Product–Market Fit Starts With a Stakeholder Map (Not an ICP)

Most startups are taught to define their Ideal Customer Profile early. B2B or B2C. Buyer personas. Decision-makers. Budget holders.

That discipline matters — but I’ve seen many teams define their ICP prematurely, before fully understanding the space they’re actually operating in.

What’s often missing is a comprehensive stakeholder map.

Customers, users, payers — and everyone in between

A stakeholder map goes beyond “who buys” and asks harder questions:

• Who uses the product day to day?

• Who benefits from adoption?

• Who influences the decision?

• Who blocks it?

• Who pays — and who creates leverage?

Those roles are often not the same person or organisation.

A stakeholder map isn’t just about naming the players, but understanding how each stakeholder experiences the startup’s solution across their needs, objectives, and day-to-day workflows.

The format of this mapping work isn’t the important part. There’s no single right canvas or framework. What matters is asking who actually exists in the space you want to operate in, putting them down on paper, and then spending deliberate time and brain power thinking them through.

That means asking: what do they care about, what do they need, what are they trying to achieve, how will they interact with the product you offer — and do they need to love it, tolerate it, or simply not resist it? It also forces harder questions: do you have enough of the right stakeholders in the system, and are their incentives aligned?

When ICP thinking hides the real moat

Take a product built for university students but sold directly to universities.

If the university is treated as the sole ICP, it’s easy to over-optimise for procurement, compliance, and administrative workflows — and under-invest in the actual student experience.

But students are the daily users. If they don’t love the product, advocate for it, and demand it in their routines, you don’t build a moat — you build a replaceable vendor.

Usage becomes leverage. Without it, the system is fragile.

Platforms fail when ecosystems are misaligned

The same pattern appears in platform and marketplace businesses.

You can optimise for the needs of the client who commissions the platform — and still end up with a failing system. If buyers don’t show up, the business doesn’t work. And if sellers are absent or uncompetitive, buyers won’t stay.

In that case, the platform may function perfectly from a delivery or feature perspective, but the ecosystem doesn’t reinforce itself.

Product–market fit isn’t just about feature completeness. It’s about whether demand and supply actually meet — and keep meeting.

You can optimise for one, but ignoring the others creates friction elsewhere.

Now consider a different scenario

Imagine a solution that wants to integrate itself into the home-buying process.

It’s a multi-party journey with tightly coupled steps and dependencies. The solution may be sold to one party, but it operates across many: the buyer, the seller, the real-estate agent, the mortgage advisor, the lender, the conveyancer, and the legal and regulatory processes that bind them together.

Optimising for just one of these — even the paying customer — can create friction elsewhere. A tool that improves the buyer experience but complicates conveyancing, or helps sellers while being unlikable for agents, won’t scale. Adoption breaks not because the product lacks value, but because it doesn’t fit the system it’s trying to enter.

This is where stakeholder mapping becomes essential. It forces you to test whether your solution works across the full flow of work, or whether it simply shifts complexity from one actor to another.

Enterprise software: selling vs adoption

In enterprise software, the buyer is often clear — but rarely the whole story.

You may sell to the CTO, but you still need to take into account employees’ daily workflows, adjacent systems, security teams, regulatory constraints, and operational reality. If those layers experience friction, the product won’t stick — regardless of how strong the initial sale was.

Put differently: you may sell to the CTO, but adoption is decided elsewhere.

ICP still matters — just not in isolation

None of this argues against focus.

A clear, targeted ICP reduces wasted acquisition effort, sharpens messaging, and helps teams prioritise. ICP focus still matters, but it shouldn’t be defined in isolation.

Mastering the stakeholder map first makes your ICP strategy far more powerful.

When internal demand builds across users, influencers, and beneficiaries, your ICP doesn’t need convincing — they’re pulled toward you.

That’s when sales becomes easier, retention improves, and product–market fit becomes durable rather than fragile.

The monetisation layer

A well-understood stakeholder map also sharpens monetisation decisions. It doesn’t just build confidence in how you price for your ICP; it informs how you design partnerships, affiliation models, campaigns, discounts, joint activities, and even where to invest next.

When you understand who creates value, who amplifies it, and who benefits indirectly, monetisation becomes an ecosystem decision — not just a sales one.

That’s how moats are built.