One of the enduring lines from the 90s classic movie Field of Dreams was delivered by the late great, James Earl Jones ‘If you build it. They will come’ , encouraging midwest farmer Kevin Cosner to build a baseball pitch in his field of corn.

I’ve had the line quoted to me a few times in business, referring to demand will follow if the product solution is good enough. Keeping with US vernaculars - hogwash.

I’ve learnt this from bitter experience. Sanctifly was built on the belief that travelers would want a leisure alternative for the airport downtime and that hotels would jump at the chance to commercialize their non-room assets. Both were painfully slow starters. We spent so much time educating the market, that the sales process was exhausting. Thankfully today demand is 400% up from when we started in 2016 with over 460 hotels in the US welcoming Daycations, almost zero 8 years ago. But as a start-up the last thing we wanted to spend our limited start-up Capital and time on market education.

"There are many ways to win in business, but there is one surefire way to lose: run out of money. Entrepreneurship is a game of survival." James Clear, author of Atomic Habits

The second challenge to this approach, is even if your offering is solving a problem, does that problem have a budget ( more on pain with budget here). Whilst blue sky market opportunities appear a whole lot better than a ‘red sea’ of competition, at least the market has:

1. Establish customer profiles
2. Educated decision makers with a proven value proposition
3. Budget
4. Finally, an incumbent (i.e.existimg supplier) to analysis and work out how to beat using the disruptor or challenger sale methodology.

Ultimately, hope is not a strategy. Builders, designers, marketers, car manufactures all sell off plans and designs. If the plans don't sell, they get canned. That sounds like a better approach. If the perceived market won't invest in your vision, is that saying something?