What is an ideal customer profile?
An ideal customer profile, or ICP, describes the kind of customer who gets the most out of your product and is most likely to buy it. It’s usually a description of a company, a school or a household, not one person. A persona is the human inside it. The ICP tells you who to build for and who to talk to first.
What goes in one
Who they are.
The kind of organization or household, and anything that changes whether they need you: size, location, what they already use.
The problem they have badly enough to pay for.
Not a problem they’d agree with in a survey. One they’re already spending time or money working around.
Who decides and who pays.
Often not the same person. Sometimes not the person who uses it, either.
Where they’d look for it.
A store, an app store, a search, a recommendation. It decides how you reach them.
Your user isn’t always your customer
Owlet’s first idea was a wireless pulse oximeter for hospitals. The founders talked to 58 nurses, and 93% wanted it over the corded kind. Then they talked to hospital administrators, who said no because it wasn’t cost-effective. The nurses were the users. The administrators were the customers, and they had the budget. The team’s own words: “your user is not always your customer.” They moved on to parents, who were both.
ICP vs persona
An ICP describes the buyer: the school district, the family, the business. A persona describes a person who uses the product inside it: the teacher, the parent at 2 a.m., the new hire. You usually need both. The ICP tells you who to sell to, and the persona tells you what to build.
How to find yours
Look at who already has the problem and is already doing something about it. Interview them about the last time it happened, not what they’d do in the future. If you have users, look at which ones stick around and what they have in common. Your ICP is usually narrower than you want it to be, and that’s fine. Narrow is how you win the first group.
Questions people ask
What does ICP stand for in business?
Ideal customer profile: a description of the customer who gets the most from your product and is most likely to buy it. It’s used in product, sales and marketing to decide who to build for, who to sell to first and who to leave for later.
Can you have more than one ideal customer profile?
You can, but start with one. Each ICP pulls the product in its own direction, and trying to serve two before you’ve won one usually means serving neither well.
Learn it by doing it
The app teaches this in Module 7, No Facts Inside the Building, where the crew picks who to learn from first.
Product Management is a course for curious teens, in five-minute lessons with something to play with in every one. Part I is free on iPhone, iPad and Android. No account, no ads.
Keep going
What is a value proposition?
Why someone would pick you over what they do today, in one sentence.
TAM, SAM and SOM, explained
Everyone, the part you can reach, and the slice you can win.
The baby sock that found its market, then ran into the FDA
A baby monitor that proved its demand for $220, then spent five years at odds with the FDA.