Why Immediate’s First Year of Sales Targeted Everyone—And Why That Was the Right Move

Why Immediate’s First Year of Sales Targeted Everyone—And Why That Was the Right Move

Every founder faces the same early-stage pressure: narrow your focus, define your ICP, pick a vertical. The advice is so universal it feels like gospel. But what if you’re too early to know who your ideal customer actually is?

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Matt Pierce, CEO and Founder of Immediate, shared how his financial wellness platform deliberately ignored that advice for an entire year—and discovered insights that now drive 2-3x higher enrollment rates in specific verticals.

The Conventional Wisdom Problem

Most founders approach ICP definition with confidence they haven’t earned. They build personas based on assumptions, market research, and competitive analysis. Then they spend months—sometimes years—targeting these fictional ideal customers before realizing the market doesn’t match their thesis.

Matt took a different approach. After spending a full year navigating legal and regulatory compliance hurdles to get Immediate’s platform live, he could have rushed to define an ICP and start scaling. Instead, he made a counterintuitive decision: intentionally target no one specific.

“In the first year or so of selling, we really took anything, right?” Matt explains. “Let’s just figure out what makes sense and let’s make sure that we’ve got a scalable platform in place.”

This wasn’t desperation or lack of strategy. It was disciplined discovery. Immediate had built a platform for earned wage access—letting employees access earned but unpaid wages between paydays. The total addressable market was 180 million American workers. But which segments would actually enroll? Which would use it regularly? Which would generate the engagement patterns that make the business model work?

Matt didn’t know. More importantly, he knew he didn’t know.

What “Taking Anything” Actually Means

The phrase “we took anything” undersells the sophistication of Immediate’s approach. They weren’t randomly chasing any company willing to sign. They were systematically testing different customer profiles while building the operational infrastructure to serve them all.

During that first year, Immediate onboarded companies across industries: biotechnology firms, higher education institutions, restaurant groups, healthcare systems, hospitality companies. Each new customer was a data point. Each implementation taught the team something about integration complexity, HR buyer behavior, and employee adoption patterns.

The key was capturing the right data. Immediate tracked enrollment rates by industry, company size, and employee demographics. They measured usage frequency, transaction sizes, and time-to-first-transaction. They documented which industries had smoother implementations and which required more support.

This wasn’t passive observation—it was active experimentation with rigorous measurement.

When the Signal Emerged

After collecting sufficient data, patterns became undeniable. “What we started doing was evaluating the data and seeing areas, verticals and individuals and demographics that were enrolling and utilizing the platform the most,” Matt recalls.

Healthcare and hospitality weren’t just performing well—they were performing at completely different levels. “In the past year, we’ve really started to zero in on two industries that we feel like are the best fit for us and for our platform, and that’s healthcare and hospitality,” Matt explains. “Those are places where because of reference ability, of course, we can move pretty quickly through a sales process and we can also go in and see pretty high enrollment where in some cases as much as double or triple what we see in non healthcare, non hospitality companies.”

Double or triple enrollment rates. That’s not a marginal difference—that’s a fundamental signal about product-market fit.

But the data revealed something even more specific. “87% of our users are earning less than $60,000 a year,” Matt notes. This demographic insight transformed how Immediate thought about their market. They weren’t just targeting healthcare and hospitality—they were targeting shift workers earning under $60,000 who faced unpredictable schedules and bills that didn’t align with bi-weekly paydays.

Why This Approach Works (And When It Doesn’t)

Immediate’s discovery strategy succeeded because of three critical factors:

First, they had a horizontal product with broad potential application. Earned wage access could theoretically work for any company with hourly employees. This made exploration viable—the product didn’t need fundamental changes to serve different verticals.

Second, they built measurement into the discovery process. Every customer generated comparable data on enrollment, usage, and implementation complexity. Without this systematic tracking, patterns would have remained invisible.

Third, they had sufficient runway. That first year of regulatory work meant Immediate had already invested time before generating revenue. The team had aligned expectations around a discovery phase rather than immediate scaling.

This approach doesn’t work for every company. If you’re building vertical-specific software, you can’t afford a year of horizontal exploration. If you’re capital-constrained with three months of runway, you need revenue immediately. If your product requires extensive customization per customer, serving diverse segments becomes operationally impossible.

But for companies with horizontal products, sufficient runway, and the discipline to measure rigorously, the discovery phase creates information advantages that assumptions never could.

The Compounding Benefits

Immediate’s approach delivered advantages beyond ICP clarity. That first year of serving diverse customers forced the platform to be truly scalable. The team couldn’t build industry-specific workarounds because they were serving biotechnology and restaurants simultaneously.

“We wanted to make sure that we’ve got a scalable platform in place,” Matt emphasizes. This constraint became an asset. When Immediate eventually focused on healthcare and hospitality, they weren’t rebuilding systems—they were simply directing existing, proven infrastructure toward the highest-value segments.

The broad customer base also created unexpected referenceability. Healthcare buyers could see implementations at hospitality companies and vice versa. This cross-industry credibility helped accelerate sales cycles once Immediate narrowed their focus.

Currently, Immediate sees 24% average enrollment across all customers, with healthcare and hospitality pushing 25% to 35%. These aren’t theoretical projections—they’re actual results from the discovery phase, now being replicated at scale.

The Framework for Discovery-First GTM

Immediate’s experience suggests a framework for early-stage ICP discovery:

Phase One: Build with Constraints (Months 1-12) Immediate spent their first year on legal compliance and platform development. This created a forcing function—they couldn’t scale prematurely even if they wanted to. Use your constraint period (regulatory, product development, fundraising) to prepare for systematic discovery.

Phase Two: Intentional Exploration (Months 12-24) Say yes to diverse customers while building measurement systems. Track enrollment, usage, implementation complexity, support burden, and sales cycle length. Make every customer a comparable data point.

Phase Three: Pattern Recognition (Months 18-30) Let the data reveal segments performing 2-3x better than others. Don’t just look at top-line metrics—understand why certain segments work better. Immediate discovered not just that healthcare worked, but that sub-$60K shift workers were the demographic driver.

Phase Four: Focused Scaling (Months 24+) Direct resources toward proven segments while maintaining operational flexibility. Immediate didn’t abandon non-healthcare customers—they just stopped actively pursuing them. The platform remained horizontal even as sales became vertical.

The Question to Ask Yourself

Most founders optimize for looking smart—having clear positioning, a defined ICP, and confident vertical focus from day one. Matt optimized for being right, even if it meant admitting uncertainty for a year.

The question isn’t whether you should target everyone forever. It’s whether you have enough actual data to know who your ideal customer is, or whether you’re making expensive bets on attractive assumptions.

“We’ve been at this for about three years,” Matt notes, referring to the three years since their first customer in September 2019. In that time, Immediate has grown to six figures of eligible employees, closed 60 deals in their most recent 100 days, and maintained zero customer churn.

That success didn’t come from brilliant initial assumptions. It came from the discipline to spend a year learning before the confidence to spend the next three years scaling what worked.

Sometimes the fastest path forward starts with admitting you don’t know—and building systems to find out.