The Founder Love Trap: When Product Pride Warps Your Positioning

Have you ever been in a situation where the founder demos a feature, and you can feel the pride in the room. The UI looks sharp, the workflow feels smart, and the team has that look of “we did something real here.”

Immediately, the founder says, “This is going to be our biggest value proposition! Let's change the website, the sales decks, and our messaging around this feature.”

Then someone opens the usage view, and the air changes. Customers said the feature was “incredible,” and almost nobody uses it.

That moment is uncomfortable because it forces a question that founders rarely get time to sit with.

Are we telling the market the story we want to be true, or the story buyers already believe?

When a feature can earn compliments and still not show up in behavior, your positioning can do the same thing.

Fun fact that isn’t very fun once you think about it: a Pendo’s feature adoption research from 2019 says 80% of features in the average software product are rarely or never used. Pendo also estimates public cloud software companies invested up to $29.5B building those rarely used features. The point isn’t “stop building,” it’s “stop assuming your most loved build is your best story.”

How a good kind of conviction turns into a bad kind of filter

Founders have a special kind of conviction. They need it to survive the early days, when nothing is proven and the product still feels like a bet. A lot of times, that conviction is the reason the company exists.

The shift happens when conviction becomes a filter. You start treating market input as interesting, but not binding, and you treat your own beliefs as truth. Over time, the company stops noticing the difference between a belief and a signal.

Harvard Business Review describes confirmation bias in plain terms: leaders tend to pay attention to information that supports the decision they’ve made, and dismiss information that doesn’t. You see it when a team keeps defending a positioning statement that “should work” while pipeline keeps disagreeing.

The dashboard doesn’t care about your narrative

The “feature nobody uses” pattern usually starts with good intentions. The founder saw a real problem, built a serious solution, and customers genuinely appreciated the effort. The mistake comes later, when appreciation gets confused with adoption.

Customers say nice things for all sorts of reasons. They don’t want to offend you, they like you, they respect the ambition, they’re trying to be supportive. Their calendar tells a different truth, and so does their behavior inside the product.

If your positioning leads with the feature they praise, and not the feature they live in, you end up building the company story on polite feedback. Then your site sounds impressive, your deck sounds impressive, your demo sounds impressive, and the buyer still stalls because it doesn’t map to what they actually need day-to-day.

The second trap: “I’m the only one who knows the market”

I once worked with a founder who genuinely believed he was the only person in the company who understood the market. Sales calls were treated as anecdotal, support tickets were treated as edge cases, and renewal feedback was treated as noise. The company wasn’t short on effort; it was short on shared reality.

If you’ve been in that room, you know what happens next. People stop bringing input because they learn it will be dismissed. Not because they’re fragile, but because they’re tired of being ignored.

There’s also a real psychological pull here. Research on entrepreneurship has long discussed overconfidence as a common driver in entrepreneurial action, and it can push founders to enter markets and act decisively even with incomplete data. That trait can be useful early. It becomes expensive when it blocks feedback once customers are already voting with their wallets.

The marketing leader’s real job: carry the market’s voice into the room

I’m using “marketing leader” on purpose, because this role is often misunderstood. It’s not about making the story prettier. It’s about making the story truer, then making it repeatable.

In his book T2D3 - How Some Software Startups Scale, Where Many Fail, Stijn Hendrikse, our founder, lists the three traits of a marketing leader: Leadership, Management, and ROI.

Marketing leadership is about that! Being seen and respected as a leader in the company you're in. You're not there just to run campaigns, but instead to have a seat at the leadership table and contribute strategically. Which sometimes includes saying no to in-love founders' ideas.

This is also why T2D3 resonates with founders and investors. It frames growth as a series of choices about who you serve and how you show up, not a pile of tactics. Kalungi describes it as a go-to-market playbook for founders, marketers, and investors who want to build and scale. The marketing leader’s job is to help the founder make those choices with market evidence in the room.

Parenting made this clearer for me than any business book

I have a teenage son, and parenting keeps teaching me the same lesson with better stakes. When your kid is little, you believe your influence will shape most of what happens. You teach values, you model habits, you try to be consistent, and you assume the inputs you provide are the main inputs.

Then the world shows up and reminds you it’s not that simple. Friends, teachers, school incentives, culture, the internet, and the kid’s own wiring all start shaping what sticks. You still matter a lot, you’re just not the only force shaping the outcome.

That’s how products behave too. Founders provide the first DNA, the early belief, and the initial standard for quality. Then the market starts raising the product, shaping it through use, constraints, budgets, politics, and what people do when nobody is watching. Fighting that input doesn’t preserve the vision, it just delays learning.

A small reset that doesn’t require a full reposition

The reset isn’t “trust customers more than founders.” Founders are not wrong. Their knowledge is often the strongest internal asset you have, and early customers often come from the founder’s network and intuition.

The reset treats the founder's belief as one input and then uses buyer evidence in the same room. That usually starts by listening to the people closest to deals and renewals, then validating it with a handful of customer conversations that go past surface praise.

Once you get used to hearing real buyer language, it gets harder to fall back in love with internal stories.

Also, as with everything marketing-related, nothing is set in stone. If you've done your audit or run the best/better/only exercise months ago, and the product has evolved, do them again. Repeat the exercises, and get real data to back up your claims.

Don't steer the product story. Trust where the market is guiding it.

When you open the usage view and see what customers return to, you’re not looking at an opinion, you’re looking at behavior. Your product pride belongs in the story, it just can’t drive the story. If you let adoption and renewal patterns shape the headline, you stop arguing with the market and you start sounding like it.

Think of it this way: what part of your positioning would collapse if you replaced your beliefs with usage data and five recent customer conversations?

If you want help pressure-testing that answer, this is exactly the kind of work we do at Kalungi. Book a GTM strategy workshop with us, we’ll look at your current narrative, your market signal, and what your buyers are actually rewarding.