Should a founder move to their target market?

A home-market pilot proves your product works clinically or technically, and almost nothing about whether buyers in the target market will pay. Talor Sax, Managing Partner at eHealth Ventures, points out that two health systems share the illness and the treatment while the cost, the people who decide and the groups who must sign off are completely different. Treat the home result as proof the thing works, then go re-learn the buying decision where you actually mean to sell.

The company and the founder are two separate decisions, and founders routinely collapse them into one. Where you register the entity is a question for your investors and your accountant; where the CEO physically sits is a sales question, and the answer is wherever your market is. Sax is blunt that registration decides nothing about selling: if the market is entirely in the US, incorporate there, but the location that moves deals is the one with a person in it.

Being in the market surfaces what a remote relationship structurally cannot deliver. Sax spent years in physicians' offices, watching routines the doctors themselves had stopped noticing, and he puts in-person meetings with the American regulator, done instead of email, at two years saved. Etgar Shpivak makes the same call with founders: a video call gets you the version a buyer can put into words, and sitting across from them gets the version they can't.

Whether moving is worth it comes down to one question: does your market have a real gatekeeper? Etgar Shpivak, who works with seed and Series A founders on marketing, uses a plain test. If a regulator has to clear you, or a committee has to agree before anyone buys, being on the ground pays for itself. A founder who can sell to buyers who purchase on their own is buying an expensive answer to a problem the market doesn't have.

A marketing hire is rarely needed before a seed round, and never just to satisfy diligence. Sax says that at the stage he invests most companies have no marketing team, maybe one person or someone fractional, so he puts the business questions to the founder or CEO. Etgar Shpivak tells founders the same: this early, understanding the market is the founder's job to own. When you do hire, whether it works is mostly settled before the person starts.

The founder should run the first sales in a new market, because that is where the buying decision is still being learned and no hire can learn it for them. Once the pattern is clear, the founder can hand it over. Watch the failure mode on the other side, though: a company that stays wholly dependent on the founder out front has traded one problem for another.

A pilot is a small paid trial with one customer, and it proves one thing only: that the product works. It doesn't test who inside the organization will actually pay for it, which is the question that closes a sale. In Talor Sax's example, the physician who loved the technology had no idea what the hospital's costs were, so the user's love was never the buyer's yes.

A market is worth relocating to when it has real gatekeepers: a regulator, or a purchase involving several parties who must agree. In those markets, being physically present surfaces what a remote relationship never shows. If instead customers buy on their own, with no regulator and no buying committee, moving there answers a problem the market never posed.

In-person meetings with the US regulator save about two years over doing it by email, according to Talor Sax, and a good deal of money too. Sitting in the room, you catch things the other side is too used to their routine to mention, things that never come across on a Zoom call. An inbox's slow pace is one of the biggest costs of running a foreign market remotely.

The person who uses the product is usually not the one who pays for it. A single sale can need three parties to align: the user, the provider who does the work, and the payer who foots the bill. The doctor who loved the technology didn't know the hospital's costs, so ask the person inside your customer exactly what your product saves them.

A consultant can pressure-test the move before the founder buys a plane ticket: which decisions really need presence, and what the home proof does and doesn't carry. Etgar Shpivak, a marketing consultant who works with seed and Series A founders on marketing and go-to-market, the work of reaching and selling into a market, takes exactly this call with founders before the relocation. You can read how he works with founders.

Relocating mainly pays off when the market has gatekeepers: a regulator or a buying committee. If customers buy on their own and decide for themselves, moving there answers a problem the market never posed, and you can run it remotely. Separate the two decisions: register the company wherever is convenient, but send the CEO to the market only when there's a real gatekeeper there.