Is this a thing? I’m doing some market research on some competitors in a niche, and a few of them are listing massive customer numbers (10,000+) on their sites that don’t seem to line up. This is in a 90% B2B, 10% B2C vertical.
From my due diligence, the competitors in question are small startups, that have been around for less than a few years. They don’t have VC funding that could explain the massive customer base vis-a-vis their headcount, and the customer / brand logos they have listed on their sites seem tangentially related to this vertical, at best.
From what I know about sweat equity, it can take decades to build up a thousand customers - yeah, you can do that warp speed with VC funding and the right sales team / strategy - but these numbers don’t add up. For what it’s worth, if you’re in a majority B2B space and have 10K+ customers, odds are we would have heard about you through the grapevine.
Is this commonplace, for startups (or businesses in general) to artificially inflate their customer base on a marketing site or claim customers that they don’t actually have based on the vertical? (for example, a wedding planning software claiming a law enforcement agency as their customer, wildly impractical). Is this even legal to make these claims?
Note: this is nothing I want to do, just trying to understand if this is just how the kool kids do marketing these days.
The saying “fake it until you make it” gets thrown around a lot in business, but unfortunately newbies have no clue what it actually means. It’s actually just talking about overcoming self-doubt and imposter syndrome and just being the thing you want to be, rather than always feeling like you’re just looking at things from the outside. It’s talking about a mindset shift to overcome limiting beliefs and improve confidence. However, newbies take it to mean you literally fake everything, AKA lie, which it absolutely does not mean at all.
On the contrary, honesty, especially with yourself, will always pave the way forward for the best business outcomes. Stroking your own ego, searching for echo chambers, and confirming your own biases might make you feel good, but it doesn’t do anything to help you build a successful business. You need to be real with yourself about your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Otherwise, you’re just throwing a veil over your eyes and living in ignorant bliss while your business is run to shambles.