Choosing an ICP for your product is hard.
But deciding on an ICP makes the rest of the marketing much easier.
Here's the process I used to decide on an ICP for my product.
Painpointy helps people find real user pain points, content ideas, questions asked and engagement opportunities by analyzing Reddit threads.
The Two-Audience Problem
With Painpointy, I noticed two types of people signing up:
- People who want to validate an idea for a product
- SEOs and marketers who want to create content that solves real problems
I originally built PainPointy to help me discover real user problems and create products around them.
So when Painpointy started getting word of mouth in SEO circles, I wasn't sure what to do.
I had conversations with users - some were using it for creating content, others for creating better ads. I also had an onboarding question that asked what they wanted to use it for. Some said they want to find pain points to build a better product, some wanted to understand the market.
Why I Kept Avoiding the Decision
With so many use cases, it wasn't clear in my head what the main focus was. Who should I address on the landing page?
Jason Cohen has written a great article about how focusing on one narrow ICP is the solution to growing a product.
I was still struggling mentally to commit to one ICP. It was only yesterday that it finally clicked for me.
The Research That Changed Everything
I did some deep research on ChatGPT with the goal of finding the answer, and I found people sharing PainPointy on twitter and LinkedIn that I didn't know about before. And they were all marketers.
My biggest question was around positioning. What do I position this product as? I gave Jason’s post and April Dunford’s Obviously Awesome book as context and I also included the blog that featured Painpointy and the LinkedIn post that mentioned Painpointy as context.
I enabled deep research with o3 model.
Deep research gave me a really good reason why I need to focus on content marketers and SEOs. It was obvious in retrospect but even though I had thought about it before, I was struggling to commit to this ICP. But now it all made sense in my mind. I could see how I can market the product to this group and that was the missing piece for me.
Making the Call (Finally)
So I made the decision. My ICP is content marketers and SEOs. I can refine the ICP as time goes on. Maybe it's not as narrow of an ICP based on what experts say, but I can finally see which road to take.
It's so obvious in retrospect. Looking back, all the signs were there - the organic word-of-mouth, the most engaged users, the clearest use cases. Sometimes you need external validation to see what's right in front of you.
What's Next
My next steps are to update the landing page to focus on my ICP, with a heading based on how one user described it: "Reddit Research Assistant for Content Marketers".
I’ll also showcase the features of the product with this group in mind.
This is just the start. But finding which direction I need to go with the marketing makes things a lot easier.
The lesson? When you're torn between ICPs, take some time and look at who's already talking about you. It’s really important that you decide who you’re marketing to. If you’re marketing to everyone, you’re not marketing to anyone.