Ideal users Archives -

Target Locked: Strategies to Get in Front of Your Ideal Customers

April 19, 2023September 25, 2023 Shashank

As a side project or new startup, one of the biggest challenges you’ll face is finding and reaching your ideal customers. Without a solid strategy to get in front of the right people, your business may struggle to gain traction and grow.

Fortunately, there are several effective strategies you can use to get in front of your ideal customers and start generating interest in your product or service. In this article, we’ll explore some of these strategies and provide you with actionable tips on how to implement them.

The question of “Who is your ideal customer?” may seem overwhelming, but defining your ideal customer is crucial to everything that follows. To help you define your ideal customer, check out the Ideal Customer Profile Framework provided in the link. If you do not know your ideal customer, then it will be difficult, if not impossible, to proceed from this point. Once you have defined your ideal customer’s demographics, psychographics, and characteristics, you can seek out more people or companies that fit your template. Your ideal customers can include your current customers (although not all your customers may be ideal), unconverted prospects, or even customers of your competitors.

Start with your current customers

Your current customers are a valuable source of information for identifying your ideal customer. You can gather data on their age, gender, location, occupation, income, and other demographics through surveys, email, phone, or chat. Additionally, you can ask for feedback on your products or services, and what they like or dislike about them. This can help you identify areas for improvement or new product development.

Some examples of startups that leveraged talking with their current users to define their ideal customers:

Slack – Slack initially launched as an internal communication tool for the gaming company Tiny Speck, but the founders realized that it had broader potential after seeing how much their users loved it. They then talked to more potential users to understand their needs and refined their ideal customer profile.
Dropbox – Dropbox started by targeting individuals who wanted an easy way to store and share files, but after talking with their current users, they realized that businesses could also benefit from their product. They then shifted their focus to target small and medium-sized businesses.
Airbnb – Airbnb founders talked with their early adopters and learned that they were using the platform to find unique and affordable accommodations when traveling for events, such as conferences and festivals. They then refined their ideal customer profile to target this group.
Stripe – Stripe founders initially targeted developers who were frustrated with existing payment processing solutions. They then talked with their current users and discovered that many of them were startups who needed a simple and flexible payment system. They then refined their ideal customer profile to target this group.
Intercom – Intercom founders initially targeted software companies who were struggling with customer communication, but after talking with their current users, they realized that other types of businesses could also benefit from their product. They then refined their ideal customer profile to target small and medium-sized businesses in a variety of industries.
Zoom – Zoom founders talked with their current users and learned that many of them were using the platform for remote work and online education. They then refined their ideal customer profile to target businesses and schools that needed a reliable and easy-to-use video conferencing solution.
Hubspot – Hubspot founders initially targeted small businesses who wanted to improve their online marketing, but after talking with their current users, they realized that larger companies could also benefit from their product. They then refined their ideal customer profile to target mid-sized companies in a variety of industries.
Canva – Canva founders talked with their current users and learned that many of them were small business owners and social media marketers who needed an easy and affordable way to create high-quality graphics. They then refined their ideal customer profile to target this group.
Calm – Calm founders talked with their early adopters and learned that many of them were looking for a way to reduce stress and anxiety. They then refined their ideal customer profile to target people who wanted to improve their mental health and wellbeing.
Headspace – Headspace founders talked with their early adopters and learned that many of them were looking for a way to learn meditation and improve their mental health. They then refined their ideal customer profile to target people who wanted to learn mindfulness and meditation.

Conduct industry-level research and surveys

Industry-level research and surveys can provide a wealth of information on your target audience. You can gather data on market trends, consumer behavior, and preferences, which can help you identify potential areas for growth or improvement.

Many early-stage startups use industry-level research and surveys to better understand their target audience and market. Here are a few examples:

HubbleHQ: HubbleHQ is a London-based startup that helps businesses find office space. The company conducted a survey of over 1,000 UK office workers to understand their preferences and priorities when it comes to workplace amenities, such as bike storage, showers, and communal spaces.
Clearbanc: Clearbanc is a fintech startup that provides funding to ecommerce businesses. To better understand the market, the company conducted a survey of over 1,200 ecommerce businesses to learn about their funding needs, revenue streams, and growth plans.
UserTesting: UserTesting is a platform that allows companies to get feedback from real users on their websites and apps. To better understand the user experience (UX) design market, the company conducted a survey of over 1,200 UX professionals to learn about their roles, responsibilities, and challenges.
Hims: Hims is a direct-to-consumer healthcare startup that offers products for hair loss, erectile dysfunction, and other issues. To better understand its target market, the company conducted a survey of over 1,000 men to learn about their attitudes towards healthcare and their willingness to try new products.
GrubMarket: GrubMarket is a San Francisco-based startup that connects consumers with local farmers and food producers. To better understand the market for sustainable food, the company conducted a survey of over 2,000 US consumers to learn about their attitudes towards organic and locally-sourced food, as well as their buying habits.

Look at cancelled customers and free trials that didn’t convert

Cancelled customers and free trials that didn’t convert can provide valuable insights into why people may not be interested in your products or services. You can conduct exit surveys or ask for feedback to understand what didn’t work for them and why. Some real-world examples of how analyzing cancelled customers and free trials can help businesses better understand their customers:

Netflix: When Netflix started offering streaming video, they provided a free trial to attract new customers. However, many of these free trial users didn’t convert to paying customers. By analyzing their behavior, Netflix found that some users weren’t sure how to use the service or were overwhelmed by the large selection of movies and TV shows. To address this, Netflix started offering personalized recommendations based on users’ viewing history, making it easier for users to find content they were interested in.
Spotify: Spotify allows users to sign up for a free trial of its premium service, but many users don’t convert to paying customers after the trial period ends. To better understand why, Spotify analyzed the behavior of users who cancelled their subscriptions. They found that many users cancelled because they didn’t understand the value of the premium service or didn’t use it enough to justify the cost. To address this, Spotify started offering more personalized recommendations and highlighting exclusive content that was only available to premium users.
Blue Apron: Blue Apron is a meal delivery service that offers a free trial to new customers. However, many users who signed up for the trial cancelled their subscription after the first week. By analyzing their behavior, Blue Apron found that many users were overwhelmed by the amount of work required to prepare the meals. To address this, Blue Apron started offering more pre-prepared ingredients and simplified recipes, making it easier for users to cook their meals.

In each of these examples, analyzing cancelled customers and free trials helped these companies better understand their customers’ needs and preferences, leading to improvements in their products and services.

Talk to non-customers

Talking to non-customers can help you get a wider perspective on your target audience. You can gather data on why they haven’t bought from you, what their needs and preferences are, and what they’re looking for in a product or service.

Talking to non-customers can provide valuable insights into why they haven’t purchased from you and what they are looking for in a product or service. Here are some real-world examples of how businesses have gained valuable insights from talking to non-customers:

Dropbox: When Dropbox first launched, the company’s founders were having trouble getting traction with their product. They decided to talk to people who had signed up for the service but had never used it. Through these conversations, they discovered that many people were hesitant to use Dropbox because they were concerned about the security of their data. Based on this feedback, Dropbox improved their security features and were eventually able to gain a larger customer base.
Airbnb: When Airbnb first started, the company’s founders were struggling to get people to trust the idea of renting out their homes to strangers. They decided to talk to people who had signed up for the service but had never booked a stay. Through these conversations, they discovered that people were hesitant to use Airbnb because they were concerned about the safety of their homes. Based on this feedback, Airbnb improved their verification and insurance policies, and were eventually able to gain more trust and customers.
Slack: When Slack was first launched, the founders were having trouble getting traction with their product. They decided to talk to people who had signed up for the service but had never used it. Through these conversations, they discovered that people were hesitant to use Slack because they were concerned about the amount of time it would take to set up and learn how to use the platform. Based on this feedback, Slack improved their onboarding process and were eventually able to gain a larger customer base.

These examples show how talking to non-customers can help businesses gain valuable insights into why they may not be attracting customers and what they can do to improve their product or service. By listening to feedback and making changes based on that feedback, businesses can improve their chances of success and attract more customers.

Look for customers of your competitors

Customers of your competitors can provide valuable insights into their product selection process, decision-making criteria, and trusted sources. You can find them by looking for testimonials and case studies on your competitor’s site, LinkedIn profiles and groups, product certifications, tweets, oDesk profiles, or Facebook. During these conversations, ask about other competitors they may have evaluated and why they chose the one they did, who else they trust in the industry, what blogs they read, if they bought direct or through a distributor/VAR/app store, and so on.

Here are some real-life examples of how companies have gained insights by talking to customers of their competitors:

HubSpot: HubSpot, a marketing automation company, wanted to understand how its competitors were positioning themselves in the market. They reached out to customers of its competitors, specifically those who had recently switched from HubSpot to a competitor, and conducted interviews to gain insights into what factors led to the switch. HubSpot discovered that price was a major factor, and as a result, they decided to introduce a lower-priced tier for their product.
Salesforce: Salesforce, a customer relationship management (CRM) software company, wanted to understand how its customers were using its product compared to its competitors. They conducted interviews with customers of their competitors and found that their customers preferred Salesforce’s user interface and ease of use. This led Salesforce to make changes to their product to further improve the user experience.
Dropbox: Dropbox, a cloud storage company, wanted to understand why some customers were choosing competitors over their product. They reached out to customers of their competitors and found that many customers were choosing competitors because of better integration with other software applications. This led Dropbox to invest in developing integrations with popular software applications to improve their product offering.

By talking to customers of your competitors, you can gain insights into what your competitors are doing well and where they fall short. This can help you identify areas where you can differentiate yourself from your competitors and improve your product or service to better meet the needs of your target audience.

Challenges in finding ideal users

August 5, 2021August 20, 2021 Shashank

Start-up is a stage in the process of turning a business idea into an established real company and a ‘start-up’ is a company that is confused about – what its product is? Who its customers are? How to make money?

We start with assumptions about everything, to begin with.

The more early you start to get a sense of theories against reality, the safer you are.

With an incredible fit between you and your early adopters, they play a crucial role in speeding up this process of clarity before your resources are exhausted.

Early adopters optimize your efforts. And yet, in practice, we see many founders do not seek early adopters. And many of those who attempt to seek them find it challenging too.

Here are 6 commonly seen challenges in finding early adopters.

Challenge # 1 – Better mousetrap fallacy

Even founders who believe in lean startup methods tend to fall into it. The “better mousetrap fallacy” is the mistaken belief that a superior product will automatically generate customers. It is easy for start-up founders to get blinded by their new product as they are working hard to build.

And, it is this fallacy that some founders tend to not give much attention to working on getting early adopters.

What is the problem with this?

What if the market does not need your product, no matter how good it is?
What if your better product is not valued over the existing product, how would you know?

What works?

You have to get in touch with your early adopters, find out what they really want and need and then give it to them.
Building a product is relatively the easy part, now you have to find someone to buy your product.

Challenge # 2 – trying to scale early

Premature scaling is “spending money beyond the essentials on growing the business before nailing the product/market fit.” Or, spending resources on mass marketing much before you know what solution might work for sure.

Why does this happen?

We like the very idea of a million users. The absolute numbers when you work on individual users seem so small at first.
We don’t like engaging with users individually because it’s hard and demoralizing to be rejected.
We are shy and feel lazy to recruit users individually,

Instead, what will work?

All successful startups started from a countable number of users or early adopters and grew through repeatedly doing things that don’t scale.
When you’re starting out, you should use all the channels that the big guys can’t use because they are focused on scale.

Challenge # 3 – mistaken identity

Some users sign up for a variety of reasons (other than the consideration of their pain point), though they may not be having an urgency to solve the problem that you are trying to solve. And, for the reasons that they signed up early, you mistake them for being early adopters.

What is the problem with this?

If the users who signed up are not desperate to find solutions, there is less likelihood of an active usage of your product or them buying it.
And until users start using your product actively, you will not get any feedback about its usefulness.
You remain in denial about your product’s lameness

What works?

In early-stage startup building, you need active users or early adopters who will give you feedback on your product.
Since they are anxious to see if your product works for them, they will be active in using it.
Only when you get feedback from early users on what works for them and what doesn’t, you can potentially build a product that a lot of people would buy.

Challenge # 4 – at loss with them

We don’t know where to find them and we don’t know how to reach out to them.

We don’t know how to get them on board.

We don’t know how to engage with them.

We don’t know how to de-code what they tell us.

What works?

It is not a rocket science that you cannot learn. And this course will equip you to be confident in dealing with early adopters.
The key to doing it right is to treat each individual user as a human and not as something that adds to numbers.
Connect with each user individually.

Challenge # 5 -pitching urge

In pitching, since you are doing most of the talk, it is likely that customers pretend to go along with what you are saying.

In the learning frame, you set the context but let the customer do most of the talking.

In an early product building phase, learning is more critical than pitching when you meet your early adopters.

We need to get some facts to qualify our hypotheses (guesses) about what kind of product customers will buy before we start selling them our idea or product.

But many times, we give a miss to this.

Why?

We come under pressure from targets.
It is very hard to resist the temptation to pitch or sell our product or idea and in the process, we tend to forget “learning” as the core objective of customer discovery.
We tend to not care to learn about prospects, it’s just so much easy to focus on product and technology instead.

What works?

With customer discovery, the initial goal is not pitching but learning.
Make course adjustments before you build a large product.

Challenge # 6 – avoiding unsexy stuff

There is hard work involved in locating prospects to be approached for customer discovery and at times it is hard to reach out to them and convince them to spare time for us.

The whole process is time-consuming. It would take the focus away from product development, design and sales.

And, this prompts us to do things that could possibly not require us to do such hard work and make us do boring stuff.

What is the problem with this?

If you don’t do what is needed to reach your early adopters, you will never be able to reach them.

What works?

Life is too short to build something that no one wants.
Save time and money by discovering early on if something won’t work.
Discovering early adopters is the key to discovering if you are doing good.

Summing up

There is a double benefit of seeking them. First, you acquire active users, and second, you define your product.

On the other side, inaction is doubly dangerous. First, you fail to grow, and second, you remain in denial about your product’s lameness.

Ideal users: Where and how to find them

August 5, 2021January 12, 2024 Shashank

Who are we essentially finding?

You are finding people who

Have a problem that you are trying to solve
Are aware of the existence of the problem
Have already tried to solve the problem and are unhappy with the current solution to the problem; so they are still actively looking for a solution
Have a budget to get the problem solved

But the harder part is – they don’t wear tags or introduce saying they are “early adopters”.

There is no agency or website that can supply you with early adopters.

So, how do we identify them?

We can look for some other “tags” which they wear!

The secret to the tag to be used lies in “finding a solution”.

Where do they seek a solution to their problem?

You need to find places where they hang out in search of a solution.

To find your early adopters, first ask yourself, what are the behaviors of someone who is actively seeking a solution to this problem right now? These actions make up your solution-seeking behaviors list.

This list of solution-seeking behaviors is a great start, but…

It’s critical you talk to the people who demonstrate these behaviors to see what problem they are actually trying to solve.

First, identify those externally observable behaviors

If you turn a solution-seeking behavior into a behavior that you can identify, you’ve probably found an early adopter.

A list of externally observable behaviors helps you answer the question: where do you find your early adopters? The answer is written within each of these behaviors.

Once you write down the externally observable behaviors—things that you as an outsider can see—you know where to find your early adopters.

Summing up

You find early adopters in the places that they are trying to solve their problems and to find them, look for solution-seeking observable behavior.

If you can’t find early adopters, you can’t build a business

August 5, 2021August 20, 2021 Shashank

It’s as critical as that for you to get your early adopters or early users.

First of all, the discovery of early adopters gives you the first signal that you are not doing badly.

Early adopters happen to have the problem that you are trying to solve and so, when you discover them, you know the problem that you want to solve exists, and there are definitely some people out there who have the problem that you want to build a solution for.

In other words, early adopters validate the problem.

With their discovery, you turn your assumption that there exists the problem into validated learning.

They give the most valuable insights for product building. When you the starting up, just the way you start with the assumptions about the pain point or the problem, you also start with assumptions about a potential solution that would work for the customers. If you build a new product based on your hunches or assumptions about what matters to the customers, there is a chance that you may build something that doesn’t meet their key requirements.

You need customers’ perspectives, rather than your views about their perspectives.

When you find early adopters who happen to be aware of the problem and happen to be aware of how they think it needs to be solved, they will give you feedback and insights that you aren’t able to gain on your own.

And these insights are the ones that would ensure you build something with features that people want.

Building a product is NOT “the product” of your startup. Your business model is “the product”. Once we acknowledge that the solution is not the whole product and that we don’t need to pretend to believe our made-up answers, we shift from pitching to learning — from other people – your early adopters. They validate or invalidate all crucial elements of your business model – value proposition, channels, price, and more.

Working with early adopters allows you to ship early. Early adopters will go for your product even if it is not a finished one. They don’t mind the bugs so no need to wait till “it’s perfect” before you ship. As long as it meets the core requirement of theirs or you are willing to work towards what they need, they will be willing to live with you even with the not perfectly finished product.

Early adopters are a necessary step on the way to convincing the pragmatist customers your company needs to sign on. The early adopters should help you get references to selling to your ultimate target market.

In the diffusion curve, the early adopters are the ones that represent the group that buys or uses a new product/service first. The early adopters are followed by the early majority, late majority, and laggards. But there’s one thing you have to do before your early majority will jump on board – you have to get your early adopters. Without Early Adopters, there’s no one to tell your early majority about your product. If you don’t get your early majority, no one will convince your late majority to use your product, and of course, you’ll never find your laggards.

Early adopters are the most critical element for a new business building.

If you can’t find early adopters, you can’t build a business.

Ideal users: Incredible match

July 1, 2021August 20, 2021 Shashank

When we are working on a new business idea, we do look for potentially interested audiences from our immediate circle. There are two clear advantages of doing that – first, they are much more easily accessible than complete strangers, and secondly, they all mean well for you.

They are the perfect audience when you discuss your business model so you get some perspectives when it comes to prioritizing your action plan for testing assumptions.

They may or may not belong to the target segment that you want to go for. Even if they fit the profile of your target audience, they may or may not be your early adopters, despite them choosing to use your product.

Their decision to use your product may be out of a strong urge to be “nice” and “helpful” to you. And this urge may over dominate a “need” factor totally, even if it was there in the first place.

The bottom line is that your immediate network serves you the purpose of getting clarity on risk factors and prioritizing testing game plans. But they are not your early adopters.

You need to look beyond.

Where do you start?

You could of course pitch the idea to everyone in your target segment and see what they think! Wrong.

Not all people or businesses in that segment would be your early adopters.

And, you have limited resources and time to target people in a random way.

You need to meet only those who matter to you. And it is the early adopters who matter to you at this stage. Talking to others is a waste of resources.

The ideal candidates for you are the ones who:

Have the problem that you are trying to solve;
Are aware of the existence of the problem;
Have already tried to solve the problem;
Are unhappy with the current solution to the problem;
Have a budget to get the problem solved

These are the people you want to target first.

They’re already looking for a solution, which means they are keen to solve their problem and they are possibly not happy with the options with them.

Your big work is taken care of when you don’t need to bring awareness about the existence of pain and you don’t need to convince them that they need to solve this problem.

This makes it an incredible fit!

What is left is really to present them something that will work for them.

Or, even better, get insights about their challenges with respect to the existing options and using those insights to build something new that works just perfect for them.