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BUSINESS STRATEGY

Understand the Market Landscape

Define Your Target Customer (ICP)

Define your Ideal Customer Profile: from demographics to shared traits, pain points, and buying behaviour. A strong ICP filters decisions across GTM, product, and support, and keeps focus where it counts.

Why it's Matters

Without a well-defined Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), even great products struggle to gain traction. Startups often waste time selling to the wrong people, adapting to non-repeatable requests, or chasing revenue that doesn’t scale. A strong ICP keeps your product, sales, and messaging aligned and builds momentum instead of noise.

What You Need to Do

  • Define who your best-fit customers are not just demographically, but behaviourally and contextually

  • Focus on accounts or users with the highest potential for retention, advocacy, and revenue

  • Align your product roadmap and GTM strategy around this ICP

How to Approach It

Use your current customers (or early users) to build the first      profile:

  • Which ones convert fastest?

  • Which ones stay?

  • Which ones love the product without needing heavy hand-holding?

Describe the ICP at multiple levels:

  • Company-level (industry, size, growth stage, geography)

  • Buyer-level (title, role, pain points, KPIs)

  • Behaviour-level (tech stack, willingness to experiment, urgency to solve problem)

Narrow it down, even if it feels scary:

  • You can’t align your messaging or features to 5 ICPs

  • Focus ≠ exclusion. Startups that grow fastest usually start narrow

Turn ICP into actionable filters:

  • Sales qualification criteria

  • Messaging and content tone

  • Product feature prioritization

  • Targeting for ads, outreach, onboarding

Deliverables

  • Ideal Customer Profile (1-page summary)

  • Buyer personas with key insights

  • ICP-fit checklist or decision tree

How to Tell if You Got It Right

  • Your team knows who to say “no” to

  • Your messaging and product roadmap match real needs

  • Your sales cycle shortens and win rate improves

  • Customers start referring others like them

What to Watch Out For

  • Creating an ICP based only on revenue instead of fit

  • Over-relying on broad labels like “mid-market”

  • Letting the ICP drift as you chase new deals

  • Trying to “serve everyone” and losing traction

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