Beachhead market: how to choose your first customers

A beachhead market is the small, specific group of customers you sell to first, chosen because you can win a large share of them before you expand. For a small product business, it is the group that can buy your first production run and that you can reach for little or nothing.

The idea is usually traced to Geoffrey Moore's Crossing the Chasm, first published in 1991. The book has a chapter called "The D-Day Analogy", which compares a company's first target segment to the Normandy beaches in the Allied invasion: the place to concentrate everything before moving on to the wider market. Bill Aulet, managing director of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship, teaches choosing a beachhead market as an early step in his book Disciplined Entrepreneurship (Wiley, 2013), and his MIT course has a lecture on it.

Both books were written for technology companies that plan to grow large. This guide is for a founder with a physical product who plans to take pre-orders online and needs to sell one production run to people they can reach this month.

Target market and beachhead market examples

Your target market is everyone you might sell to one day. The beachhead is the part of it you start with. These examples are illustrations, not research:

Each beachhead names a place and an activity, so the founder knows where to look for the first buyers.

A worked example: a heated seat cushion

The example and its numbers are invented. A founder plans a rechargeable heated seat cushion at $60. The first production run will be 300 units, and the founder has a child in a youth soccer club.

1. List three or four groups who might buy first

Start from the product in use. Write down every situation where someone would want it, noting where they are, what they're doing and for how long, and then name the people in each one. Naming a group after the moment it meets the problem, such as "parents on the bleachers at Saturday games", also tells you where to look for them.

Keep three or four groups that don't overlap. For each, check that you could name a place to find 20 of them this week.

The cushion would be used on bleachers, in tree stands, on office chairs and in stadium seats, so the founder's four groups are:

• parents watching their kids' weekend soccer and football games from September to November;
• deer hunters who sit for hours in tree stands;
• office workers who are cold at their desks;
• season-ticket holders at outdoor college and pro games.

2. Write the same five notes on each group

Spend an evening on each group and answer the same five questions, so the answers line up when you compare them:

• Where would you find the first 100? Name the places, such as a club, a newsletter, a forum or a store, and note whether you could post there for free or would need paid ads.
• What do they pay for the problem now? Blankets, a cheaper product and a homemade fix all count. Write down the prices so you can see how yours compares.
• How often does the problem come up, and for how long each time?
• Who already sells to them?
• Would others in the group see the product in use?

Posts where people describe the problem themselves answer most of these. How to know if your target market is real covers how to find them, and how to tell whether the group exists as a group at all. Draper's Pick Your Beachhead workshop does this research on each group and lays the results side by side for you.

3. Compare the groups in one table

The founder's notes, summarized:

The way in decides what each pre-order costs you. A post in the club newsletter costs nothing, while every order from a paid ad has to cover the cost of the ad. What a group pays for now tells you whether $60 will feel normal, and it is what your product will be compared with; product differentiation covers how to stand out against it. How often the problem comes up predicts pre-orders, because people pay months before delivery only for a problem they meet often. The last row counts free exposure: the other parents at a game see each cushion on the bleachers.

Size rarely separates groups at this stage. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service counted 14.4 million Americans aged 16 and over who hunted in 2022, far more than a 300-unit run needs. Hunters fall behind on competition and fit: the founder would be up against established gear brands, and hunters would want a quieter, waterproof cushion in camouflage.

4. Check the group can buy your first production run

The number to sell is your first production run, and the factory's minimum order quantity usually sets how small that run can be. Here it is 300 cushions. Sizing a whole market is a different exercise, covered in TAM, SAM and SOM explained.

The founder's club has 25 teams of about 12 players, so roughly 300 families. If one family in ten buys a cushion, that is 30 per club, and selling 300 cushions takes 10 clubs. There are 18 clubs within an hour's drive, so the group is big enough on paper.

The one-in-ten figure is a guess. The first club's pre-orders replace it with a real number. If that club produces 10 orders instead of 30, the founder needs 30 clubs, more than the area has, and should widen the group to youth football and a second city.

5. Choose one group and set the others aside

In the example the parents come out ahead. They sit in the cold most weekends for three months, already spend on comfort at games, can be reached free through the founder's own club, and see each other's cushions every Saturday.

When two groups come out close, choose the one you can reach without paying for ads, which is often a group you already belong to. Before committing, write down the result that would make you switch, such as fewer than 10 orders from the first club.

Keep the other groups on the list for later. Hunters could come after the parents, with a version made for them. Selling to two groups at once splits a small ad budget across two messages, and neither gets enough to tell you anything.

6. Write a one-page ideal customer profile

Turn your notes into a profile short enough to fit on one page, and use it when you write ads and talk to people.

The founder's opening line reads: "Parents within an hour of the city whose kids play fall soccer or football, who sit on aluminum bleachers for two hours on cold Saturday mornings and already bring blankets and folding seats." That line sets where the ad runs, its photo (a cushion on a bleacher) and its first sentence.

The guesses become your interview list. Ask parents about the last cold game they sat through, using the Mom Test, and rewrite the profile after the first ten conversations.

Gifts, marketplace products and groups you can only reach with ads

• If most sales will be gifts, the groups you compare are groups of givers. A heated cushion bought for a grandparent is chosen by a son or daughter, so their habits and spending go in the table.
• If people find products like yours by searching a marketplace such as Amazon, the listing does most of the reaching. Use the group to choose the listing's photos and words.
• If every group you list needs paid ads to reach, choose on how often the problem comes up and what they pay now, then test demand with a page and a small ad budget before ordering stock.

Related questions

Before you order the first run, a feasibility study checks that the product can be made and sold at your price, and a pre-mortem looks for the ways the launch could go wrong.