[SaaS Club] Lessons on Finding Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)

Hey Reader

I hope you're doing well.

Here's a quick round up of what's been going on at SaaS Club:

🎧 Podcast

SaaS Lessons on Finding Your Ideal Customer Profile

Mike Adams is the co-founder and CEO of Grain, a SaaS product that helps you capture and share insights from customer meetings.

In 2018, Mike, together with his brother Jake, co-founded Grain. 

But instead of starting with a problem, the brothers began with a solution in mind and set out to find a problem that it could solve.

As you can imagine that approach didn't work out too well.

Their first year proved challenging as they struggled to identify their ideal customer profile (ICP). Mike jokingly said that at the time, their ICP was anyone who would talk to them and liked the product.

However, after a year of refining their approach, they discovered their actual ICP and focused on one standout feature that resonated the most with customers. This led them to throw away their existing code and rebuild the product from scratch around that single feature.

Fast forward to today, Grain hit $1M ARR about a year ago, has amassed 1,300 customers, and raised $21 million, including a recent $16M Series A round.

In this episode, you'll learn:

• How Mike and Jake figured out their ideal customer profile (ICP) which helped them improve product development and marketing.

• How Grain grew from zero to 1,300 customers including companies such as Slack, Zapier, Webflow, and more.

• Lessons on how to avoid ‘herd mentality' and think for yourself in order to get more creative ideas and unique solutions

• How to trust your instincts as a founder when making decisions, even when everyone around you tells you to go another way.

• How to handle competition and stay ahead when other businesses are copying your ideas, features, and tactics.

I hope you enjoy it.

Listen to the full podcast episode

🚀 Drata

Drata is a security and compliance automation platform that continuously monitors and collects evidence of your company’s security controls while streamlining workflows to ensure audit readiness.

Thousands of today’s leading companies, from startups to global enterprises, use Drata to achieve continuous SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, PCI DSS, and GDPR compliance.

Drata customers report a time saving of over 85% when compared to handling compliance manually.

Visit Drata.com to learn more and get a 10% discount

📗 Book of the Week

This week's book recommendation is:

The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done by Peter F. Drucker

🌐 Around the Web

YouTube Channel

Here's a link to the full video interview with Mike.

Check out our YouTube channel here. 

😍 Let's Get Social
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Have a great week!

- Omer

Interested in sponsoring The SaaS Podcast? Learn more here.


P.S. whenever you're ready, here are 3 ways I can help you:

1. SaaS Club Plus: We're re-launching a brand new paid community for SaaS founders with an exciting new offering. Join the waitlist!

2. SaaS Club Launch: A 12-week coaching program to help you launch your SaaS and/or get to $10K MRR faster. 

3. SaaS Accelerate:  A private coaching program to help SaaS founders get breakthrough results.