From $3M to $5M ARR in 4 Months by Refusing to Go Broad

What Everyone Says

Once you hit traction, expand. Add more features. Target more use cases. Go after the bigger market. If your AI tool generates wireframes, why not generate full apps? Why not add backend code? Why not compete with Lovable and Replit?

The logic sounds bulletproof. Bigger market means bigger opportunity. More features means more customers. Investors love total addressable market slides with massive numbers.

Why That's Wrong

Going broad means competing with everyone. And when you're bootstrapped, competing with well-funded companies across multiple use cases is a losing game.

The founders who expand too early end up with a product that does five things at 60% quality instead of one thing at 95%. Their messaging gets blurry. Their positioning gets lost. Customers can't explain what the product does in one sentence.

Meanwhile, the narrow player owns their niche. Every feature, every marketing dollar, every engineering sprint serves one clear purpose.

What Adam Did Instead

While competitors were building no-code tools that could do everything, Adam Fard kept UX Pilot focused on one thing: AI-powered design for product teams.

"We are not building backend, we are just generating design so it's faster, it can be even cheaper, the quality is better."

That's it. No code generation. No full-stack app building. No backend. Just design.

The result: UX Pilot went from $3M to $5.3M ARR in roughly four to five months. Bootstrapped. While competitors who tried the broader approach struggled to get traction.

Adam watched companies try to replicate Figma's vector-based design and bolt AI onto it. They went after a wider audience. "They didn't manage to grow or get enough or the same level of traction."

The narrow positioning worked because it gave UX Pilot a clear edge. When product teams compared tools, UX Pilot's output was better for their specific use case. Not because it did more, but because it did less.

Early on, the ICP wasn't even clear. Adam wasn't sure if the product should target designers, developers, or non-technical founders. But over time the answer became obvious. "Product teams are, especially in this kind of team environment, enterprise environment, these are people who will use UX Pilot and kind of keep using it."

Enterprise product teams needed professional-quality design output. They needed something that fit into their existing workflow. They weren't looking for a tool that also builds databases. They wanted the best AI design tool, period.

The Principle Underneath

Narrowing your focus doesn't shrink your market. It clarifies your position in it. When you're the obvious best choice for a specific type of customer, you don't need to convince them. They come to you.

The UX design space was less competitive than the broad AI tool space precisely because most founders were chasing the bigger opportunity. Adam found more room to grow by going where fewer people were competing.

This isn't about thinking small. It's about winning a beachhead before expanding. You can always go broader later. But you can't un-blur your positioning once customers stop understanding what you do.

Should You Do This?

Do this if you're past $1M ARR and feeling pressure to add features that serve a different audience than your core users. That pressure usually comes from competitors, not customers.

Skip this if you genuinely haven't found product-market fit yet. Narrowing too early, before you know who your best customers are, can box you in. Adam figured out his ICP through experimentation, then narrowed. That sequence matters.