Founders are innovators who have historically created some of the most transformative solutions the world has ever seen. They can go into extraordinary detail describing how their product works and everything it can do.
Unfortunately, few can tell you precisely who will use it. Or more importantly, who will buy it.
They usually have a general idea. Someone they had in mind when they built it. Maybe they think in broad terms like “mid-sized companies in the US” or “enterprise teams that need better analytics.” Or they have someone very specific in mind; often someone a lot like themselves. Tech people building solutions for other tech people. The problem is they may not fully envision all the people who have the problem their solution solves. And that audience is already out there, already frustrated, already looking for something.
Those people have a title, a budget, a set of frustrations, and a way of talking about their problem. If your marketing does not speak directly to each of them in language they actually use, it is not marketing. It is noise.
This is what ICP work actually is. Not a demographic exercise. Not a spreadsheet of firmographics. A disciplined effort to understand the human being on the other side of the sale.
Too many companies skip it or do it poorly. I once worked with a group of brilliant founders who had built one of the most sophisticated enterprise solutions I had ever seen. They were marketing it to students. Not because students were the buyer. Because students were who they knew. The ICP was never defined, so the default was whoever was closest.
Many companies define their ICP too broadly because they are afraid to leave anyone out. The result is messaging that tries to speak to everyone and lands with no one.
Here is what that looks like in practice. The website says something like “the platform that helps teams work smarter.” The emails talk about features. The sales deck has seventeen beautifully designed slides that are utterly useless before it gets to why anyone should care. Every piece of content is written for a hypothetical buyer who does not actually exist.
The fix is not complicated, but it requires honesty.
Start with your best customers. Not your biggest. Not your newest. Your best. The ones who got value quickly, renewed without being asked, and became advocates. Look for patterns. Who are they? What problem were they trying to solve? What triggered them to start looking? What ultimately convinced them to buy?
Build your personas around that. Focus on the people involved in the buying decision and how they describe their challenges. What are they accountable for? What keeps them up at night? What do they call the problem you solve? What have they already tried that did not work? The answers to those questions will tell you far more than any demographic profile ever will.
One more thing. Avoid technobabble. Unless your solution is specifically built for technical users, most of your buyers are business people who want plain language. Speak to them accordingly.
Three questions worth taping to your monitor:
What does your solution do?
Who is it for?
How does it help them?
When you have those answers, messaging becomes straightforward. You are not writing copy anymore. You are writing a letter to a specific person who has a specific problem and is looking for a specific kind of help. When that person reads it, they should feel like you understand them better than they understand themselves.
That is when marketing starts working. Not because you found the right channel or ran the right campaign. Because you finally got specific enough to say something true to someone who actually needs to hear it.
Everything else is just noise.