What do you learn from an ICP?

So much for the background, but how does this affect your technical decision making?

For me the key factors to take away here are, by specifying your expected target customers, you learn about:

• Expected scale

  A friend of mine once said that for any magnitude (10 times the requests) in scaling you'll need a different architecture. If you already scale for 100 times of the requests you'll actually see you are going to waste a lot of money, while scaling for a factor of 100 below the requests you'll see you are going to hit a wall. So being able to guestimate the customer size will allow you to make predictions about the required architecture.

• Level of "enterprisyness"

  A simple example you'll find almost everywhere which will depend on the size of the companies you target is: What kind of login mechanisms do you need? Simple sign-up, single-sign-on using Google, or SAML? Attached to that are often requests for granular permission systems, audit logs, and identity management.

  The actual requirements, of course, entirely depend on the product you are building, but the topic of authorization should give you an idea what I'm talking about.

• Target the correct buyer persona

  While everyone of us wants a perfect product in all areas of the product this obviously is not possible given time and money are usually limited. To understand the most important validation factors of you ideal customer and buyer persona will allow to focus on these topics first and optimize the experience in those areas.

  This is one of many reasons why I'd strongly suggest that even technical leaders stay in constant close contact with your sales and pre-sales teams.

How does an ICP look like?

In a startup change is the only constant and your ideal customer profile will also change on the way towards finding you product market fit. An example ideal customer profile we used for a while:

• It's all about transactional business models

• Online turnover $■■■m to $■■■m (or having ambitions of that)

• Want to differentiate on experience and move fast

• Retention is a key metric

• They will decide or have already decided to go headless

• Have frontend developer(s) in-house or work closely together with their agency

• Aim to work in cross-functional teams with frontend developer in team

We even communicated this to our prospects, because we believe in transparency and close collaboration. If the customer understands what you are targeting and optimizing for they either will know that they're a perfect match or where they could maybe experience hicc-ups. They still might sign, but there should be mutal awareness what that could mean for the ongoing partnership.

Summary

Try to be as specific as possible about your ideal customer profile and the resulting buying personas to optimize your product and technical scalability for exactly this customer profile. You shouldn't try to convince and win every customer, since you'll have to optimize for something.