Who is your perfect customer ?

A very important aspect of entrepreneurs' due diligence during ideation is to know who will be willing to buy the company's product/service. Market analysis tend to give a broad identification of potential customers through large segments such as baby-boomers versus millennials, men versus women, high income versus low income etc. However, this is not enough. When defining their customers, entrepreneurs need to get into personas, or in other words, know how their potential customers:

live (where they live, how old they are, what are their life aspirations, where they go buy groceries, what type of car they drive, what trends do they follow…)

do things (what’s their job, hobbies…)

like (what music they listen to, what party they vote for…)

The objective of creating personas is to get into a level of refinement that will allow the entrepreneur to clearly identify why a customer may want his startup's product or service. At the end of a perfect customer identification, the entrepreneur should almost be able to draw his/her perfect customer’s face. If having different categories of perfect customers, (s)he create personas for each of them. On the other hand, if none are fond, maybe the entrepreneur's startup idea is irrelevant or should be refined.

This process is part of customer development rather than product development as any entrepreneur should:

Develop the customer before developing the product/service

Develop a product or a service as a bundle of customer experience, looking at every touch point customers will have with the company, whether through distribution, after-sale, sale, or pre-sale

Want to find the key levers of what is very important for the startup's perfect customer, not the features the entrepreneur wants to put into the product. Entrepreneurs should think about what matters to their target before what matters to them

Most importantly, trying to appeal to everyone is appealing to no one. If looking at the product life cycle, innovators and early adopters will be the startup's first customers. Their needs will be very specific and they will not adopt a generic product or service. It is only when the product starts to spread to the masses that entrepreneurs may look to pivot and try to appeal to a bigger audience as they start adopting the startup's product. However, what is different is special and that’s why a Mac is not a computer, including the success we all know.