When the Coach Is Wrong and the Market Is Right

There is a moment that many experienced founder coaches know well. You are sitting across from a founder, listening to the concept, and something inside you thinks: this will not work. Too niche. Too complicated. Too early.

And then it works anyway.

MyMuesli is one such case. A personalised muesli, ordered online, produced in small batches. For many observers at the time, not an obvious business model. The market saw it differently.

Moments like these are instructive. Not because coaches should have no opinions, but because they reveal where the limits of experience lie.

One of the things that makes a good founder coach is the ability to recognise patterns. Someone who has accompanied many founding processes can quickly see where typical mistakes tend to appear, which assumptions are unrealistic, and which markets are difficult to enter. That is valuable.

But experience has a structural weakness. It is based on what has already happened. New markets, new technologies and new user behaviours often emerge precisely where prior experience no longer provides reliable orientation.

This is the fundamental tension in founder coaching. A coach's own judgement is never neutral. It is always shaped by what they have experienced, observed and learned.

It would be unrealistic to expect coaches to form no opinion about a business model. It happens. And sometimes it is even useful when that assessment is made transparent.

The decisive question is not whether a coach has a judgement. The question is what they do with it.

There is a difference between "I think this market is difficult, because..." and "This will not work." The first opens a conversation. The second closes it. A coach who treats their own assessment as fact narrows the founder's space for reflection, precisely where it should be widest.

What does this mean in practice? Not that a coach should stay silent when they have reservations. But that they should mark those reservations for what they are: a personal assessment, not an objective truth.

Notice your own reaction without immediately following it. When you find yourself thinking "this will not work", that is a signal, not a statement.

Frame assessments as hypotheses. Instead of "this is too niche", try: "My experience tells me that very narrow markets often grow slowly. What do your data say?"

Make the founder the real expert. A coach knows many companies from the outside. A founder knows their company from the inside. The question "What do you know about this market that I do not?" is often more productive than any assessment the coach might offer.

Tolerate not knowing. A coaching session sometimes ends without a clear answer. That is not a failure. It is an honest recognition of the coach's role.

Coaches who have experienced such moments often describe them as important correctives. Not because they were wrong, but because they learned what that means: that market developments cannot be derived from experience alone. And that the accompanying role of a coach does not consist in predicting success, but in enabling the founder to make good decisions themselves.

That is a modest but demanding understanding of coaching.