What is an ideal customer, and how do I find mine?
Your ideal customer is the one kind of person who needs your product most: they have the problem now, they know it, and they already spend time or money working around it. Written down, that is an ideal customer profile, or ICP. With no customers yet you find yours by evidence: where those people already talk about the problem, what they use today and what it costs them. Say, as an example, you talk to 20 people. 12 say it sounds useful and 3 show you the spreadsheet they keep to do the job by hand. Start with the 3.
Where the idea comes from
Nobody owns the phrase ideal customer profile, and this page credits it to no one. The idea under it has named authors. Steve Blank calls the first customers worth finding earlyvangelists, and his post of 4 March 2010 says most customers do not fit the profile.
Earlyvangelists can be identified by these characteristics:
They have a problem.
They understand they have a problem.
They are actively searching for a solution and has a timetable for finding it.
The problem is painful enough that they have cobbled together an interim solution.
They have, or can quickly acquire, dollars to purchase the product to solve their problem.
The fourth mark is one you can see: a workaround they have already built. Paul Graham puts the same point as a choice.
you can either build something a large number of people want a small amount, or something a small number of people want a large amount. Choose the latter.
Your ideal customer is that small number.
How to find yours, step by step
- Write the guess in one line. Who has the problem, and the moment it bites.
- Name the place they already talk about it. A forum, a subreddit, a group chat, a search they type. A Y Combinator talk on talking to users lists LinkedIn, Reddit, Slack or Discord communities and, sometimes, events in person among the most common places its founders found their early users.
- Talk to them, and ask about today. The same talk gives the questions: how do you do this today, what is the hardest part, why is it hard, how often, why does it matter, and what do you do about it yourself. It says to keep your idea back until the end of the call, or leave it out.
- Write down what they use today. A spreadsheet, a rival product, a person they pay, or nothing. By Blank's fourth mark, someone who has done nothing about the problem is not your first customer.
- Write down what it costs them. Money they already pay, hours they lose, a deadline they miss. The talk's first sign that a problem is worth money is that people already pay for another answer to it.
- Keep only the people who pass all three. If they are too mixed for one line, narrow again.
The formula in words: a person with the problem now, a place you can find them, something they use today and a cost they already carry. Take one away and you are still guessing.
A real one or a guess: three checks
Say you built a tool that chases unpaid invoices. The product and every number here are made up for the example.
| Check | A guess | A real one |
|---|---|---|
| Where they talk about it | Small business owners, somewhere online. | Freelance designers, in one forum where late payers come up again and again. |
| What they use today | Nothing. They only need to hear about it. | A spreadsheet of unpaid invoices and reminders written by hand. |
| What it costs them | It must be annoying. | Say 2 hours a month chasing, and 1 invoice in 10 paid late. |
Of the 20 people in the example at the top, the 3 with a spreadsheet are the profile. The 12 who said it sounds useful are the trap Paul Graham describes.
They don't want to use it themselves, at least not right now, but they could imagine other people wanting it. Sum that reaction across the entire population, and you have zero users.
The mistakes a new founder makes
- Naming everyone. "Small businesses" is a market, not a customer.
- Counting kind words. The Y Combinator talk puts asking whether someone would use your product among the questions not to ask: they will probably say yes, and it will mean nothing.
- Choosing people you cannot reach. Reach is one of the six things that decide whether a stranger pays.
- Treating the first guess as final. Do Things that Don't Scale, from July 2013, says the usual way to find the most promising users is to get a first set, watch which kind seems most enthusiastic and seek out more like them.
Which channels and pages it matters for
The place your ideal customer gathers picks the channel. Reddit, Hacker News, Product Hunt and LinkedIn and X are worth your time only if these people are there. Cold email and DMs start from a list of exactly these people. The words they use for the problem are the words to build pages around for SEO.
Positioning takes this person as its starting point and writes one sentence about your product around them. And when visitors do not sign up, the first check on nobody signing up is whether they are these people at all.
How Sami uses it
Sami works from the numbers you give it and the records AskSami keeps, says so when it has no data, and never invents a figure. The honest read, free once you sign up, scores the six things that decide whether a stranger pays as yes, partly or no, and marks one unknown where nothing on record shows it. Four of the six are this page's checks: a problem the buyer must solve, what failing costs them, their alternatives and whether you can reach them.
Signups and payments are tied to their source where the snippet in your product recorded one, so the record shows which place sends people who pay. The conversations are yours to have.
Questions people ask
What does ICP mean in marketing?
Ideal customer profile: a short written description of the kind of customer who needs your product most. Selling to companies, it describes the kind of company and the person inside it who feels the problem. Selling to people, it describes the person and the moment the problem bites.
How do I find my ideal customer if I have no customers yet?
Write a one line guess, then check three things: where those people already talk about the problem, what they use today and what it costs them. Keep only the people who pass all three.
How many people should I talk to before I decide?
A Y Combinator talk on talking to users moves on to conclusions after five or ten interviews, and says a five minute video call teaches more than 500 or 5,000 survey responses.
How narrow should my ideal customer be?
Narrow enough that you can name the place they gather and the thing they use today. Paul Graham's essay says to choose a small number of people who want the product a large amount.
Read next
- What is positioning, and how do I work out mine?
- What are Reddit's rules on promoting your own product?
- Is it legal to cold email or DM people about my product?
- Will my app make money, and when should I stop?
- Nobody is signing up to my app. What do I do?
- What is product market fit, and how do I know if I have it?
AskSami reads what you give it, all of it optional: your GitHub repository, up to 40 pages of your live site, and the screenshots, ad exports and payment exports. From that it writes an honest read of why the product does or does not sell, and a ranked plan of up to ten ways to get customers, free methods before paid ones.
Sources
- Steve Blank, Perfection By Subtraction, The Minimum Feature Set, posted 4 March 2010. Read on 8 October 2026.
- Paul Graham, How to Get Startup Ideas, November 2012. Read on 8 October 2026.
- Y Combinator, How to talk to users, a talk by Gustaf Alströmer in the YC Startup Library. Read on 8 October 2026.
- Paul Graham, Do Things that Don't Scale, July 2013. Read on 8 October 2026.
Checked on 17 October 2026. Every rule, price and figure on this page was read on the page it links to, on the day shown beside it above. They change, so open the source before you rely on one.