EE04 • Don’t Just Find Your Ideal Customer. Be One of Them.
How to identify the right customers and build with them from day one
// 8-10 minutes read · Precision tools for finding your ideal customer before your time runs out.
It’s a quiet Friday in Germany. Corpus Christi left behind a soft, serene pause. Our neighbors just set up a giant pool in the garden. It’s 27°C. Summer has finally arrived.
I’m sitting inside, blinds down, writing my fourth issue.
As of today, Essentialist Edge is read in 18 countries across 5 continents. That alone makes me super happy.
Alright, let’s dive into EE04.
“Waste no more time arguing what a good person should be. Be one.”
— Marcus Aurelius
In life and product development, you are whom you talk to. Your product becomes who uses it. Most startups don’t die from a bad product. They die talking to the wrong people.
So don’t overthink your ideal customer. Be one.
Whenever I started from zero, who I talked to made all the difference. It shaped my product thinking. It shaped my state of mind.
The right conversations sharpen your judgment. The wrong ones blur even what you thought you knew. At this stage, customers aren’t customers. They’re co-designers of your future.
Right now, somewhere out there, a small team is chasing something that might change the world or just save ten minutes of drudgery.
Either way, they’re circling the same brutal question: Who cares enough to pay for this?
Finding your ideal customer is a quest for precision, not persuasion.
That’s why the best founders don’t chase demographics. They focus on relationships. They carefully identify the nuances that reveal a deep sense of meaning behind why your product deserves to exist.
If you miss the mark, you end up selling to everyone and no one. But if you get it right, customers don’t just buy, they evangelize. It’s like picking your class in a game: choose wrong, you stall. Choose right, you level up fast.
With 8.2 billion potential players, ruthless precision isn’t optional. It’s survival.
Most founders think they’re building products. They are not. They’re helping the right people become more powerful versions of themselves.
You’re not selling fire flowers. You’re helping the right person throw fire.
The Essentials Up Front:
Many founders stumble early on by chasing the wrong customer. They build something real then spend months wondering why no one gets it.
Here’s the sharpened checklist I wish more teams used before writing a single line of code:
Shrink the target to three traits. Force-rank the exact three things that separate “will buy now” from “nice idea.”
Map the customer-problem relationship first. Understand how your customer relates to the problem your product solves. Is it Hair-on-Fire / Hard Fact / Future Vision? Your approach changes with each one.
Run the Essential Gates.
Do They Desperately Care → Will they switch → Will they pay premium
One “no” = disqualify.
Re-evaluate every single week. People, products and budgets move. Nothing static. Your ideal customer has to move and evolve with them.
That means narrowing the circle until you could almost be one of them. Until you deeply understand their decisions, constraints and triggers as if they were your own, not just line items on an ARR forecast.
01. The Demographics Trap
When “Anyone” Is Your Customer, No One Pays
Most founders say they know their Ideal Customer Profile. But press them on the details, the subtle ones and the room goes quiet.
I learned this the hard way.
While juggling my engineering manager role, I was also doing 30 customer calls a week for a new product launch. What I discovered wasn't in any demographics chart. It was in how differently people related to the same problem. Some saw it as urgent. Some didn’t care at all. Same pain, different emotional truths. That changes everything.
That’s why early validation fails so often: you’re testing the right idea on the wrong people. And you don’t realize it until three months and 400 demos too late. This costs you your motivation.
You can raise more money and even reset the clock but if you lose conviction, it’s game over.
After years in the trenches, I'll say this with full conviction: the only way to find your ideal customer is direct contact. Eye-to-eye conversations. Seeing their world through their lens, in the ways they get stuff done, not your spreadsheet.
Your ideal customer isn’t static. It shifts as your product matures. Pay attention to the chasm between early adopters and the mainstream market. That’s your ideal customer migrating right under your feet.
02. The Four-Step Precision Engine
Step 1 – The Three Relationship Archetypes
Sequoia Capital nails this in their PMF framework: they don't just ask "Do customers want this?" They ask "How do customers relate to the problem?"
It’s one of the simplest, most overlooked questions in early product discovery.
Before you pitch or prototype, map the relationship between your customer and the problem. You’ll usually find one of three archetypes:
Hair-on-Fire (Urgent):
Problem is urgent, solution needed yesterday. They buy fast, implement faster. Don't need convincing, need proof you can deliver.
Defining ability: To aggressively out-maneuver the competition
Hard Fact (Logical):
They see the problem clearly, but they need evidence before switching.
They want case studies, ROI calculations, reference calls. They'll buy, but only after validation.
Defining ability: Getting customers to re-evaluate the current processes.
Future Vision (Aspirational):
They’re betting on real generational transformation.
Problem is aspirational, solution makes sci-fi a reality. They're buying true transformation, not efficiency. Potentially the largest payoff, yet the most difficult.
Defining ability: Attract and retain top talent for the long haul.
Here’s where most builders go wrong: they pitch spreadsheets to dreamers and transformation to pragmatists.
And wonder why no one moves.
Your archetype determines everything: messaging, demo flow, sales cycle, pricing. That transformation looks very different for each archetype. But in the end, the real question is:
Does your product actually change behavior?
Step 2 – Triple Trait
Adapted from Lenny Rachitsky's ideal customer profile methodology
To define your ideal customer, pick three traits that, together, describe a very specific subset of the market.
Notice the pattern: each company identified traits that go beyond demographics. They have a clear revenue concentration. The best companies go beyond demographics.
Scale AI doesn’t target “enterprises”. They focus on companies with massive unlabeled data and active AI workflows. Anything less is a false lead. The magic is always in the intersection.
Your three traits should be:
Specific enough to exclude 90% of the market
Measurable enough to identify prospects quickly
Valuable enough that all three together predict buying behavior
Think in ecosystem, not checklist. Traits aren't isolated data points, they're brushstrokes. Together, they paint a real-world picture of a living person inside a specific context.
Examples of high-signal combos:
Company size + job title = decision-making power
Pain point + working style = urgency level
Tech stack + business type = implementation complexity
Community presence = where to find them
Example:
Instead of saying: "engineering managers at 500-person companies."
Say "engineering managers at 500-person SaaS companies who use GitHub, attend DevOps conferences, sell $30K+ software and are drowning in deployment complexity because they're scaling fast."
That’s someone you could spot at a conference and guess what keeps them up at night. That’s your edge.
The best customers I have seen don't just buy, they advocate and recruit. They become your sales force. Stripe's developer adopters pulled in entire engineering teams. Figma's designers dragged whole companies onto the platform.
Ask: Will my ideal customer naturally want their peers to use this too?
Also, the best customers don't just pay. They graduate from your basic tier to premium tiers as their problems deepen.
Ask: Will this customer need 10x more value from us in 18 months?
Step 3 – Trigger & Exclusion Lens
(Adapted from GV’s methodology)
Once you’ve nailed your three core traits, add two filters many founders overlook: triggers and exclusions.
Triggers = Urgency
Triggers are recent events that make someone buy now, not someday. They separate “should care” from “must act.”
Examples:
A security breach → for cybersecurity tools
New funding round → for scaling infrastructure
Regulatory deadline → for compliance software
These aren’t just signals, they’re your accelerants. Triggers turn latent interest into momentum.
Exclusions = Ghost Filters
Exclusions help you avoid perfect-on-paper prospects who’ll never convert.
Examples:
Too much domain expertise → They’ll build in-house
Just signed with a competitor → Locked in for years
Change-resistant culture → Internal adoption stalls before it starts
Ask yourself: What would I need to hear in the first 5 minutes that tells me this is the wrong person?
Smart founders ask about recent change before jumping into demos. Both filters save you months of chasing ghosts.
For an AI infrastructure product:
Trigger: Just hired their first ML engineer
Exclusion: Already spent 18 months building a custom LLM stack
Step 4 – The Essential Gates
Every serious prospect must pass three simple tests. One “no” means disqualification, so you can move on with a clear conscience.
Gate 1: Do They Desperately Care
Does this prospect feel the pain acutely? Are they actively seeking solutions or just browsing?
The ultimate litmus test: will they actually change their behavior?
Gate 2: Will They Switch
Can they switch? Do they have the authority, budget and organizational capacity to implement something new
Gate 3: Will They Pay Premium
Not just pay. Pay increasing amounts as you solve deeper problems.
Most founders fail at Gate 1. They mistake polite interest for genuine care. Others get to Gate 3 only to realize the buyer expects a free alternative.
The beauty of these gates? It forces honest conversations early saving you from months of false hope.
Example:
A startup founder loves your productivity tool
Gate 1: They desperately need better workflows ✓
Gate 2: They have authority and budget ✓
Gate 3: They expect it to be free ✗
Move on.
Narrow Wins, Wide Wanders
The Canva vs Notion Tale
Canva found momentum in six months by obsessing over one sharp edge. They noticed one group lighting up: social media managers drowning in visual content creation as Instagram and Pinterest exploded.
Their early ideal customer profile was crystal clear:
Social media professionals (roles)
Creating lots of visual content (behavior)
Freelance or solo operators (context)
Result? Instant product-market fit. Users changed their entire workflow around Canva within days.
Notion wandered for years chasing everyone: personal productivity users, students, startups, enterprise teams. Each quarter brought a new persona pivot. No single archetype felt urgent enough. Classic Future Vision trap. Building for transformation before proving basic utility.
The difference? Canva's precision created compound growth and natural evangelism. Social media managers recruited other social media managers. Notion's "everyone" approach meant years of expensive iteration with lukewarm adoption.
The lesson:
Precision beats perfection. One obsessed customer segment beats ten interested ones.
The Contrarian Test & Three Sharp Signals:
The best ideal customers often look wrong to everyone else. If your ideal customer profile makes perfect sense to everyone, you're probably not seeing something others missed. The biggest moats come from being right about customers others dismiss.
They change how they work, not just what they buy.
Real customers don’t just plug you into their stack. They restructure workflows around you. They become power users who push your product beyond what you imagined.
They refer without being asked.
True ideal customers become natural evangelists. They mention you in Slack channels, conference talks, and team meetings because your product changed their day, not just their dashboard.
They start using your words. [The ultimate signal]
You hear customers describing their problems with your exact language and workflow. You've found your people.
Your Move
Belong First, Build Second
Are you targeting lawyers? Spend your days in their world. Observe how they make decisions, what tools they use, what frustrates them. Study their logic, their constraints, their rituals. Become a lawyer.
Your ideal customer profile isn’t a persona on a slide. It’s a human being whose problem you understand so deeply that the solution becomes inevitable.
Stop studying customers. Start being one.
End of Line.
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Stay essential,
Nihal