I've been listening to a few episodes now and it's crazy to me how most founders have no clue who their customers are.
You can't fix your landing page, ads or roadmap until you know who they're for.
I've automated most of this at HeadshotPro
Here's my setup
> 1. Ask during onboarding, not after
New teams answer 5 quick questions while setting up:
• What's your role?
• Where will the photos go?
• When will you need more?
• What would you do without us?
• Which feature would solve a problem for you?
It's part of setup, not a popup.
So most people actually answer.
> 2. Read every sales email
Agents pull the first message from every inbound lead and tag why they reached out.
It's almost never what you'd guess.
> 3. Track everything in PostHog
Every click, upload, edit and purchase is an event.
So we don't just know what people say they'll do.
We see what they actually do in the product.
> 4. Check what they say against what they pay
We match every survey answer to their PostHog events and payment data.
The people who answer your surveys the most are often not the ones paying you the most.
> 5. Turn it into an ICP
Agents put everything into one doc using the SPICED framework:
• Situation: what's true before they find you
• Pain: the problem, in their own words
• Impact: what changes once it's solved
• Critical event: what makes them buy now
• Decision: who signs up, who approves, what they check
Then we split customers by pain, not by industry or company size.
Every pain gets its own message, objection and landing page angle.
We also note who finds you (the champion) and who pays (the approver).
Plus a checklist of good-fit and bad-fit signals.
That doc runs our landing pages, ads, sales replies and roadmap.
> 6. Keep it running
New answers come in every day.
So the ICP never goes stale.
No calls. No guessing.
Ask at the right moment and check it against who actually pays.
New Smart Bear Live E12 just dropped!
Post Bridge loses 20% of its customers each month. Its founder knows narrowing to an ICP should be smart but "it doesn't feel like that."
Cohost @tibo_maker and I workshop it with @jackfriks (Post Bridge):