Demand Before Supply: Why Lead Generation Should Dictate Your Entire Business Model

 I learned one of the most expensive lessons of my career the hard way. I spent more than a year building a sophisticated research tech product that I believed would change the way clients would conduct qualitative research. I poured hours of thinking, design and engineering into it, let alone splashed a lot of cash. As a team, we obsessed over features and highly-polished the interface. I committed early to a vision that I believed our clients and prospects would want.

Then I released it.

It didn’t turn heads. It did not create a spike in new enquiries. It did not generate revenue that even vaguely justified the investment.

That silence was the real feedback.

The lesson was a brutal one. I had built a product before building demand. I had acted as if the product itself would pull people in through the sheer brilliance of the idea and its execution. In reality the market had not been asked a single meaningful question before I started building. I was being led by my assumptions and blindsided by my industry expertise.

The experience forced me to rethink not only how I build businesses and products, but how any business should think about growth. Lead generation is not a downstream activity that happens when the product is ready. Lead generation should be the first activity, preceding design and certainly before anything that feels like development work. It is the only reliable way to understand if you are building something the market genuinely wants.

I now see exactly where I went wrong.

Product First Thinking Creates a False Sense of Momentum

Product or solution first thinking feels productive. You can see progress, tick off tasks, point to the features you’ve added. You can readily tell yourself that you are moving forward.

But momentum is not the same as traction.

Real traction is when your target audience raise their hand and say they want what you are building, and that they are willing to pay for the value it offers them. Until that happens, everything is conjecture. Product first thinking puts all the weight on internal conviction and relies on the belief that the founder knows the market better than the market knows itself. It’s flattering, but it is also fragile.

In my case, I believed the demand would come once the product existed. I believed the concept was strong enough that early adopters would find it irresistible. I believed that my insight into client needs was sharper than it actually was.

I was wrong.

The truth was painful and expensive, but invaluable. The market didn’t need my product, or at least, it didn’t need it in the way I imagined. The pain points I thought I was solving were not the ones buyers prioritised. The product solved a problem that clients didn’t feel at the moment they were making decisions. It was a nice-to-have tool that I had elevated into a mission.

Product first thinking blinded me to this.

Lead Generation Reveals What the Market Actually Cares About

Lead generation is often seen as a marketing function. Something you do once the product or service is ready. A set of activities that move prospects into a pipeline for sales to handle.

This mindset is outdated and damaging. Lead generation is market intelligence, and it’s early stage validation. It is the clearest indicator of whether your proposition is speaking to a real, felt, financially meaningful problem.

The quality of leads tells you everything. It tells you who is responding. It tells you which titles, industries and roles feel the pull. It tells you what language creates curiosity. It tells you what outcomes people want to move towards or away from. It reveals which problems are urgent and which are tolerated. It exposes where your value sits in the hierarchy of their priorities.

If I had set up even a basic lead generation loop at the start of my product journey, the insights would have changed everything. I would have discovered that the problem I was focused on was interesting but not critical. I would have found out that clients cared more about speed of execution than the sophistication of the feature set. I would have been able to rank the pain points in order of commercial importance. I would have seen that the early messaging did not resonate and would not convert.

Those insights would have stopped me building the wrong thing and given me a lot of confidence. More likely, they would have guided me to build a smaller, sharper and more specific version of the product, shaped directly by buyer behaviour.

Instead, I learned these truths after the build, and by then the cost was sunk.

Leads Define the Business You Should Be In

This is the most important realisation. Lead generation does more than help you refine a product. It tells you what business you are really in.

The market will always define you more accurately than you define yourself.

When you look closely at your strongest leads, you start to see patterns. These patterns are not always the ones you expect. Sometimes the people who respond to your early messages are completely different to the ones you thought you were building for. Sometimes the pain that pulls them in is not the pain you believed was central. Sometimes the outcomes they want are simpler, more emotional or more urgent than your internal model suggested.

If your leads cluster around a different problem than you anticipated, that is a signal. If prospects repeatedly ask for something adjacent to your original idea, that is a signal. If your opt in forms, landing pages or conversations show a consistent pattern of desired outcomes, that is a signal.

These signals are not just about the product. They are about your business model. They point towards whether you should be building high touch advisory services or scalable digital products. They show whether your pricing is too low or too high. They indicate whether your audience wants predictable subscription support or bespoke expertise. They highlight whether your market size is narrow or wide.

Leads don’t just validate. They shape direction.

When you build without them, you are essentially guessing.

Why Product First Thinking Kills Momentum

Once you have spent months or years building something, you feel committed to the idea. You want it to succeed because you have invested so much in it. You fall into the emotional trap of sunk cost. This makes you defend the product even when the signals are weak.

Product first teams tend to fix problems by adding more features. They respond to poor traction by adding complexity. They assume that the lack of response is due to missing capabilities, not misaligned demand. They keep building when they should be listening.

Lead first teams behave differently. They fix problems by improving clarity. They refine their positioning. They test new angles. They change the offer before changing the product. They base decisions on real buyer behaviour, not internal speculation.

If I had used lead generation as the upstream activity, I would have avoided the misplaced momentum that carried me through a year of development work. I would have avoided building something that solved a problem nobody ranked highly. I would have redirected my energy towards the things that people actually wanted from me.

Momentum built on assumption collapses. Momentum built on demand compounds.

Building a product before generating demand is one of the most common and costly mistakes in business that I see. I made it myself.

Lead generation is not the final stage. It must be the first. It is the way you learn what matters, who cares, and where the real value sits. It tells you the business you should be in, not the business you imagine you should be in.

If you are considering building something new, start with demand. Build a simple demand probe. Observe who raises a hand. Listen to the language they use. Understand their pain chain. Shape the offer around the strongest signal. Only then should you consider building anything substantial.

If I had done that earlier, I would have saved myself a year of effort. You can save yourself the same.

Don’t wait to make this mistake.

If this experience resonates and you want to avoid the same expensive mistake, I can help. I work directly with founders who want to validate demand before they invest time, money and energy into building the wrong thing. If you would like a clear diagnosis of where demand is already forming in your market, and how to turn that insight into a product or service people genuinely want to buy, get in touch with me.

Send me a message or book a conversation. Let us make sure your next move is driven by real demand, not hopeful assumptions.

If you like this article, you might also want to read this one about the problem of weak demand.