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17 Comments

How did you define Ideal Customer Profile for your product?

Hi all,
I am trying to understand how indiehackers define their ICP.

I would love to listen to your valuable insights. :)

  1. 5

    This is probably one of the most important questions you have to ask yourself as a business owner or product builder. With Startup Sanctuary we have tried to do this by conducting more and more customer interviews. Understanding the problems that users are having helps us to determine the characteristics of our ideal customer profile.

    Another worthwhile exercise to do is to create a customer persona. Doing this helped us to understand who our ideal customer is on a deeper level. Creating a persona for them also makes it easier to tailor content, messaging and services to meet their specific needs.

    You can use a tool like the Hubspot Customer Persona Tool to develop a customer persona. You may even have more than one persona that you are targeting based on different product or service offerings.

    I hope this helps @nitin_k

    1. 3

      @gordon,
      wow i didn't know of what actually a "customer persona" is. I thought ICP and customer persona would be almost the same. I am learning about these terms as I go.

      I just found out about them as "your ideal customer profile is a description of the type of company you should try to sell to and your buyer persona is a detailed analysis of the people who buy from you."
      thank you for taking time & answering :)

      1. 1

        Glad you found it helpful @nitin_k

  2. 3

    Wow Uclusion spent a long time figuring this one out. Finally I introduced this copy on the website this morning:

    "Project Management For People Who Lead AND Code"

    There are exercises you can do like https://www.digitalmarketer.com/blog/customer-avatar-worksheet but that didn't really get us there.

    1. 1

      Thanks David. I will surely check the link, lets see if it works for me :)
      And I went through your competition page of Uclusion. The page is not mobile friendly to read, please check once again.

      1. 2

        Thanks Nitin - I opened a story in our user interface Workspace in Uclusion to get the competition page fixed.

  3. 2

    This post is a gem. Those who can answer this question are real entrepreneurs. I can't yet.

    Followed everyone.

  4. 2

    This is an important question, thanks for posting. Adding to this, once you find your ideal persona, where or how do you find them? There is Reddit (usually don't want survey like questions) where else?

    1. 1

      I'm also interested in this answer! Lets see what people have to say on this.

      BTW, I recently found out about this article where 16 businesses shared their stories about how they got their first customers:
      https://www.indiehackers.com/article/how-to-find-your-earliest-users-5df383c1ad

      1. 2

        Awesome thanks for sharing.

  5. 2

    I use a client avatar template (Basically a series of 10 questions) and start talking to the market, filling out those questions on the go.

    Once I've talked to about 20-30 people, I'd have a pretty solid understanding of my ideal customer.

    I can share my templates if you'd like?

    1. 1

      Yes ofcourse! I would like, thanks

      1. 1

        Hey Nitin, I documented it here: https://lzvo.com/join-membership/

        You should be able to find it under "market research" or "mvo"

        1. 1

          Yes i found it, thanks again!

  6. 2

    ICP is really a guess at first (unless you know your segment cold). After you get a few customers, your ICP is defining what the perfect customer looks like based on a set of variables. Example: my perfect customer is a SaaS company with between $1m-$10m in revenue and focused on increasing profitability.

    That way, when you plan for customer acquisition, you can focus your efforts on companies that fit your ICP.

    1. 1

      @cyberbadger Nice! It was very helpful. Thanks for this valuable insights :)

  7. 2

    This comment was deleted 3 years ago.

    1. 1

      @peteswrath,
      "Ideal could mean which specific type of customer buys it the most."
      This is what I am trying to figure out with ICP practices.

      While talking to a few people about the problems/difficulties they have in current solution, I see that their needs are different according to them.

      I don't see a pattern (i.e. the pains that come up repeatedly) where I can focus on and develop the product solution around the pains.
      May be i need to talk to more target audience after creating proper ICP.
      I appreciate your thoughts on this :)

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