The Startup Guide to Finding Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)

Why Your Initial ICP Matters

Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is your revenue north star. Without it, you’ll waste months chasing prospects who either don’t need your product or aren’t able to buy it. Or worse, you’ll win the wrong prospects and learn the wrong lessons.

When you focus outside your ICP, the damage goes beyond wasted time. You distort your early learnings and start basing product and go-to-market (GTM) decisions based on feedback from people who were never going to be great customers. This is how teams accidentally subvert their own product-market fit journey and GTM strategies.

When you sell a bad fit, it often leads to a lack of focus across the company. These customers consume a disproportionate amount of Customer Success and Support hours. After draining internal resources, these customers often churn because they don’t realize the product’s value. The other cost is that it often leaves your ideal customers under-supported in the process.

At my last startup, we learned this the hard way. Early on, we sold to a mix of SMBs and large enterprises. The feedback was contradictory and confusing. SMBs told us our platform was “too expensive” while enterprise prospects thought it was “cheap.” The more we sold outside our true ICP, the muddier the picture became.

It wasn’t until we committed fully to Enterprise clients, big logos like Coca-Cola, that the signal became clear. Our product positioning, pricing, and roadmap started making sense because we were finally hearing feedback from the right customers. We even restructured our Customer Success model to prioritize Enterprise clients, aligning our resources with the customers who would actually drive our growth.

Selling outside your ICP slows you down and it actively points you in the wrong direction.

The Product Focus Problem

At an early-stage startup, multiple ICPs can often lead to building fundamentally different products, fragmenting development resources and delaying progress on both fronts.

I recently coached a founder with an AI learning platform serving two distinct markets. One set of prospects were interested in replacing teaching assistants, while others wanted to use the platform for assessing oral exams. These weren’t different marketing angles for the same product, they were different products sharing some underlying technology.

Each market demanded distinct feature sets, technical complexity, and execution capabilities. Trying to serve both simultaneously essentially meant running two startups with one team’s resources. This results in a product that can’t reach the quality needed to confidently scale sales. The bottleneck is product readiness, not market demand.

Early-stage startups have limited engineering bandwidth. Spreading it across multiple product visions guarantees slower progress everywhere. Pick one ICP, build something exceptional for them, then expand to adjacent markets after proving execution capability.

The Multiple ICP Messaging Problem

Multiple ICPs also create a communication problem that paralyzes founder confidence. One of the clearest symptoms is when Founders can’t consistently explain what their company does. This happens when Founders try to serve multiple value propositions simultaneously. 

An early-stage Founder recently told me, “Every time someone asks what do you do, I actually cringe because I don’t know how to pitch my own company.” 

The root cause wasn’t bad messaging, it was serving two distinct ICPs with fundamentally different value propositions. 

Until Founders pick one to focus on, no amount of messaging work can create clarity. You can’t articulate a clear identity when you’re trying to be different things to different people.

ICP Isn’t Aspirational, It’s Operational

Most Founders define their ICP as the logos they wish they could close. Fortune 500s, industry giants, the accounts that would look great on a pitch deck. But ICP isn’t aspirational. It’s operational.

Your ICP should reflect where you can consistently win. If you anchor ICP to accounts you’re not yet ready for, you waste months chasing deals you can’t close. You burn cycles trying to win whales with a rowboat.

The gap between current and aspirational ICP is usually about capabilities, not market demand. Maybe Enterprise prospects love your product but require SOC 2 certification you don’t have yet. Or your solution works but lacks the integrations Enterprise customers expect. Be honest about what’s actually holding you back. It’s rarely the product value itself.

An aspirational ICP can be important and can provide you with direction. But your current, operational ICP is what drives revenue today. Align the company around the customers you can actually serve, and you’ll create the clarity and momentum to climb to the next stage.

The Discipline to Focus

Why is it so hard for early-stage startups to focus? The biggest reasons I see are: 

1) A fearful scarcity mindset that naturally comes with early survival mode

 2) Founders genuinely love their products and keep dreaming up all sorts of ways it can be used to help the world, making it hard to focus on just one idea.

3) Focus often feels boring. It can be repetitive and lacks the novelty hit you get from chasing new markets or use cases.

It’s hard to focus when you’re hungry for revenue. Saying “no” feels like leaving food on the table. You’ll always have more opportunities than resources. That’s why the discipline to focus is so hard. It forces you to choose and choosing means letting go.

Focus is a discipline and it can be uncomfortable. It means resisting the temptation to chase every “maybe” and committing to go deep with your ICP, even when it feels slow. Focusing on your ICP isn’t easy. It’s easy to say “yes” to your ICP, but it’s much harder to say “no” to deals that aren’t in it.

The spray-and-pray approach  might feel productive, but it produces shallow insights and inconsistent results. Iterating inside a narrow ICP feels monotonous at times  but it compounds. The more conversations you have with the right customers, the sharper your message, the stronger your product-market fit, and the faster your growth curve over time.

Rigorous focus is how you win early. Not volume. Not variety. Go deep.

How to Determine Your ICP Hypothesis

Creating your ICP hypothesis isn’t about getting it perfect from day one, it’s about forming a focused hypothesis that you can test, iterate, and refine. Most importantly, it provides you with clarity and focus.

Start broad by identifying industry, company characteristics, and geography first. ICP is about industries and organizations, not individuals initially. 

Evaluate your ICP based on these factors:

1. Strength of Product’s Value
   • “Do they need it?”
   • Does your prospect have a real need or desire for your solution? 
   • Prioritize prospects with stronger pain points or excitement (e.g. revenue growth often trumps cost savings).
2. Product Readiness
   • “Can you deliver it?”
   • Assess your product’s feature completeness and technical complexity
   • Evaluate your team’s execution capability for this specific use case
   • Choose the ICP where you have higher delivery confidence over larger market opportunities
3. Average Deal Size
   • “Is it worth pursuing?”
   • Targeting higher-value opportunities usually beats chasing small fish.
4. Ease of Sale
   • “How hard will it be to close?”
   • Consider the sales cycle, decision-making processes, procurement processes, and expected conversion rates.
   • Whale hunting can be exciting but it’s often better to target deer at this stage.
5. Qualifying Characteristics
   • “Do they have budget and authority?”
   • Define clear parameters like organizational size (e.g. 50-500 employees).
6. Scalability 
   • “Can you repeat this at scale?”
   • Ensure the market is large enough and assess repeatability.

Your ICP hypothesis should focus on the accounts that drive revenue today. But it’s normal to also have an aspirational ICP, the accounts you wish you could serve. For most startups, this means moving upmarket from SMB to Enterprise. 

As you’re going through this exercise, be brutally realistic about the gap between your current ICP and your aspirational ICP. Ask the hard question: What’s holding us back from reaching our aspirational ICP? 

For example, maybe you have strong product-market fit with mid-market companies, but enterprise deals require dedicated customer success resources you can’t provide yet. However, you can use these mid-market deals to help you build toward Enterprise readiness – whether that’s hiring CS staff, developing implementation processes, or creating the case studies Enterprise buyers need to see.

But what happens when you’ve evaluated multiple ICPs and they score similarly across these factors?

When ICPs Look Equal: Breaking the Tie

Sometimes Founders work through the evaluation framework and don’t have a clear winner when two ICPs score similarly across multiple factors. When this happens, they need additional criteria to break the tie.

Sustained Energy and Motivation

Consider which market you’ll stay excited about during the inevitable grind of outbound prospecting. Building a pipeline requires hundreds of conversations with strangers who will mostly say no. The ICP that energizes you during this process has a significant advantage.

It may sound frivolous but enthusiasm for your market directly impacts execution quality.

Speed to Market

When factors are equal, choose the ICP that lets you launch and iterate fastest. Consider which market has fewer regulatory hurdles, simpler procurement processes, or shorter decision cycles. Getting to market quickly often matters more than targeting the theoretically better segment.

Learning Velocity

Ask which ICP will teach you more valuable lessons quickly. Some markets provide rapid, clear feedback on product-market fit. Others have longer feedback loops that slow your learning. Choose the market that will accelerate your understanding of what works.

When your framework produces similar scores, trust these judgment calls. The goal isn’t perfect optimization, it’s making a decision you can execute on confidently.

Developing Your Prospecting Strategy

Once you’ve nailed your initial ICP, your prospecting strategy becomes clear:

• Inbound vs. Outbound
  • Does your ICP lend itself to inbound or outbound lead strategies? 
• Identify Your Target Persona
  • Who within the ICP organization has decision-making authority for the problem your product solves?
• Value Proposition & Messaging
  • Tailor your messaging not just to ICP’s pains but also to the persona’s role and motivations.
• Contact Method
  • Match your outreach to your ICP. For example, cold calling often resonates better with SMBs, whereas Enterprise might respond more effectively to targeted LinkedIn outreach.

Start, Learn, and Iterate

As a first goal, proactively reach out to 50-100 potential clients that fit your initial ICP hypothesis. Engage them directly in conversations about their business pains and try to validate (or invalidate) your ICP assumptions.

You’ll quickly identify mismatches and refine your ICP further. Over time, you’ll be able to build a stronger lead scoring system, which can help you reliably gauge prospect value and focus your sales efforts.

Selling to everyone equals closing no one. Your success depends on your ability to define your ICP early, test it aggressively, and stay ruthlessly focused.

Next up in the Founder Led Sales Series: Developing Your Prospecting Strategy, where I break down how to build a prospecting strategy that turns your ICP into a repeatable, scalable deal pipeline.

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