Frenemies - Where growth meets reality
Welcome to Frenemies - the podcast where growth meets reality. Julia Hartwig believes that the B2B system is broken and that strategy and execution don't have to be disconnected. At the center of Frenemies stands one goal: uncovering the alignment trap most SaaS companies face within their go-to-market functions.
That's why Julia sits down with a guest every second week to uncover the key topics driving alignment and industry news.
Frenemies - Where growth meets reality
#38 ICP, Positioning and Scaling Reality with Joris van Kappen
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Most founder-led companies treat ICP as a demographic checklist. Joris van Kappen thinks that's where growth goes wrong.
In this episode of Frenemies, Julia sits down with Joris van Kappen, founder of Accelor Hub, who has spent his career building, buying and selling companies before becoming a GTM consultant for founder-led B2B scale-ups between €1M and €10M ARR. His work sits at the intersection of ICP discipline, positioning and what it actually takes to make a commercial function work in practice.
This is a peer conversation between two practitioners who work in overlapping territory, and it gets honest about where founder-led GTM most often breaks down.
Topics covered in this episode:
- Why ICP is a strategic filter, not a demographic checklist, and how to operationalize it
- The shared meaning problem: why everyone in the company has a different definition of the ICP
- How to score and bucket prospects so sales, marketing, and CS are all working from the same source of truth
- What happens when the founder's mental model never gets downloaded into the organization
- Why scaling is not linear, and what S-curves actually mean for go-to-market strategy
- The difference between winning customers and winning with customers
- "Excel always works like that. Reality doesn't."
Follow Joris van Kappen on LinkedIn
Learn more about Accelor Hub
