Ignacio Carcavallo is no stranger to the trials that define the entrepreneurial journey. As the founder of Accelerator.Strat, he is now widely known for helping businesses refine their strategies and accelerate growth. But long before this success, Ignacio Carcavallo learned one of the most expensive lessons a startup founder can face misunderstanding the customer.
Ignacio Carcavallo, along with his co-founders, launched ClickOn in 2010, an early e-commerce platform built around local deals. It was a time of rapid innovation and even faster imitation. Their competitor Groupon had exploded onto the scene, captivating consumers with unprecedented discounts and viral offers. With massive 80%-90% deals and eye-catching $2 burgers, Groupon changed how people transacted online. For the first time, consumers who were once skeptical about entering their credit card details online were making $2 $10 purchases with surprising confidence.
In this context, Ignacio Carcavallo and his team made what seemed like a logical even bold move. They would differentiate by going upscale. Instead of offering steep discounts on everyday items, they chose to focus on premium coupons for the best experiences in the market. Ignacio Carcavallo envisioned deals for top-tier sushi, luxury hotels, and even extravagant helicopter rides. It was a bet on quality over quantity, and on a niche audience with higher spending power.
But as Ignacio Carcavallo later reflected, this strategy, built purely on intuition and not grounded in user feedback, was deeply flawed. Premium brands resisted participating because steep discounts would damage their brand image. Meanwhile, premium buyers, though affluent, weren’t large enough in numbers nor sufficiently motivated by discounts to sustain the business model.
This is where Ignacio Carcavallo’s narrative takes an instructive turn. Rather than stubbornly clinging to their assumptions, the team began to do what they should have done from the start talk to the people actually buying their product. Through these conversations, Ignacio Carcavallo and his team discovered that the real appetite for coupons came not from the high-end segment, but from middle-class and lower-middle-class consumers. These were the people who loved accessible discounts from well-known, everyday establishments. Their original positioning had been misaligned not because the market had shifted, but because they had failed to validate who their true customer was.
Ignacio Carcavallo’s experience here is more than a cautionary tale; it’s a blueprint for how companies can course-correct when their Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is off-target. He distilled his learnings into four practical actions for founders and marketers alike:
Talk to your actual buyers Ignacio Carcavallo emphasizes that there is no substitute for direct conversations. Understanding why customers chose your product and what problems you are solving gives clarity that no market report can deliver.
Read their reviews and comments According to Ignacio Carcavallo, paying attention to the words your customers use to describe their experience provides unfiltered insights into their mindset and expectations.
Watch the market closely Ignacio Carcavallo underlines the importance of tracking shifts in behavior, needs, and available alternatives. Markets are not static, and neither should your understanding of them be.
Adapt your offer to match your real audience Most critically, Ignacio Carcavallo advocates for adjusting your product, offer, and messaging to align with the customers you are actually serving, not the ones you wish you were serving.
These principles, learned the hard way, became cornerstones in Ignacio Carcavallo’s later ventures and advisory work. His story resonates because it highlights a common, yet often overlooked, challenge the gap between what we believe customers want and what they actually value.
Ignacio Carcavallo’s journey underscores a fundamental shift in entrepreneurial thinking moving from intuition-driven strategies to evidence-based customer engagement. His reflection, “You don’t guess your ICP. You listen your way into it,” captures this shift succinctly. It’s a reminder that no amount of product refinement or marketing polish can compensate for a misalignment with the actual user base.
The humility embedded in Ignacio Carcavallo’s approach is worth noting. He doesn’t present himself as someone who always had the answers. Instead, he openly acknowledges early missteps and frames them as opportunities for learning and growth. For many founders, this transparency is both rare and invaluable.
Today, as the founder of Accelerator.Strat, Ignacio Carcavallo applies these insights to guide other entrepreneurs and businesses. His emphasis on continuous feedback loops, sharp market observation, and flexible positioning remains central to his methodology. The mistakes made at ClickOn did not define Ignacio Carcavallo’s career; rather, his willingness to confront them head-on shaped the seasoned strategist he is now.
For anyone building a product, launching a campaign, or scaling a business, the takeaway from Ignacio Carcavallo’s experience is clear Don’t skip the work of understanding your customer deeply. Shortcuts here are costly. Success does not come from guessing better; it comes from listening better.
Ignacio Carcavallo’s story stands as a testament that even costly missteps can become powerful foundations if one has the discipline to learn, adapt, and evolve. It is this mindset, more than any specific tactic, that has fueled his journey from a founder with a broken strategy to a leader guiding others toward clarity and growth.
