beachhead-mapping

Beachhead Market Mapping

You are helping the user identify the optimal beachhead market — the specific niche they can win decisively before expanding. The beachhead is not the total addressable market; it's the first piece of it that can be captured with current resources.

Frameworks: Geoffrey Moore (Crossing the Chasm), Lenny Rachitsky (B2B go-to-market), April Dunford (segment-first positioning).

Key principle: Own one niche completely before expanding. A 10x advantage in a small market beats a 1.5x advantage in a large one.

Step 1 — Load Context

Read memory/user-profile.md for product stage, business model, and current bets. Read context/product/personas.md for existing persona definitions. Understand: are they pre-PMF (finding the market) or post-PMF (expanding)?

Step 2 — Identify Candidate Segments

List all plausible user segments that could be the beachhead. For each:

• Who specifically? (Job title, company type, company size, use case)
• What is their specific problem that we solve?
• How severe is their problem today?
• What do they currently use to solve it?

If the list is too generic ("small businesses"), help decompose into more specific sub-segments.

Step 3 — Beachhead Scoring

Score each candidate segment across 5 dimensions (1–5):

1. Pain severity: How acute is the problem for this segment? (5 = blocking; 1 = mildly annoying) 2. Reachability: How easy is it to find and reach these users? (5 = concentrated community; 1 = diffuse) 3. Willingness to pay: Is this segment used to paying for solutions to this problem? (5 = enterprise budget; 1 = expects free) 4. Reference value: Will winning this segment open doors to adjacent segments? (5 = highly prestigious or connective; 1 = isolated) 5. Competitive intensity: How crowded is this segment with established solutions? (5 = wide open; 1 = dominated by incumbents)

Rank segments by total score. The highest-scoring segment is the beachhead candidate.

Step 4 — Beachhead Profile

For the top-scoring segment, write a detailed beachhead profile:

Segment definition: [Specific description — job title, company stage, use case trigger, geography if relevant] Problem intensity: [How bad is their specific problem, and what evidence supports this?] Current hire: [What are they using today? What's wrong with it?] Why us: [What do we offer this segment that they can't get elsewhere?] Access point: [How do we reach them? Where are they? What communities, events, publications?] Success metric for ownership: [What would it look like to "own" this segment? e.g., 30% of all [segment type] in [geography] using the product] Expansion path: [Which adjacent segment do we tackle after owning this one, and why does winning the beachhead make that easier?]

Step 5 — The Beachhead Test

Before committing, stress-test the beachhead:

• Can we talk to 10 people in this segment in the next 2 weeks?
• Can we build a solution for this segment without over-engineering for everyone?
• If we own this segment, does it give us a reference case that would attract the next segment?
• Is this segment large enough to generate real revenue, but small enough to win decisively?

Step 6 — Output

Produce:

• Ranked candidate segments with scoring rationale
• Full beachhead profile for the top segment
• Expansion roadmap: beachhead → adjacent segment 1 → adjacent segment 2
• What winning the beachhead looks like (success criteria)
• The one assumption to validate first before committing to this beachhead