How to identify your ideal customer profile (ICP)
How to identify your ideal customer profile (ICP)Part three of my seven-part series on kickstarting and scaling a B2B business👋 Hey, I’m Lenny and welcome to a 🔒 subscriber-only edition 🔒 of my weekly newsletter. Each week I tackle reader questions about building product, driving growth, and accelerating your career. Welcome to part three of our series on how to kickstart and scale a B2B business:
Let’s jump right in. A huge thank-you to Akshay Kothari (COO of Notion), Ali Ghodsi (CEO of Databricks), Barry McCardel (CEO of Hex), Boris Jabes (CEO of Census), Calvin French-Owen (co-founder of Segment), Cameron Adams (co-founder and CPO of Canva), Christina Cacioppo (CEO of Vanta), David Hsu (CEO of Retool), Eilon Reshef (CPO of Gong), Eric Glyman (CEO of Ramp), Guy Podjarny (CEO of Snyk), Jori Lallo (co-founder of Linear), Julianna Lamb and Reed McGinley-Stempel (co-founders of Stytch), Keenan Rice (founding team), Mathilde Collin (CEO of Front), Rick Song (CEO of Persona), Rujul Zaparde and Lu Cheng (co-founders of Zip), Ryan Glasgow (CEO of Sprig), Shahed Khan (co-founder of Loom), Shishir Mehrotra (CEO of Coda), Sho Kuwamoto (VP of Product of Figma), Spenser Skates (co-founder and CEO of Amplitude), and Tomer London (co-founder and CPO of Gusto) for contributing to this series. Art by Natalie Harney. We’ve so far spent all of our time finding and validating a problem, but surprisingly, many (perhaps most?) of the B2B companies I researched spent just as much time on picking the problem as they did on figuring out who to solve the problem for. When they didn’t do this, they often regretted it. “We did not think about ICP. I wish we did earlier on. It’s one of my biggest mistakes.” If you’ve got a killer idea but you’re talking to the wrong people, you’ll come away thinking your idea stinks, and give up. But the same idea pitched to different people can change everything. Below, I’ll share a guide for nailing your ideal customer profile (ICP), dozens of stories of how founders identified their ICP, and as always, templates and tons of examples. A few of my biggest takeaways and surprises from this step
Initial ICPs for some of today’s biggest B2B companiesThrough my interviews, I’ve gathered the initial ICPs of over a dozen startups. In the chart, and in the stories below, notice how most companies landed on exactly three attributes. Some had more, but no one had fewer. Also notice how specific these attributes get. How to identify your ICPTo identify your own ICP, go through the list below and take your best guess at picking the three most unique and important characteristics of your potential ideal customer (here’s a template to get you started):
Try to get super-specific and super-narrow with your ICP. Almost comically narrow.Gusto found the most success with six ICP attributes initially:
The founders of Gong landed on three highly nuanced attributes:
As did Snyk:
And Looker:
Don’t stress if you can’t figure out your ICP for a while.Here’s Ali Ghodsi, co-founder and CEO of Databricks (which is now worth over $30B) on their complete lack of an ICP early on:
And Rick Song, co-founder and CEO of Persona:
But the sooner you figure out your ICP, the faster things will fall into place.
Eventually, you’ll be forced to figure it out.
Start by paying attention to who gets most excited about what you’re building.For Canva, here’s Cameron Adams, co-founder and CPO, sharing their path to identifying an ICP:
For Sprig, Ryan Glasgow, founder and CEO, on narrowing in on their unusual initial segment:
Be careful not to pattern-match too quickly...Subscribe to Lenny's Newsletter to read the rest.Become a paying subscriber of Lenny's Newsletter to get access to this post and other subscriber-only content. A subscription gets you:
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