🚨 Stop accepting any customer

June 27, 2025

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When you're starting out, any customer is ideal. Gotta keep the lights on somehow, right?

Wrong (he says in a very serious tone).

Being okay with any ol' customer is a trap. 

If you're accepting money from a wide swath of people, you'll start accepting their feedback, too. Typically, a great thing to do, but if the feedback's coming from conflicting and/or off-target viewpoints, it becomes really distracting.

Imagine if you asked every person walking down the street how you should style your hair. You'd expect varied answers, no?

Building a business is the same thing; it doesn't make peoples’ opinions magically agree. Be sure you’re get opinions from your ideal customers.

Some founders nail this step because they ARE their ideal customer. Others succeed by systematically studying customers who are nothing like them. Both approaches work, but they require completely different strategies.

In this newsletter:

• You don't need to be your ICP to make things work

• How to get hyper-specific on who you're targeting

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Weekly Insight

Founders tackle the ideal customer profile (ICP) challenge in wildly different ways. Some just point to themselves, then build exactly what they wish existed. Others study their customers like anthropologists. 

Let me show you both approaches in action.

Path 1: Linktree — be the change you wish to see

Alex and Anthony Zaccaria’s problems were the Linkseeds that grew into Linktree. (I’d apologize for that pun, but I loved writing it. Sorry.)

The Zaccaria brothers were constantly frustrated by Instagram's single bio link while managing Instagram accounts for bands and festivals, as part of their day jobs.

They (rightly) thought it was dumb; everyone was stuck choosing just one link when they had dozens of places to send their audience. It took up time they didn’t have, and rendered historical posts irrelevant.

So, they fixed it.

They built exactly what they needed: a dead-simple landing page with customizable buttons. No analytics dashboard, complex themes or extraneous features. 

A simple, lovable, complete product, built in 6 hours. Chef’s kiss.

Their validation 

They used it themselves, then, after realizing they weren’t alone in their frustration, shared it with fellow creators in their network. 

The response was immediate. 

Other musicians, influencers and content creators started asking for access and offering to pay. The Zaccaria brothers realized they had something here.

Linktree hit 1 million users within a year, spread entirely through word-of-mouth by people who “got it” immediately. Today it powers over 30 million pages globally, with “link in bio” becoming shorthand for an entire category they created.

Advantage of being your own customer

Speed and intuition. No guessing required.

Path 2: Descript — when you’re definitely not the customer

Andrew Mason (who previously founded Groupon, btw) had zero interest in editing podcasts or videos. But he noticed creators constantly griping about their editing workflows on X… AKA Twitter. (AKA I’ll never get used to it.)

Instead of guessing what they needed, Mason did something radical: he talked to them.

He interviewed dozens of podcasters and YouTubers, watching them work through their editing process. He discovered that the biggest time-suck wasn't making creative decisions. It was the mechanical process of scrubbing through timelines to find the right moments to cut.

Which made his team’s job easier, to be honest. They just had to solve a thorn-in-the-side issue, which would enable editors to do the hard part.

They built a text editor to replace the cumbersome, timeline-based editing process. Upload your audio/video, get a transcript, edit the text like a Google Doc and the underlying media automatically updates. Delete a sentence from the transcript? Gone from the audio too.

Their validation

Every assumption got tested with real users before a single line of code was written. They couldn't rely on intuition, so they built small prototypes and put them in front of their ideal customers, immediately.

The response validated their approach: creators who tried it couldn't go back to traditional editors.

Today, Descript has raised over $100 million and processes millions of hours of content for everyone from individual podcasters to major media companies.

Advantage of NOT being your own customer

Fresh eyes spot opportunities that insiders miss.

Both paths work, but they require completely different levels of empathy. Linktree succeeded through lived experience. Descript succeeded through systematic observation. 

There’s no “better choice.” Just pick the path you’re better suited for.

Next, I'll show you how clear you need to get about your ICP if you want to save yourself lots and lots of headaches down the road.

​​📚 Related Reading

• Stop creating your product and start talking to people by Ian Efford | Making the case for validation through real conversations.
  

• Be them, with them, about them by Amena Schlaikjer | An alternative framework that invites you to step further into your ICP’s world.

• Integrating customer focus in product development by Digital Entrepreneur’s team | How to bake customer insights directly into your offer. Especially useful if you're not your own ICP.

Intent to Action

I remember putting together customer profiles back in business school: “This is Anna. She lives in Wyoming with her partner and 3 kids. Works in electrical engineering and…” it goes on.

We created fictitious avatars who needed our products and services more than anything else in the world. Ideal, right?

Ideal, but not overly useful. This is the “classic” way we’re taught to pinpoint our ideal customers, but it immediately becomes irreconcilably disconnected from reality. Put into the words of someone who isn’t a nerd, it just isn’t useful.

So I sought to find something that is.

I studied how mega-companies like Gong, Retool and Gusto nailed their ideal customer profiles: every successful company landed on exactly three attributes to describe their ICP. 

Not two, not four. Three.

The number three isn't arbitrary here. This hard limit serves to identify the attributes that are unique and important, but limit you before you get bogged down in endless detail (like the number of kids they have or their marital status).

Since you know I love my steps and checklists, here’s how you do it in a series of steps.

Step 1: Pick your three

Choose three attributes from this list:

• Company size (e.g., 10–50 employees)

• Job title (e.g., engineering manager, content creator)

• Specific pain point (e.g., compliance headaches, content distribution)

• How they work (e.g., remote-first, design-obsessed)

• Tech they use (e.g., uses Slack, posts on TikTok)

• Business model (e.g., SaaS, creator economy)

• Geography (e.g., US-based, urban centers)

• Budget range (e.g., spends $500-2000/month on tools)

Real example: Gusto started ridiculously narrow:

1. Companies with 5 or fewer employees

2. Based in California

3. Who had no contractors

That hyperspecific focus let them nail the value prop before expanding to 300,000+ businesses.

Here’s the sheet I use when creating an ICP. :)

Step 2: Test your hypothesis

Talk to 10–15 people who match your three attributes. Look for these four signals that you're getting warmer:

1. Conversion rate spike — More people say “yes” to trying your solution

2. Enthusiasm increase — Prospects get visibly excited during demos

3. Urgency — They want to start using it now, not “sometime soon”

4. The nod — They immediately understand the problem without explanation

Step 3: Go even narrower

When in doubt, get more specific. Take Hex, which targeted:

1. Startups using a data warehouse

2. With an analyst or data scientist on staff

3. Already using dbt (a specific data tool)

There were maybe a few hundred companies in the world that fit this profile. But that focus let them become the obvious choice for that specific group, before trying to expand their market.

Step 4: Expand gradually, and for good reason

Once you're crushing it with your narrow ICP, you can start to expand; one attribute at a time. Gusto started with “5 or fewer employees in California with no benefits” before expanding their definition:

• First: Those with hourly employees (not just salaried)

• Then: Expanded to more states

• Then: Added companies offering benefits

• Finally: Moved up to larger companies

The key is to only expand when you feel confident you won't lose focus on your original customers. If your current segment still has unmet needs or you're still refining the product, stay narrow.

🚩 Warning signs you're expanding too fast

• Conversion rates drop

• Customer feedback becomes conflicted 

• Your team starts debating which customer to prioritize

If you’re seeing these things, slow down. Find the source of the problem. Fix it.

Remember: slow is smooth, smooth is fast.

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Closing Thought

Whether you're your own customer or not doesn't really matter. What matters is that you deeply, empathetically understand who you're building for.

Some founders get this for free because they live the problem. Others have to work for it by talking to customers obsessively. Both approaches work—just pick the one that fits your situation and commit to it.

Next week, get your lab coat and scalpel handy, because we’ll be dissecting the anatomy of a no-brainer offer; one that converts on sight.

See you then.