We were on a call with VidyaAI. B2B plug and play. Their deck says: Personalized AI learning for students.
Clean pitch. Sounds right. Checks all the boxes.
Except when we pulled their usage data, the actual power users weren't students. They were educators. Admins drowning in tabs, teachers with back-to-back classes, grading that goes until midnight, with no time to think.
Their positioning revolved around helping students. What were they actually solving? Giving educators their lives back.
Classic B2B blindspot: the ICP says one thing, reality says something else entirely.
We rewrote the narration around one promise: "Save 10 hours every week."
That's it. No fluff about personalized learning journeys or adaptive AI. Immediately, fewer trash leads, higher urgency. We could price on desperation instead of feature lists.
This disconnect between who companies think they're selling to and who actually needs them isn't unique to VidyaAI. It's everywhere in B2B.
Most ICPs read like: Series A+ founders. $5M+ ARR. Growth-stage SaaS. 50-200 employees. That's just a list of attributes. It doesn't tell you when someone's ready to buy or why they'll pay.
Which is funny because an entirely different industry figured this out by accident.
Dating apps don't make money by matching people. They make money by understanding when loneliness peaks.
Hinge doesn't target single professionals aged 28-34 in urban markets. They target Sunday, 11 PM, when the silence gets too loud. Not a demographic, that's a moment of weakness.
In 2020, Tinder added a panic button. Hit it on a bad date, and it sends your location to emergency contacts. Unusual feature for a dating app. The panic button isn't really about emergencies. It's positioning.
It tells users: we understand the exact moment you feel unsafe. We've thought about your worst-case scenario. We're not just selling the fantasy, we're acknowledging the reality.
B2B rarely does this. B2B pitches the 300% ROI. The seamless onboarding. The glowing testimonial from some VP nobody knows. But people don't buy on the happy path. They buy in the panic.
Quibi raised $1.8 billion targeting "mobile-first Gen Z with short attention spans." Perfect on paper. Dead in six months.
They blocked screenshots. Disabled sharing. Killed the exact tools their audience needed to make content spread. They built for a profile (young phone addicts) instead of a situation (stuck on a 15-minute commute with nothing to do).
When COVID hit and commutes disappeared, their entire use case evaporated. Turns out "mobile-first Gen Z" wasn't the real ICP.
The future of B2B is more human. It means understanding that your ICP isn't a person. It's a problem at a specific moment in time.
The educator using your product isn't defined by years of experience or grade level. They're someone grading papers late at night on a Tuesday, third cup of coffee cold, thinking there has to be a better way.
That's when they're searching and purchasing.
The difference matters because it changes everything about how you position, price, and sell.
When you map your ICP to moments instead of profiles, three things change:
Messaging gets specific. You stop talking about features and describe reality, not ideology.
Qualification accelerates. You're not filtering by company size or job title anymore.
Pricing strengthens. Urgency pays more than budget. Someone in the middle of the crisis will pay a premium. Someone casually browsing won't.
B2B has spent decades trying to remove emotion from buying decisions. The ones getting it right are putting it back in. With the kind of precision that comes from actually watching people struggle and deciding to meet them there.
Which brings us back to that call. Once we pivoted on that, the product began speaking for itself. Their users were making desperate decisions about time, not rational decisions about learning outcomes.
We repositioned around that, and growth followed.