What I learned from Clients? July 2026

Written by Swagat Irsale, Growth Advocate. 

I am a Growth Advocate who consults with start ups and scale ups in growing revenue and scaling products. 

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Here is what I learned from my clients. 

There is a consistent trend on the stage where the product and company is to the strategy and initiatives you can try to achieve your goals. 

I hope this helps you. 

Here is how I would approach a match making app in 2026 - Client is in the US and plans to create a matchmaking app for Indian communities in the US. 

I believe the need exists as Indian origin youngsters may feel pressured by their parents.

This approach can be tweaked and should be revisited based on user acquisition, revenue goals every 3 months or similar. 

1 - Segregate the users by age, community (religion), income, location, etc. These are very important for Indian users. This will give a rough TAM estimate. Then focus on one region/ city/ niche. Examples are the New York city area only or Jain community in the North east. 

Mobile apps MVP is a must. 

2 - Channels are key. We should experiment with traditional, social, non-traditional channels as well to see what is working. Pricing can be free for some time. Onboard more ladies. Getting user’s profiles and phone numbers verified is a must. 

3 - Think about some restrictions such as unless the profile is verified, you can not see profiles for matchmaking. In the Indian community dating may not be well received. So position as get to know/ referral/ breakfast and lunch serious relationships only. 

4 - Find where Indian communities do marriages, festivals, events, birthday parties, etc. Get those event places/ partners onboarded; they know a lot about the community, whatsapp groups, Indian temples and more. These can be a growth strategy for acquisition. 

Some marketing, awareness initiatives are a must in the selected geography. 

Target audience, positioning, message, channel optimisation should be re-assessed after every 2 years or so based on the business and seasonality you are in. 

Here is another story on what I learned from my clients.

How to handle difficult customer conversations? 

I suggest looking at first why the conversation became uncomfortable/ difficult?

• Was the customer sold something which did not exist?

• Timeline given missed repeatedly. 

• Unexpected service cost occured for the customer which is not budgeted. 

• Expected value is not achieved; product not working as expected. 

• The customer is not in our ICP from industry, use cases, workflows, compliance perspective. 

• Too many heads to answer, too many communication threads, and more. 

Check similar reasons from the customer side as well. 

• Many customer representatives get exhausted because this project is their part time job and their primary job is taking most of their time. 

• Sometimes, the customer feels that this is the end of the road for the relationship. 

• Customers create many meetings just to make sure that they stay relevant in the job/ position they are in. They do not have any other place to go. 

• Genuine product, people, integration, workflow, etc. issues. 

• Too much pressure from their business/ management and unrealistic timelines. 

If you are in a b2b business- executive relationships, contracts, people relationships matter a lot. My approach would be to get as much information as possible from the clients and prioritise the issues they have mentioned as Critical, must-have and minor or similar. 

Then internalise if there are resources needed to solve these. Give realistic timelines. Understand the customer's pain. Why is that needed next week? Example - you are a retail store and something is a must a month before thanksgiving/ Christmas. So your business is dependent on my product/ service; that is a very good thing. 

Convey the customer what the timelines are and the exact output. Expectations management is key here. Let the customer know what we need from them. I will use activities, tasks, sequencing, and other program management principles in a leaner way. 

These conversations get better as we deliver better. I understand the Contract value, resources spent, team commitment from our side. Sometimes customers pay low and expect white glove service. It is a fine dance. At least listen to 60% of what the customer is asking and definitely say no to 30% and give appropriate reasons why it will not help them become better. 

My experience spans across onboarding 100 plus b2b enterprise customers. Hence these thoughts/ approaches. 

How should I grow and scale my tour guide business? 

1 - The buyer in this case is either the Museum or the Tour guides association who operates in the Museum (example). We should also market to the tourist which is the User in a very leaner way. Our point of view can be “you can enrich your travel experience, learn about the country/ history, stay close to the heritage and so on”. This will enrich their experience with the monuments. 

2 - Channels are key. We should experiment with traditional, social, non-traditional channels as well to see what is working. 

3 - Pricing can be free for some time but as we onboard more places we can charge tourists. They can replay the audio, etc. kind of features (as an example) can be given to them which are valuable after their travel completes. 

4 - Traditional solutions may be based on the recorded tape which needs to be returned. Our solution is 10x better than that. We can have a much better sound quality, personal touch, location/ festivals based humor and so on. We can have competitive pricing and do a competitive analysis and see how we can differentiate; flip phone vs touch screen phone approach. 

These are my very initial thoughts. 

Once an initial set of users exists a detailed multi-channel and paid strategy can be considered.