The customers you can't see yet

ByPath — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 20:42:42 +0000

I sold for about 15 years. B2B and B2C, cold and warm. I built teams and I sold by myself. One thing still sits in my head, and it gets louder now that I work with makers.

Almost every company I worked with only reacts to one moment. The moment a person already shows clear interest. They fill a form. They google you. They reply to an email. Sales and marketing wake up right then and start chasing.

But the real decision happened earlier. Weeks earlier, when something in that person's life or work changed. A team outgrew its office. Someone got promoted. A founder closed a round. The need was real right then. They just had not put it into words yet, so no tool could see it.

That gap is what I call demand blindness. A business can only see people who already named their need. The much larger group, the ones whose situation already created the need, stays invisible. They are posting about the move, the new hire, the bigger space. None of it looks like a buying signal, so everyone scrolls past.

So we all crowd the very end of the journey and fight over the few who raised a hand. Whoever showed up weeks earlier, calm and human, already won that customer.

I do not have this fully solved. Reading a situation is hard, and the line between early and creepy is thin. But once you start seeing these windows, you cannot stop seeing them.

If you build or sell something: what is the earliest real signal you ever caught from a customer, before they searched for you?

DEV Community: ByPath

The customers you can't see yet