Expanding into a new customer segment means entering an area where you still have important things to learn. Your existing business may already produce recurring revenue, but that does not tell you whether a different ideal customer profile, or ICP, will respond in the same way.
In this Designli Academy lesson, Carlos explains how to manage that expansion as a separate, limited bet. Treat the initiative like a small startup within your company: give it resources, decide what would count as success and establish when you would stop.
What you'll learn.
- Give each new market test its own budget, timeline and people before work begins.
- Define success and stopping criteria in advance, including what useful learning would look like.
- Protect the resources behind your current recurring revenue, and record what each experiment teaches you.
Treat the new market as a fresh experiment.
The expansion discussed here starts when a founder believes they have captured the value available from a current segment and wants to explore another customer profile or industry vertical.
A common mistake is to go all in and treat the new initiative as another sprint inside the existing company. That overlooks the need to give the experiment its own resources and to judge it as a new venture. Carlos describes these projects as mini MVPs, or minimum viable products, inside the business.
Early revenue may not arrive immediately. Learning about the segment can still be a worthwhile result, provided the team knows what it is trying to learn and can explain what it found.
Set the budget and timeline before starting.
Allocate time, money and people before pursuing the new market. Those limits give you a way to see whether the initiative is succeeding and whether its spending is in line with the plan.
Carlos compares this stage with the early days of a company, before monthly recurring revenue, or MRR, made the business more predictable. The same care over spending is useful again because the new segment has not yet proved itself.
Use an investor's perspective when funding the initiative. Decide what you are willing to put into the test and what evidence would justify that investment. Those decisions belong before code is written or other work begins.
Protect the work that already earns revenue.
The experiment needs tight constraints so it does not consume the people, time and budget behind the company's existing MRR. Moving resources away from a working business to an unproven segment creates a risk beyond the experiment itself.
A practical way to apply this is to name the resources the test can use and the existing work those resources must still support. That makes the boundary visible when a new request or feature starts expanding the project.
The goal is to create room for another growth opportunity while maintaining the effort behind what already works.
Define stopping points and record the learning.
Set clear success criteria and what Carlos calls kill switches: conditions that tell you to stop. If the initiative does not reach the goals you agreed on, you may need to shut it down. Establishing that decision point in advance makes it possible to act on the evidence.
A shutdown can be a useful outcome when the test answered an important question about the customer profile or market. Learning can be a win even when it does not produce revenue right away.
Document what happened, keep the data and move on when the evidence calls for it. The record gives the company something to carry forward from an initiative that will no longer receive resources.
A new market should have a defined investment, a clear question and an agreed decision point. Those boundaries let a founder pursue the next stage of growth while protecting the business that is already producing results.
