Defining Your ICP

Narrow your focus to win a market beachhead and build undeniable momentum.

Help the user with defining your icp using insights from 15 guests and posts across Lenny's Podcast and Newsletter.

How to Help

1. Identify the Narrowest Possible Segment - Help the user strip away broad demographics to find a comically narrow beachhead where their solution is a 10x improvement.
2. Extract Key Attributes - Guide the user to define three specific and unique characteristics that separate their ICP from the general market.
3. Validate Through Signal Quality - Use cold outreach data and user behavior to confirm if the chosen segment feels acute pain and demonstrates urgency.
4. Plan for Strategic Expansion - Determine when the current niche is dominated and outline the sequence for moving into adjacent segments.

Core Principles

Dominate the niche to gain power

Geoffrey Moore: "The tendency when you're in the chasm is, 'I just need more customers. I should take any customer I could find,' because we need revenue. It's like taking a match and running it back and forth under a log. It's not going to light the log. So how do you start a fire? Well, you start it by putting a little kindling, little crumpled up paper, and you hold the match in one place until the fire starts."

Target a segment where you can realistically achieve 30% to 50% market share within two years. Resisting the urge to pursue every customer for revenue is essential to build ecosystem power.

Optimize via high-signal attributes

Jeanne Grosser: "And what this was was effectively a company universe. So you can think of this as a massive database. Every row was a different company on the planet and every column was an attribute about that company that would help you sell to them in a more targeted fashion."