Demographic categories like age ranges are too vague for product development. Instead, segment customers by their specific problems and anxieties. First-year engineering students worried about keeping up with coursework need reliable computer access, not just a product for "college students."
Knowing that someone is 18 or 20 or 25 years old doesn't give me much because an 18-year-old can be very different from an 18-year-old, or it's definitely different from a 25-year-old. So broad demographics are not actionable. What's actionable is the problems that they have, the anxieties that they feel, the hesitations that they have. So you could say, hey, I am building a product for university students, presumably they're 18 to 22, but there are millions of them, so what I wanna know is, let's say first-year students who are, I don't know, engineering students who are nervous about their ability to keep up with course content or nervous about their ability to learn quickly enough, who have access to a computer and are facing these types of common problems within their courses. So you can see this is not saying I'm targeting 18 to 22-year-old students, I'm saying within that, here are the subgroups of problems that I'm trying to solve, and that's what I would segment based on.
