Defining Your ICP

"VSBs or SMBs are the safest bet at first because these companies can make faster decisions, there’s less compliance/security risk, and you won’t need a robust sales team immediately. They are also more likely to be the early-adopter types."

"Attacking everyone will pull your product in different directions, require you to build expertise in multiple channels at once, communicate to different types of customers at once, etc. It’s better to focus on one part of the market."

"If you’ve got a killer idea but you’re talking to the wrong people, you’ll come away thinking your idea stinks, and give up. But the same idea pitched to different people can change everything."

"Try to get super-specific and super-narrow with your ICP. Almost comically narrow."

"Data from outbound sales is the best signal for what’s working, versus leads from investors and friends."

"Looker was a technical product, created right at the very start of data moving to the cloud and large, event style data being treated as business critical for analysis. ... The companies tended to be startups with around 50-400 employees, with either engineering leading data or the data team being very technical."

"We knew we were ready to expand when we felt like, one, we were getting customer love and, two, we had sufficient engineering bandwidth to go and build the features and products without letting go of the previous customer audience."

"When it comes to the question of the target customer, the most common mistake is the definition is too broad. It must be almost comically narrow, to the point where you may be misunderstood for such a narrow focus."

"If you want to build a big business, you don’t go after the big market first, because those people only buy based on references, and you don’t have the references. You need to create a beachhead, a niche you can dominate."

"Spend time promoting your product to the wrong people and you’ll waste your time or, worse, go nowhere and give up. But if you can identify the right early users for your product in time, you’ll find that everything gets easier."

"The founders picked their first users carefully, courting people who would be good photographers—especially designers who had high Twitter follower counts. Those first users would help set the right artistic tone, creating good content for everyone else to look at."

"Simply put, an ICP must be a single market segment: a group of people for whom the value of solving a problem is roughly the same, and who can be reached in roughly the same way. “People who use Excel” is not a market segment, because it says nothing about either the value of their problem or how to reach them."

"A product that’s 10x better on average might actually be 50x better for some groups but only 1.1x better for others. Picking the right group will determine whether you quickly find product-market fit or face an uphill battle."

"Your best-fit target customers are customers who really care a lot about your unique value."

"Narrowly and concretely define who you’re building for. . . Resist solving adjacent problems, or problems for other segments. Continue to come back to your primary segment and the primary problem you’re solving for them."

"In B2B, you first segment your customers via firmographics, i.e. things like how many employees, revenue, geography, etc. Then, a more actionable segmentation is: “three-member or more creative agencies that follow a specific firmographic profile and have a budget of 20K and they use Notion.”"

"My advice: Your product’s first atomic network is probably smaller and more specific than you think. Not a massive segment of users, or a particular customer segment, or a city, but instead something tiny, maybe on the order of hundreds of people, at a specific moment in time."

"We found that many more people were part of Facebook Groups communities that had been set up specifically for buying, selling, and trading than we expected."

"The intensity of the pull is a factor of the fit (how good your product is at solving the user’s problem) AND initial market size (is it niche or broad). Dropbox, Netflix, and Tinder were 10x better products within a huge market —> sudden and broad pull."

"Your target audience should also be very narrow. Almost comically narrow. Shoot for at least three narrowing characteristics."