into it already resonates. Instead, get specific about who you're targeting, earn their trust through direct and focused outreach, learn what message actually lands, then scale it. 

Scaling a message that doesn't work yet just means losing money faster.

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The Permission to Go Narrow

When it comes to identifying an ICP, there’s a psychological barrier for founders — most resist specificity because it feels like leaving opportunity on the table. Investors sometimes reinforce this by pushing for large TAMs and expansive visions.

But the founders who build durable GTM muscle give themselves permission to go narrow first. They understand that dominating a specific segment is not the ceiling, but rather the foundation that they can build upon and scale — either by expanding to serve other verticals or with natural upsell opportunities in the product.

For Midwest founders operating with less immediate access to capital, less network density, and less margin for a wasted quarter, finding product market fit is mission critical. 

Don’t waste time.

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