Jesse Pujji shares seven methods for defining your ideal customer, from guessing and testing to leveraging your own expertise. When Kahani focused on apparel brands with many SKUs instead of the broad e-commerce market, conversion jumped from 10% to 30%. Red Ventures cut Ampush's customer base in half and increased profitability five-fold.
All right, so we got 7 ways to figure out your ICP.
And we're gonna go through each one of them individually.
So let's get to guess and test. When we first started Kahani, Kahani was a business that we started at GatewayX that didn't work out, but the idea was to put the Instagram stories at the top of your e-commerce experience and to kind of transform your e-commerce experience to look more like TikTok and Instagram. But initially I was like, oh, everyone says the long tail of e-commerce is where it's at. So like, let's go out and talk to these people. And we realized like they were overwhelmed and we were just like, these are not good customers. But in that process there was like 5 people who go, oh, I have 100 different SKUs, I would love to showcase it. And then we said, let's go find only like apparel or companies with lots of SKUs who wanna make it really easy to browse. I think our conversion rate went from like 10% to 30%. I've seen a lot of entrepreneurs, they're like, oh, what should I, should I sell to this? Should I sell to that? Make a good guess. Pick one and get to work. That's to me the way you learn. So this is my favorite one. And actually, before we go to it, I want everyone to close your eyes and I want you guys to all think of one customer. And this is your favorite customer. They trust you, you trust them. Imagine you got an email and you looked at it and you're like, hell yeah, I know exactly your problem. That's the customer we want. Write it down. How big are they? What makes them so great to work with? What's the problems that you're solving for them? And my favorite ICP exercise is that is the center of your bullseye. Now let's go find a bunch of other similar customers.
Who is that, a growth assistant for you?
We used to think of it as— I think we still think of one of our top ones as like the $10 million plus e-commerce business. They've got 10 employees. We get them 3 growth assistants. It takes some of the worst work off their plate. The new one that's been emerging just from looking at our data is agencies. Agencies can take on a lot of headcount. We have a few agencies that have 20 heads. It's like an operationally easy thing to do.
All right. What's my— what's the third one?
So this is a funny one. Sometimes people troll me on Twitter and they're like, dude, you're the only reason you got Growth Assistant to grow so fast is because of your Ampush experience. And I'm like, yeah, duh. Think about your superpower. I always give this example of selling turbines on e-commerce. Very few people who know private equity also know performance marketing. That becomes an unfair advantage. So that's a really big one. Where do you have a lot of knowledge? Where do you have a big network? Just sell them to these people. These are people you know.
You are always in growth marketing.
Look, I think part of the reason I've set this up the way I have is I get a lot of joy out of building the business and coaching the CEO and winning. This is another one I love. Just like build the business around yourself. Even stuff like Growth Assistant. I'm the big marketing sales engine, but Adrian is an amazing talent person. If we can't get them good people, then the business would fall apart. One of the things—
I figured I'd bring our Nathan on.
Nathan's a perfect customer for, for bootstrap giants. He's young, he wants it to scale. You really want to literally put a person's face and a name and the level and the company and the problem. It's also helpful to think about the person's interest versus the company's. That's a big kind of opportunity for selling.
And Nathan was there before we had a customer. We just said, look, someone who has an agency, someone who has some traction, needs to grow any bigger. And that was our guess.
Yeah. So I, I, a friend of mine in private equity called me the other day. He's like, I want to buy this business. It was literally a digital marketing agency for orthodontists. They built a massive business. Even when you think your ICP is narrow, it reminded me the power of, of really narrowing your focus. Even like at Growth Assistant as an example, we will sometimes have the conversation of like, should we, you know, should we only do agencies? Like how different of a business would we be if we only did agencies? Like it would be a very different business.
When you are thinking about narrowing, let's suppose that you are gonna go with Growth Assistant, just all, all in on agencies. What do you do with all the other companies?
This is just another case study from my career. When Red Ventures invested in Ampush, we actually cut our customer base probably by about half. Our business, uh, slowed down from 100% growth to 25%, but our profitability 5x'd. We were doing too many different random customers. Growth Assistant's a big enough business that you could literally break it into its own pieces internally and have the GA agency line, the GA e-commerce line, the GA, you know, venture-funded startup. But early on, for those of you who are early, sometimes you go, oh man, I don't like— no, I can't say no to this business, Jesse. Like, I— and I get that totally. But you're going to probably service your ICP and sort of just like let the non-ICP do their thing. In our case, When we did this for Ampush, we literally took all of the data, all the stuff we wanted to focus on. We made that a team. The most nonessential customers were just minting money and eventually they all churned. And this, this side of the business ended up growing way bigger than everything else over time. And just as an example, this is a real reporting dashboard from Growth Assistant and this is a common discussion all the time. So it's not like, again, we're not saying don't talk to anybody who's not ICP. There's realities of how many salespeople you have and meeting metrics and all those things. But we're paying a lot of attention to what percentage is non-ICP versus ICP.
