Know Thy Ideal Customer

Let's talk about finding your Ideal Customer Persona or ICP today. What is ICP and why is it important?

Having an ICP can help figure out who matters, and help you prioritise your time accordingly. Founders should spend more time on finding out who the typical buyer of their product is. Without this information, outbound or paid acquisition cannot be successful.

Finding the ICP or Buyer Persona is more about figuring out how they derive value from what we are doing. It's not just if you are solving a problem. How does this product solve it?

The ICP should answer questions like

• Who is the buyer?
• Who is the user?
• How do we get utility to the users' desk?

Your Marketing, Sales, Customer Success all have to be aligned towards and driven by the ICP.

What are some examples of Buyer Persona?

• Atlassian -> Developers
• Figma -> Designers
• Snowflake -> Infrastructure 6/15

How do you define the persona? Track the following characteristics:

• Job Title: What is their title?
• Stage of Company: How mature is their company?
• Daily Activities: What do they do and care about?
• Pain points: What is hard about their job?
• Willingness to Pay (WTP): Do they want to spend money?
• Things to watch out for: How influential is this role?

How do you determine your ideal persona? Let's split it among Primary Research (Done by talking to customers) and Secondary research (Done by evaluating data from other sources) and split again by Qualitative and Quantitative

Primary Qualitative Research can be done Through

• Customer Interviews - you interview and notice patterns in roles and responsibilities
• Panels / Dinners - create gatherings of customers in a group, and talk to them about their jobs.

Primary Quantitative Research, however, involves initiating direct surveys to user base and market players, and acting insights from the data

Secondary Qualitative Research involves Competitive Analysis of other products in your category, understanding what use cases and teams they are targeting on their website.

Secondary Quantitative Research is about using internal customer and lead data, and segmenting your customers on the basis of the attributes you seem most commonly.

How do Investors think about ICP? The way the founder articulates their answer to the ICP question gives a good sense of their clarity to the investor.

If there is even more clarity not just on who the Ideal Buyer is, but also to what extent the problem is replicable across all customers, and how you reach out to them and communicate to them, it gives even more confidence to investor.

At 100X.VC we love working ground up with entrepreneurs and helping them find their customer focus and communication style. If you'd like to work with us, reach out to us at pitch@100x.vc and cc me at vatsal@100x.vc.