Identify Your Audience
Knowing who you want to work with will help communicate to them more effectively.Get to Know Your Stakeholders
Customers
Who will buy what you’re selling
Team
Who will work with you to make what you’re selling
Partners
Who will you leverage to reach the people you are going to sell to, or create the product you’re going to sell.
Investors
Who will help fund your efforts
For each group, evaluate their level of impact, where you can find them (channels), what’s important to them (values), how to speak to them (tone), and a plan for engagement. You can create an internal table to house the information like this:
| Level of Impact | Channels | Values | Tone | Plan for Engagement | |
| Customer | |||||
| Team Member | |||||
| Partner | |||||
| Investor |
Customer Analysis
Now that you’ve mapped all your stakeholders, let’s dive in on the ones who will be buying from you. A customer analysis is where you gather data and behavior information in order to identify profitable customers, attract, and retain them. When a company deeply understands their customers’ lifestyle preferences and buying behaviors, they can map and optimize their journey.
It is extremely important to the success of your startup that your customer is real and the information you gather about this person is accurate. The easiest way to achieve this is to… get a real customer — meaning someone who actually pays for your product, or becomes a user. If you’re a long way from this operationally (ie. you think you need funding to build your technology before you can offer it), consider mocking up the experience and create an MVP (Minimum Viable Product), and then use this to gather real potential customers who tell you they will purchase.
Target Market Segment and Create Customer Persona
Define the segment you’ll be targeting by zeroing in on who these people really are. Use segmentation descriptors to gather the information, and then it can be restructured in a statement for your Customer Persona.
Geography — Region, Urban or Rural, Commonalities in location
Demographics — Age, Gender, Socio-economic Group, Occupation
Behaviors — Readiness to purchase, Brand loyalty, Product Usage
Psychographics — Lifestyle, Values, Personality, Class, Goals
The more specific you can get this to be, the better you’ll be able to target these people. What does their average day look like? Something to consider is you may have multiple personas, for example if you are B2B and face an approval process to make the purchase.
Remember to test! You use the Lean methodology and run mini experiments to verify your assumptions. Here is good LinkedIn article on how to do that.