Ideal Customer Profile

“If you don't have clarity on your ICP, the use case that works for you, how your GTM is designed, You're going to be crushed by AI. The AI, like, punishes fuzzy positioning, rewards clarity, rewards like ROI, clear deliverable, and some founders don't have tha…”

“People forget that in services businesses that there's always a more luxury, luxury, luxury experience that, a certain ICP is going to want, and by focusing on this group of people, you're kind of missing out on, on those.”

“LinkedIn is that feedback loop. Like if you're, Bringing in the wrong folks, then you understand, okay, is it something with my product? Is it something with my messaging? What's my strategy that can often inform like what you should be writing about.”

“I know a lot of people talk about ICP, but I also think it's important to find like persona, maybe even before ICP.”

“If I'm very specific about what I am, then my ideal customer will definitely buy, which is already a reason to do it, but like a hundred times larger market than that. We'll see that specificity as a reason to buy your set of trade-offs, even though they're no…”

“Instead of the traditional five to six percent of prospects being in market a month, which is a way a lot of marketers think about things, right? I'm going to try to reach everyone in my universe. But the only 20% are really in my ICP and of that 20%, maybe fo…”

“But if you're getting to a million in ARR and the set of customers you have look nothing like one another, you still have very much like an evangelist sale, very much founder led sale versus if you can say, Hey, I now have an ICP If you have an IP here or idea…”

“I think the term ideal customer profile, sometimes, especially in larger companies, misleads people into thinking about, oh, my customer is JP Morgan, my customer is Home Depot, I can't. The ideal practitioner profile. Exactly. The ideal practitioner profile. …”

“And I find that that approach just allows for too much thrash in an organization, whether the product's not going to work perfectly for this end customer, potentially it means that this customer that we sign up is not going to have successful outcomes and is g…”

“Again, something else that I don't really empathize with or agree with is, like, you have to have, like, a certain ICP, it's not a, it's not necessarily about like the profile of a person, more of like what they're trying to do is like way more important.”

“It's figuring out who is your ideal customer profile, and I strongly believe it's the founder, because that's not only going to guide your go-to-market strategy, it's also going to guide your product roadmap, and where do you continue To lean in.”

“If you want to target like big companies, you need to go through compliance. You need to have like a couple of badges and everybody will ask you, can you show me like five case studies, seven use cases and yada, yada that you don't have at the moment. So we ha…”

“Choose, strategically choose the communities that your ICPs or ECPs are active in and treat them as a two or three month project.”

“Product market fit fundamentally is when your product, like the value that you are delivering is exactly what the market and specifically the market you're delivering into. So like your ICP, your ideal customer profile at that time is exactly what they want. Y…”

“And if you know your ICP down pat, A five K ACB and below, I would, 100% try to figure out how do you get as much of an automated process to engage.”

“Every step we took to shrink the product market fit segmentation, and to get more focused on the ICP, the ideal customer profile, our growth rate ticked up.”

“Sell to your ICP. It tastes good, but if you do this more than four quarters, the competition is going to pass you by. They're just going to pass you by, right?”

“What I never want to see is, Hey, I just hired 10 reps. I put a rep in New York, rep in Dallas. And a rep in San Francisco and Los Angeles, and I told them they can have all the accounts in those geographies. You're in deep shit.”

“Cause we just don't know, but like there's some folks I like to do like a green, yellow, red. I have different attributes. Like, you know, how many employees were they located in the world? What sectors are they in these types of things? Right. And the green i…”

“Audience means that they must be selling, your channel partner or potential partner must be selling to your ICP. If they're not selling to your ICP, the likelihood that they're going to be successful is zero, not two percent.”

“My goal there is not to be like, let's artificially constrain, because I think that actually artificially constrains your business. That's when you draw that Venn diagram, and you say, hey, you know, for Linktree, it's, yes, it's SMBs, and yes, it's creators, …”

“An ICP, ideal customer profile. ICP starts out as an aspiration, and over time it becomes a regression, right?”

“You do not want to start with purchasing a sequencing tool, purchasing a system that gives you contact information and blasting your ICP. I've talked about this before, but you really want to start with who you are targeting being in your own network.”

“Getting your ICP really straight is super crucial, and the market timing is even more crucial.”

“Kafka, you know, that was one of the reasons why we couldn't or we didn't sort of narrowly focus on an ICP like traditional companies do for good reason. It was because, you know, the Kafka adoption base was so broad and for Confluent to quickly convert those …”

“Once you approach 10% market share in your, not, not in the whole world, but in your core ICP, your core market, it starts to slow down at 10%.”

“One of the biggest things I see people do wrong is they see they have a conversion problem. They point a team at conversion and they look at the conversion metric overall. The problem is a bunch of those people are not ICP and they're never going to convert an…”

“Horizontal products also have an ICP. This is, I love this one. I'm going to call this out even though you didn't ask. I think it's an important one for so many people. Horizontal products have an ICP because the true ICP should be defined in terms of attribut…”

“Yeah, but I think it's like specifically logos that your ICP knows and respects, right? Because like, oh, if they're using this product, then like, oh, it's pretty good. There's like those proof points where it's not just some company that nobody knows and lik…”

“When you go to the next product, very important if you stay in the same ideal customer profile. Because it's, it will be easier to sell to the same client than to acquire a new client. It's always this. So staying in the same customer ideal customer profile It…”

“When I say ICP, It can be a different persona inside the same company, ah, but not the same user.”

“For a lot of people, I mean, to be honest, probably the easier path is to say, hey, let me build that clear ICP and reach out to specific people, and it should work even that way, right? It's not like you won't have that initial traction that way. It may be sl…”

“What is going to be key for you is to first of all draw a picture of your ideal customer profile. And you shouldn't do that three, four years down the line. You should do that even before starting your company. You should do that when you're actually designing…”

“They immediately go and put all the same amount of resources that they have in scale in one market in another market versus going through that same model again. Let's go and validate the ICP in that market. See if the same message resonates when you need to tw…”

“By being responsible for churn, they're gonna do what they can to sell into the right ICP that's not gonna churn, and keep that customer whole so that they have to sell less new bookings.”