Attention is easy. That's the problem.
There's attention. And there's a tension. Founders keep confusing the two.
I talked to a founder this week who built something good.
Smart guy. Real product. A background most founders would kill for. He came from the investor side, watched dozens of companies hit the same wall, and built the thing that solves it.
His homepage says he adapts to every buyer.
Every buyer.
And here’s what’s happening to him. He’s getting meetings. People are curious. They hear what he’s doing and they want to talk. The early calls come easy, mostly from his network, and they feel like traction.
Then he told me the real problem. Getting the first meeting is easy. Getting to the second one is hard.
He even had a word for the easy part. He called it attention. Getting the attention in the beginning is easy, he said. Doing it at scale is the hard part.
He’s right. And he’s closer to his own answer than he knows.
Because there’s attention, and there’s a tension. And they’re not the same thing.
Attention is “look at what I built.” A tension is “let’s look at you.”
Attention is you performing the product. A tension is you making someone rethink something they walked in certain about.
He’s built for attention. Every buyer. Adapts to anyone. Works for everyone.
But nobody wants to be every buyer.
When you tell me you can do something for everyone, the thing I hear is that you can’t do anything world-class for me. No one is world-class for everyone. So “every buyer” doesn’t make me feel seen. It makes me feel like a row in a spreadsheet.
I told him that. I said I looked at your site and I don’t recognize myself in your words.
And I watched him do the thing founders do when the tension lands. He pushed back a little. What do you mean by that. And then he leaned in and started asking me how to fix it.
That’s the whole move. That’s the difference between the two.
Attention got him the meeting. A tension is what would’ve gotten him the second one.
Here’s why this matters more now than it used to. Every offering looks the same. Every homepage says the same three things faster, smarter, for you. When everything looks the same, the buyer’s easiest decision is no decision. Curiosity is cheap. Everyone’s got some. It doesn’t move budget.
Now compare that to the founders who go the other way.
There’s a CRM founder I know. There are a million CRMs. He built one for charter boat operators. Insurance, jet skis, a captain, changing the dates. He walks up and down the piers and signs up boat owners. Not a huge market. Wildly profitable. Could a million companies build that? Absolutely. He did.
There’s a call recorder built only for regulated industries. Pharma. Banks. All the rules nobody else wants to touch. Someone can’t copy that tomorrow.
Everybody could build those. These founders did. And the buyer who runs a charter boat, or a compliance desk at a bank, sees himself in one sentence. He doesn’t feel like every buyer. He feels like the only buyer.
That’s a tension. It makes the person on the other side recognize themselves so sharply they lean in.
Here’s the part most founders don’t want to hear.
Going that narrow feels like giving something up. You built a product that can do a lot. Telling the world it’s for one small kind of person feels like shrinking. It feels uncomfortable. Like you’re leaving money on the table before you’ve made any.
So founders stay broad. They keep the big homepage and the every-buyer line. They keep collecting attention, because attention feels like being admired, and being admired feels like winning.
It isn’t. It’s the thing that comes right before nothing happens.
The founder who wins is the one willing to be uncomfortable. Willing to make one buyer feel seen instead of making everyone feel vaguely welcome. Willing to trade the applause for the rethink.
Most founders won’t.
I run SPRINT GTM resets with B2B founders doing founder-led sales. If the first meeting is easy and the second one never comes, that’s the work. daverubinstein.com