The Setup

F. entered a saturated physical goods market in 2023 with ambitious plans and a hybrid B2C/B2B2C model. They had funding, a finished product, and conviction that their approach would disrupt the category. What they didn’t have was any meaningful go-to-market analysis.

No pricing research. No competitive mapping. No product-market fit validation. Just a belief that if they built it and explained it well enough, customers would come.
By the time I was brought in to align their processes and drive sales, the damage was already done. The company had spent months in market with almost nothing to show for it.

What I Found

As Eyal Dror Consulting started working with F., the problems revealed themselves quickly. Nobody in the company understood the product vertical they were selling. They couldn’t speak the language of distributors or retail buyers. They didn’t know how to work with distributors, what the key decision criteria were, or frankly anything else about the business methodologies in this market. We literally had to guess (!!!) what the business model should be with distributors (we’ll come back to this).

The pricing structure was a mess. F. had set consumer prices based on their costs and desired margins, without researching what the market was willing to pay. End consumers saw the price tag and immediately compared it to familiar alternatives that cost 20-30% less. The perception was universal: F. was expensive. Meanwhile, the B2B distributor pricing model was so unclear that potential partners couldn’t figure out their own margins. Conversations that should have been straightforward commercial negotiations turned into a mess of hypothetical guesswork about their profit splits.

But the deeper issue was the product itself. F. had designed something they believed was innovative, but they’d skipped the basics. Features that every competitor offered as standard features that buyers assumed would simply be there were missing. These weren’t nice-to-haves. These were table stakes. Without them, F. wasn’t even in consideration (imagine a new car in Israel without air conditioning).

The Fatal Strategy: Market Education

Rather than adapt, F. doubled down on “educating the market.” They created elaborate content explaining why their approach was better. They held webinars. They published comparison charts highlighting their innovations. They told prospects that they were thinking about the category all wrong.

The market’s response was silence. Buyers didn’t want to be educated. They wanted products that solved their problems, fit their budgets, and included the features they expected. F. was asking customers to change their behavior, adjust their expectations, and pay a premium for the privilege all while entering as an unknown brand in a space dominated by trusted names.
Sales remained dismal. The few deals that closed were painful, heavily discounted exceptions that proved the rule: without addressing fundamental GTM gaps, no amount of explanation would create demand.

What Should Have Happened

I assume I don’t need to explain what GTM is, but proper (and not expensive) investment in researching the market they were entering would have advanced them significantly.
Before launch, F. needed to spend time understanding the market they were entering, not the market they wished existed. Pricing research would have shown where consumer price sensitivity peaked and what distributor margins needed to be. Competitive analysis would have revealed which features were non-negotiable and where differentiation actually mattered to buyers. Product-market fit validation would have tested whether their innovations resonated before they committed to production.

And beyond everything understanding logistical constraints (how long it takes to import a product, what the bureaucratic obstacles are). If they had brought in someone experienced in the field, that person would have quickly identified the problems with the product and known how to work with distributors.
Instead, they tried to build a market from scratch while simultaneously entering an established one. It doesn’t work.

The Lesson

Markets don’t care about your vision. They care about their problems, their budgets, and their expectations. When you skip GTM analysis, you’re not being bold or fast you’re being blind. F. learned this the expensive way: with months of burned runway, a demoralized team, and sales numbers that told the story of a company nobody asked for.
You can’t educate your way out of a positioning problem. You have to solve it before you launch.

If you’re entering a market and want to avoid repeating these GTM mistakes, feel free to contact me to discuss it before they become expensive.