How do I work out who my ideal customer is?

Not just what kind of business it is, but also what kind of person runs that business.

You can see who the owner is on a registry of companies. I'm pretty sure you can find how old they are. Maybe you don't want to work with people who are 60, 70 years old, because they're close to retirement. They have worked like this their whole life. They probably don't care. But maybe the right people are younger. They have, for example, taken over, or they're coming into the business.

If you genuinely enjoyed working with a client, you can write out their characteristics and try to aim for similar businesses.

You should have one customer avatar. If you have the right avatar, you can spend all of your time solving one avatar's problem rather than five or ten avatars' problems.

Has your avatar been in business for five years or for six months? Is your avatar a 45 year old guy who has a business that's been around for 15 years? It just broke $1,000,000 a year in revenue and he wants to get it to five, but he doesn't know how.

You need to personify your avatar. And if the person you're talking to isn't that avatar, sorry, goodbye. I know it's hard because money is money.

You really need to think about who it is that you're targeting. Really think about it in detail. What's their business size? How many people are in the business?

You still need to kind of have an idea of who they are, because otherwise it's too broad. You want to have that understanding, but maybe not niching down too much. Whatever works for you.

You don't have to be picking the industry. It can be location, for example: companies based in one city, or a broad region. Or it could be businesses generating seven figures, one to 10 million in revenue.

Who's paying you and who's making the decision could often be two different people.

When we were going after medical practices, we learned the admins are the ones paying attention and trying to make their lives easier. The doctor does not have a clue what's happening, but is the one who's going to dole out the money.

I'm redoing my whole ICP in three parts: their painkiller problems, the buyers and the companies. Then I do user interviews. The interview is not specific to your product, it's validating the painkiller problem. You're trying to ask, indirectly, where they're having trouble and what they do today to solve it.

The first thing I would do is define the company and your buyer inside of the company.

I knew a consultant who struggled. I think he ended up narrowing down to one very, very niche specific vertical: maritime technology providers. All of a sudden his book of business flourished because he did two things. He was very specific about what he'd look at, and he specialized in this industry.

I think at this stage you should take anyone you know who works with these things and find ten of them maybe. Test your hypothesis with them. Find out if the problem is big enough and people are willing to pay.

Every go-to-market person will disagree with me. I don't love ICPs. I think they force us to over-generalize an ideal customer. If you try and please everyone, you please no one.

My advice, often, in the situation you're in, is to find that one customer you have the best relationship with. Not the one who has the most revenue potential, not the one who has the biggest need. The one you trust, and they trust you.

There's something amazing that happens if you can solve the problem really well for one person. It gets easier to scale. If you try and scale before you've done that, your base isn't there.

You take in clients and you do many, many different things. That's great, you make money, but it makes it really hard to regularly generate leads.

How you niche down depends on a couple of things. Of all the clients you have, which ones are the most valuable to you? Valuable meaning they love your service, they're going to keep using you, and you think you're really good at providing that service.

What's the problem that they have? Before you came along, how did these people try to solve it? Why don't these alternatives work? And the value proposition: what do you bring in that's better than these alternatives?

Go through your user base and any data source you have right now. Compile that into a summary of who those users are. Compare that against your competitors and see where you think you're better or have an opportunity.

Have a point of view based on the data and try and win that segment.

If you don't really see a unique lane, you could maybe put some money towards paid advertising just for a couple of weeks. Try different ads through different segments and see what traction you get. But I wouldn't overthink it either. If you can see something now from your analysis and data, just go with that.

I think it's just: who do you want to work with? That influences everything. In my opinion, everyone gets it wrong: they focus on "we do this service", and it's like, well, you're interchangeable.

The thing that I always get to people is: who is your customer, and what keeps them up at night? How do you solve that problem in a way that nobody else does, and articulate it in a way that resonates with them?

I'm just throwing this out, but say you've worked with a bunch of plumbers and just like those people. Now you're a partner for plumbers and you can speak to their needs.

You can get an ideal customer profile template online and fill it in. You have to define where they live, what language they speak, whether they work. And especially their pain points: what is happening in their lives today that they can't figure out.

Wanting something doesn't mean you're gonna pay for it. If they don't see a need or a want, you don't have a product.

If they go on a search engine, what would they type? You might be a nutritionist selling healthy meal kits, and your customers are searching for "how do I make my child eat vegetables?" They're not searching for a meal kit.

It's hard when you're guessing, but you give your best guesstimate. It's probably worth thinking about which ICPs are most in pain and more likely to spend to solve that pain.

For me, the larger companies with lots of sales reps already are the ones pulling their hair out. Because there's that acute pain right now, that's who I'm focusing on. One company I just worked with has 100 reps. If I can save each rep one hour a day, that's huge.

You might get it wrong and waste a bit of time, but typically you've built the process and infrastructure you need for the next ICP.