🎯 Figuring out my Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)… without overfitting it

At a recent startup week event, one takeaway really stuck with me:

“Your ICP is a hypothesis, not a conclusion.”

That helped me relax a bit. I’d been trying to define the perfect customer for my SaaS, QuoteScope — but I kept getting stuck. Freelancers? Small agencies? Internal sales teams? Each seemed possible, but I didn’t know which to bet on.

The speakers said to treat ICPs like experiments:

• Pick one group, focus for ~3 months, then see if the hypothesis holds.

• Talk to existing users — ask what pain pushed them to your product.

• Find out where they spend time online, and tell stories there.

• Don’t get too precious — pivot if the traction isn’t there.

So that’s what I’m trying now. My current hypothesis: small service businesses that already use Xero and send manual PDF quotes. They feel the quoting pain daily but aren’t yet using big CRMs.

👉 Curious how others validated their ICP — what signals told you you’d found the right one?