Ask a company why they entered the market they entered, and the honest answer is rarely a market analysis. It's that someone on the team had a contact there. Or a conference went unexpectedly well. Or the CEO liked the city.
None of these are stupid reasons. Warm access is genuinely valuable and shouldn't be dismissed. The problem is that a warm introduction tells you something about one relationship, and nothing at all about a market — and companies routinely treat the first as evidence for the second.
The cost is invisible for about a year
This is what makes it dangerous. Entering the wrong market doesn't fail loudly. You get meetings, because a decent product gets meetings almost anywhere. You get interest. You get a pilot. What you don't get is the compounding that makes a market worth having — the second customer arriving faster than the first, the reference that opens the next three doors.
By the time that absence is obvious, you've spent a year and hired someone. And the post-mortem usually blames execution, because execution is visible and market choice isn't.
What a real answer looks like
A defensible market choice has four things in it: where your product needs least adaptation, where the competitive set is thinnest relative to your differentiation, where the regulatory and procurement friction is survivable, and where you can actually reach buyers. Score candidates against those, write down the reasoning, and the decision becomes reviewable rather than remembered.
That last part matters more than it sounds. A written argument can be disagreed with specifically. A corridor decision can only be defended or abandoned.