Here is a thought experiment. Imagine you invented a single product that genuinely solved every problem a person could have. One device, one solution, all of it. You would almost certainly struggle to sell it.
This sounds counterintuitive, but it gets to something fundamental about how people make decisions. We do not buy solutions. We buy solutions to our specific problem, right now, as we understand it. Put "painkillers" and "headache painkillers" side by side on a shelf and most people who have a headache will reach for the second one, even if the active ingredients are identical. We are drawn to things that feel made for us.
Shampoo for blondes. Shampoo for brunettes. Skincare for teenagers. Anti-ageing cream for the over-50s. In many cases the product inside is remarkably similar. What differs is the packaging, the framing, the price point, and critically, the feeling that someone understood exactly who you are and what you need.
Specialism sells. It always has.
The Boots moment worth remembering
A few years ago, at an event with the Boots procurement team, a delegate raised what seemed like a fairly straightforward question. They had developed a product effective for both acne and ageing skin. Where, they asked, would Boots place it?
The answer was illuminating. Given that the two markets were so different — teenagers on one end and over-50s on the other — Boots would package it as two entirely separate products, add a different scent to the anti-ageing version to appeal to that buyer, and price them accordingly. Perhaps £5 for the acne product. Perhaps £75 for the anti-ageing one.
Same product. Different stories. Very different outcomes.
Why this is one of the most common mistakes we see in business plans
We assess a lot of business plans at Innovator International. And one of the patterns that comes up more consistently than almost any other is the instinct to appeal to everyone at once.
The pitch that lists every possible use case. The market analysis that claims a total addressable market of billions. The product that could help literally any business, in any sector, anywhere.
It is not that these claims are always wrong. Sometimes the product genuinely is versatile. But versatility, presented without focus, tends to read as uncertainty. It signals that the founder has not yet done the hard work of deciding who they are really building for.
The Home Office criteria for the Innovator Founder Visa are clear that a business must be genuinely innovative, viable, and scalable. Viability is not just about financials. It is about whether the market proposition is credible — whether the right person, faced with this product, would recognise it as the obvious solution to their specific problem.
The businesses that tend to make the strongest applications are the ones that have made deliberate choices. They know their customer. They know what problem they are solving for that customer. And they can explain, simply and convincingly, why their approach is the right one for that particular person at that particular moment.
Focus is not a limitation. It is a strategy.
There is a version of this that founders sometimes resist, because narrowing your focus can feel like leaving opportunity on the table. What if you commit to one market and the other one was the bigger prize?
But this is where the Boots example becomes instructive again. Nothing in that story suggests the product cannot eventually serve both markets. It probably does. The decision to present it differently to different buyers is not about limiting the product. It is about removing the friction that stops the right buyer from recognising it as theirs.
The same logic applies at every stage of building a business. A focused pitch does not close doors. It opens the right ones.
What we look for
When we work with founders — whether through the endorsement assessment process, our business support services, or as part of the broader community we have built — we are always looking for evidence that a founder understands their market with genuine depth.
Not breadth. Depth.
Who is the customer? What is the specific problem? Why is this solution meaningfully better than what already exists? And critically: why is this founder the right person to build it?
These are not trick questions. They are the same questions any good investor, customer, or partner will ask. Getting comfortable with clear, specific, confident answers to all of them is one of the most valuable things a founder can do — long before any application is submitted.
Every product or service might already exist somewhere else. The secret to success is rarely in the thing that you're selling - it is finding the right person who is prepared to buy it.
