Forget demographics - use this strategy to qualify your ideal users!

I'm a big fan of focusing questions.

Focusing questions push you to get clear on exactly what you're doing. For example, from the book The ONE Thing:

What is the ONE thing that makes all my future work easier, or unnecessary?

It's a simple question, but one that focuses you and ensures that you're always working on the most important thing.

There's another focusing question I love for identifying your ideal user persona, as well as for qualifying leads. I used this question to pre-sell Software Ideas before it was even a complete product, and it continues to be our guiding light today.

Let me start by explaining why a focusing question is far better, in my opinion, than traditional user personas.

👎 The Problem with Customer Profiles

The premise behind a Customer Profile is simple. If you can come up with a definition of who your customers are, then you can prove that your business idea has a clear, targetable audience to sell to.

But it's not true - and here's why.

Even a poorly-thought-out idea can come up with the answers to the traditional questions that people ask when designing a customer profile:

• What industry are my customers in?
• Are they businesses, prosumers, or consumers?
• What is the primary demographic?
• Where are they primarily located?
• What software are they currently using?

It's not that these are bad questions, exactly. It's just that they are bad early questions.

Good idea or bad idea, good execution or lousy execution, every business can easily guess these bullet points, which means that they aren't a good measure of a clear customer persona!

Take, for example, my first SaaS, CoderNotes. I could have given you the answers to every single one of those bullet points, but it didn't mean anything because I didn't know how to ACTUALLY identify our best-fit customer.

❓The Focusing Question

The focusing question I use for qualifying leads and understanding our ideal customer is heavily inspired by the "Jobs to be Done" framework.

If you haven't heard of it before, I highly recommend When Coffee and Kale Compete, my favorite book on the subject.

To summarize, here's the concept:

Customers buy products and services to perform a "job" that makes their life better in some way. Once you identify the job your product or service performs, you can get clear on who needs that job done.

It's a great framework. But as I mentioned above, I prefer questions to statements. So here's the focusing question I recommend to you:

What's the shared characteristic of my users that makes them ecstatic to buy my product?

The "shared characteristic" is the trait that causes a potential customer to need to hire your product/service to solve a specific job for them.

The "ecstatic" part of the focusing question helps you determine who really needs your product or service - not just who might like it if it's cheap enough!

I find that an example helps a lot. At Software Ideas, here's the shared characteristic we look for: People who are actively looking for their next software idea.

Knowing that shared characteristic allows us to get crystal clear on who we can be valuable to, without worrying about gender, age, region, etc.

We have customers that are software agencies, angel investors, and solo founders. The thing that they all share isn't who they are. It's that they are actively looking for opportunities in the software space.

I'd challenge everyone to look for that trait or characteristic in their own company instead of focusing on demographics, regions, job titles, or other categories.

It's more of a Jobs-to-be-Done mindset, and it's worked well for us!

So, what's the shared characteristic of your users that makes them ecstatic to buy? Share it below!

If you like my thoughts, you may be interested in Founder Flubs, a free series on Indie Hackers where I'm writing about the most common mistakes I see (or that I've made myself) from running my own startups and working alongside hundreds of founders over at Software Ideas.

Want a sneak preview of Founder Flubs? You can find the first post here!