How do you find and reach your ideal customer profile early on?
Most founders waste months reaching the wrong people. They target “parents” when they should target “time-strapped working mothers in Dubai with kids under 5.” That specificity gap costs you everything downstream.
The Short Answer
Do it manually. Conduct 20+ user interviews with each potential segment to understand who experiences the pain most intensely AND has the budget for what you’re offering. There’s no shortcut. If you skip the manual work, you won’t find your ICP.
Why This Matters
Getting your ICP wrong doesn’t just waste your outreach efforts. It derails your entire strategy, your positioning, and every decision you make after that.
Think about it: your messaging is built on who you think you’re talking to. Your pricing assumes a certain buyer. Your product roadmap prioritizes features for a specific user. If the foundation is wrong, everything built on top of it is wrong.
The common mistake is assuming your customer is “everyone who has this problem.” But your actual customer is far more specific. It’s not “people who want to get fit.” It’s “busy professionals aged 30-45 who’ve tried and failed at gyms twice and now want home-based solutions under 20 minutes.” The specificity makes outreach easier, positioning clearer, and conversion higher.
How This Plays Out
A kids services company learned this lesson the hard way. They started by targeting “parents” with basic demographics. Broad audience, reasonable assumption.
But growth stalled. Acquisition was expensive. Retention was inconsistent.
Only when they analyzed who actually kept using the service did patterns emerge. Through user interviews, they discovered a segment within the broader parent base. These weren’t just any parents. They shared specific behaviors, specific pain points, specific circumstances.
These were their super consumers. Once they identified this segment, everything clicked. Messaging resonated. Acquisition costs dropped. Retention improved. The product roadmap had clarity.
The ICP was always there in the data. They just hadn’t looked closely enough.
Finding Your ICP: The Framework
If you’re just starting:
- Identify your broad audience
- Segment them based on observable characteristics
- Conduct as many user interviews as possible across segments
- Look for where pain is highest AND budget exists
If you already have customers but growth is stuck:
- Identify your repeat customers
- Reach out to them specifically
- Conduct interviews to understand what makes them different
- Find the pattern that defines your super consumers
LinkedIn is particularly effective for finding and reaching potential segments. You can filter by industry, role, company size, and geography. It’s where B2B founders should start their outreach.
Inverse mapping also works: find where people actively discuss the pain you solve. Reddit communities, Slack groups, industry forums. The platforms where people complain are the platforms where your ICP lives.
The Nuance
Honestly? This advice almost always applies. There’s no real edge case where “skip the interviews” makes sense.
The only possible exception might be enterprise products where your buyer universe is tiny (maybe 50 companies worldwide). Even then, you still need to understand who inside those companies feels the pain, who has budget authority, and who makes the final decision. So interviews still matter. Just with a smaller pool.
What To Do This Week
You don’t need permission to start. You don’t need a perfect interview script. You need conversations.
New founders: List 20 people who might have the problem you solve. Segment them into 2-3 groups. Reach out. Have conversations. Don’t pitch. Listen.
Existing founders: Export your customer list. Find the ones who’ve purchased repeatedly or engaged most deeply. Email 10 of them this week. Frame it as an “experience enhancement discussion.” People love being asked for input.
The golden rule for all these conversations: speak less, listen more.
You’re not there to validate your assumptions. You’re there to discover what you don’t know. The founders who find their ICP fastest are the ones who shut up and let customers talk.
Your ICP isn’t something you decide. It’s something you discover. And discovery requires doing the work no one wants to do: manual, one-on-one, unglamorous conversations.
Start this week.