The Bootstrapped Founder

Hey. It's Arvid, and this is the Bootstrap founder. Let's talk about handling multiple ICPs, that's ideal customer profiles, as a solo founder. This is something that I've been wrestling with a lot at Podscan over the last year and a half. And I know that many of you face the exact same challenge that I've been facing.

You're building this product that could serve two or three or maybe even five different ideal customer profiles from different industries, different kinds of people. And you're trying to figure out how to keep them all balanced, how to learn about them, how to deal with them, or whether you should even try. And before we get to that, a word from our sponsor paddle.com because no matter how many customer types I have, I charge them all the same way by using Paddle as my merchant of record. They take care of all the taxes, sales tax and stuff, the currencies, they track declined transactions, try to recapture them for me, they update credit cards when that needs to happen so that I can focus on dealing with my competitors and my customers and not with banks and financial regulators along the way. If you think you would rather just want to build your own product and focus on that, do check out paddle.com as your payment provider.

I run a small software as a service business that has several ideal customer profiles just by the nature of what Podscan is. And as somebody with limited time and limited capacity to make a product appealing to particular groups, and I'm doing this pretty much solo, I have learned how to juggle trying to sell to several different potential audiences at the same time. Or more like I had to learn how to do this right because that's just what the dynamics of trying to build this business on my own have kind of forced me into. And no matter how much we try to niche down with these businesses, which is something that a lot of founders do very intentionally, we often find that when it's software we are building something that is by design quite flexible and that's so flexible that different kinds of people can use it. Just look at Peter Levels Photo AI, for example.

And this is ostensibly a b to c product, so it's not necessarily the same thing that most indie hackers build when they build these kind of b to b enterprise y or at least, like, fewer customers' products. But even with the b to c product, this serves as a good example because it serves pretty much everybody, but some people more than others. It's trying to serve people who need passport photos while he also is serving people who are using these AI generated photos for marketing purposes or for social media posting or to put it into the dating app profiles. And there's so many different audiences that he could potentially serve. But if you look on the photo.ai website, you see that he picked out a couple to actually serve well and wants to serve as many of them as possible.

But even there in the b to c world where everybody could be a customer because everybody needs photos, Peter niches down to a couple of these ICPs. And this gets I'm not sure if you should call it gets worse at this point, but it it becomes more prevalent when you're going into the world of b to b, into the world of bigger companies or even enterprise where you're trying to serve these larger businesses with their products. In an enterprise situation, customers expect to be very clearly spoken to by marketing materials. It's not necessarily the same for b to c where people are like, okay, is this something for me? B to b people expect to be clearly told this is for you.

If you're trying to speak from the same location to many different people, you are effectively diluting your own messaging by just trying to reach multiple people at the same time. Yet there is a lot of value in trying to reach different customer profiles, particularly for businesses that are still very early because in this phase of trying to find product market fit, you don't want to set your sights on one particular customer too early. You still want to be able to experiment and see what else is out there and if you can reach them maybe better than anyone you've ever reached before. And that's my personal experience. That has been my personal experience with Podscan two.

If you've been listening to past episodes of my podcast over the last year and a half or so almost two years at this point really you find that not only did I set out to serve multiple customer types at the same time, I even went back and forth between which one I prioritized at any given time. For me, these customer groups were the marketing departments, the marketers, the public relations agencies, founders in the media and podcasting world, these kind of two ish, three ish groups depending on if you put the first two in a bucket or if they are independent from each other. I'm still not fully decided on this. This should tell you everything about how flexible these groups are. And I recently added a couple more to this.

I found that news agencies are a wonderful customer type for PodScan because more and more of them have signed up and actually find value. And even SEO professionals now draw value from my automated systems. So maybe that's four or five different groups of people and all of them I try to reach in particular ways. I will try to share with you how I go about this because unless you're really clearly aware if you're going to focus all your efforts on you kind of have to spread out your efforts for all these different groups. And I learned that you can't really target everyone at least not at the same time.

That's important for a Sodopreneur. That just spreads out your efforts too much and you really don't get any clear results there. If you have two or three different customer types and you run three experiments, one for each, and sign ups go up, which one worked? If you don't really track exactly where these people came from or if you do track it but you're not really sure which of your efforts did the conversion bit, then it's not that meaningful. You can't really learn anything from the process other that you ran three things and one, two, three potentially of them worked.

So personally for somebody who has limited time and limited attention, that's pretty much every founder out there, I would focus very much on one effort at a time. And that looked like improving particular parts of the product or having conversations with particular kinds of people, kinds of customers at any given time for me. Often I would just really attempt to focus on the let's say Podscan API which is something that is more intensely used by my founder ICP. So I would make sure that all my trialing founders get exactly what they need on the API. I would reach out to them and explicitly talk to them about what API stuff they would need right now because I saw them tentatively exploring the API.

Well, what can I do to actually build this into your product? That's what I would ask. And I would probably ignore a little bit the non founder trial users and what they were telling me, or I would put it at least in the backlog just to make sure that I could serve that one particular vertical in my prospect base that I was focusing on. And then other times, obviously, it would switch back and forth. Right?

I would think we've worked enough on API, that's good now, people have what they need and if there's anything else they will tell me and I need to get back to people who actually use the platform, the website and I would see what these PR and marketing people needed. And for that in particular, demos became incredibly valuable, both for classification, but also for what do these people need in particular. So I have a demo button, like Book a Demo in the application where people pretty much self select into talking to me by how ambitious they were with what they were going to build on the product. Like, the most ambitious people, the people who have felt a pain the strongest were often the ones booking a demo. And those demos were really good for me.

During the demo like this, I could figure out first off which bucket of my customer types do they fall into. That was often clear before. You could just check the domain and see, you know, where do these people come from, what are they building. Maybe I could even check what alerts have they set up or what have they used the platform for because I tracked this. But sometimes it became extremely apparent during the demo when it wasn't before.

And then I could ask really precise questions about what their job to be done was, which would help me to figure out what I could do to help them further. I could ask them what they thought they needed from me. I could try to figure out what they didn't even know they might need but were looking for in the products, in the outcomes that they were interested in and what alternatives they were currently using. All that kind of stuff was quite evident during those demo sessions because I could just ask them. Right?

That's something you don't really do during sign up, but you can in an actual conversation with somebody who is already kind of preselected into your vicinity. Right? They already are interested enough to actually go through the ordeal. That's what I would call it of a call, of a conversation, right? To take time out of the day to talk to you.

So if you can actually offer people a demo of your product, no matter if your product is kind of self explanatory or not, offer that demo because that will give you so many opportunities to talk to your customer and figure out what they are and what they are about and what they need that no other system ever will. But since I can't have a demo with every single customer, I think 50 to a 100 people sign up to PodScan every single day, well, there are other things that I built. And I'm just gonna go through the whole funnel from where they find it to when they sign up and how they use the product, starting with dedicated landing pages. I've created a landing page for each of my ideal customer profiles. Each of these ICPs has a landing page dedicated to them in a way that highlights particular values of the platform that are relevant for that particular group.

You usually have these things in your footer or header navigation, a link to solutions, and in those solutions, either a dropdown or a stand alone page, you have solutions for, in my case, media businesses, PR agencies, founders, podcast owners, SEO people, and so on. That's what my homepage has both in header and in the footer. And on those pages, I highlight most the very goal oriented solutions that the platform offers. If you're a news agency, for example, and you're coming to Podscan, you'll find that the news agency landing page says you'll get real time information about breaking topics. You'll be able to see trends and how certain topics are getting more and more traction before they become mainstream that's the kind of stuff that news agencies care about because that's their mission is to report things before others report them whereas if you are a PR agency I highlight that it makes it very easy to find wherever one of their clients might have reputation risk.

When somebody is complaining about them or there's a public flogging of a certain company Potskin makes it easy to be alerted when this happens and that's what I communicate on that particular landing page and in that way people coming there from Google or wherever they get this landing page from they become quite aware of how our product is meant for them. This is Podscan for you. This is what Podscan can help you with it was built for them and is usable and useful to them and by them and that's something that I feel I have to very clearly communicate because it can be used by so many different kinds of people but each of them should feel like I'm speaking directly to their needs. And that goes on throughout this process because when then people choose to register in PodScan, they can select between a couple of options. I have this in the registration screen.

I get their name, their email, and I ask them for what they're working on, what they wanna use PodScan for, and then I have a couple of options that they can self select into. Stuff like, I'm here to look at data. I'm here to look at transcripts. I'm here to look at an API. I'm here to search for stuff.

This changes over time. It's kind of an experiment that I'm running as well to see how I can be more precise in figuring out what people need, but they can pretty much self select into I'm an analyst, I'm a founder, I'm a podcast owner, or I just want to look at a transcript. And I don't necessarily ask them specifically for the industry that they're from. I tend to be able to track this through the landing page. But even if I didn't know this, that happens in the next step in the in platform onboarding that I do.

Because when people come to Podscan for the first time, a wizard pops up, right, like a screen that guides them through the first couple steps, which quite literally asks them what they want to do. And while this is open I take the email domain and maybe the project name and their name that they gave me and do a background AI agentic search to figure out who they are, how I can present data to them, what I can suggest for them to set up, how can I make the platform immediately useful to this person? That's one of the more elaborate onboarding AI automation systems that I've built. And I think I talked about this on the podcast a couple weeks ago, how I set this up as well. And with that, I very quickly figure out who people are, what they do, and what kind of customer group they belong to.

I note this in my back end with my scoring system in the CRM, and I try to sort each of these customers into the brackets during onboarding. I try to make it as apparent as possible what people of their customer type find most useful. And this is still an ongoing thing. I still haven't really changed the UI for any particular customer type, but I'm working on pulling certain features up and putting certain features further down the page for people who I know won't be using them as much just to make the primary value most apparent on a per customer group basis. And that's the in product and onboarding.

Now the way I market to these particular groups and the way I sell to them is also wildly different and that's something that I realized super quickly. You cannot expect a single process to work for every single kind of customer that you have. It just does not work. My founder customers are almost exclusively coming to me, to the product, through my founder network or through the larger founder communities in which I or the people who use my product are active. That means I don't reach them via cold email or something like this.

Makes no sense. Founders get cold emails all the time. They don't really respond well to them. But what helps is that people recommend me and the product both like me as a person, as a founder and the product. People who are working let's say with the API who've used Podscan before are recommending Podscan to somebody who they know might benefit from it which is why you will hear at the end of this podcast and at the end of every single podcast that I've had for the last couple of years a shout out asking people to recommend me and POTScan to their peers which they do this works and whenever somebody highlights POTScan or their use of POTScan on social media I very strongly amplify it as well I'm very grateful publicly because I actually am grateful for them shouting it out and I try to expose them to my own audience so that they will be benefiting from more reach and be further encouraged to share this stuff on Twitter.

Now just a couple days ago my dear founder friend Rob Walling shared publicly on Twitter how Podscan finds very interesting mentions of his name and the brands that he's interested in and the conversations around them to his own audience of almost 40,000 followers. On a meta level I know that he'll be notified of this mention on this podcast by Podscan as well and he will have another opportunity to talk about it. There's value in having a strong network of amazing successful founders that know about your product, that use your product, and then spread it among their founder peers or other people that are interested in this and might be interested in being a customer of this product. And that's my logic here. And that's how that works for my ICP of founders.

I have founders talk about it so that other founders learn about it. But this would never work for marketers or PR agencies because that's not my network. To reach these people I have to find alternative ways. That's directed sales, it's cold outreach, social outreach, being present on LinkedIn, going into specific communities that I know that these people go to or at least listening to people's complaints and trying to figure out how to interact with them to highlight the benefit of potentially using Podscan that could be in specialist newsletters that they are subscribed to or Reddit, something like that. But it has to be different for each of my ICPs because these people communicate very differently between each of these groups they hang out in wildly different locations they deal with cold emails differently and they take peer recommendations either into account or they don't even give them because for some of my customer types using Podscan is a massive edge that they will not share with their peers.

Where a founder would immediately tell all of the other founders they know that they'd found a really cool way to increase their leads or reduce churn for a financial analyst that has just found a new way to forecast a really good investment strategy or investment trend. Well, they're not going to share this with their peers. Right that's who they are competing with for forecasting and trend analysis they're not going to tell them having this edge is a barrier to word-of-mouth marketing here so I need to have different ways to reach them and I need to show them the edge that they might be having that somebody else already has but I cannot rely on that person telling them. And all of the methods are very different between each of these groups and I found that I have to have a different outreach marketing and sales approach and process for each of these ICPs. My biggest learning in all of this is even though I am doing all of this personally, I have to almost be a different persona for each of them in terms of how I approach it, but even how I present myself.

When I talk to my founder peers, for example, I can be colloquial, I can use memes, can be funny, I can use references from the founder community but I have to be much more professional when I talk to PR agencies who themselves are often like representatively formal to their clients. You have to speak the local language of that community when you're in there you have to learn this or find somebody who knows it if you want to be able to build a strong base into each of these profile groups and between different onboarding systems and different internal feature presentations per customer group and process isolation, I would almost call it, when it comes to how to reach out and convert your customers, that's what I've so far learned with Podscan about having different ICPs. This is one of the first businesses that I've ever had that has these wildly different customer profiles. Before it was usually one customer profile very intensely served, but now it's different that I have to juggle. And while it's complex, while it requires me to context switch and be different things to different people I think it's pretty valuable and pretty interesting to think about it keeps me from getting too narrow too early and has kept me from like hyper zooming in on one audience where others could also benefit and it helps me discover these unexpected use cases that ultimately bring in more experience for other people and they can learn from this transfer the knowledge into their own use of the product it makes the product stronger for everyone The key to me is not trying to be everything to everyone at once, but being very intentional about when and how I serve each group.

I time box my experiments, I create dedicated experiences along the way, and I've learned to speak each group's language in a certain way, not just in the marketing copy, but in how I think about their problems and present my solutions. That's the reality, I think, of building this flexible kind of software product in today's market. The software is already flexible, but the product and the business behind it needs to be flexible too. The job role here is real. But I think with the right systems in place and an isolation approach to them, it's absolutely manageable, even as a solo founder.

And that's it for today. Thank you so much for listening to the Bootstr founder. And I told you, you can find me on Twitter at avidkal and if there's somebody who wants to know what everybody's saying about their brand on over 4,000,000 podcasts at this point, well, Pod Scan tracks mentions in near real time with a powerful API that turns podcast conversations into actionable data then if you yourself are hunting for your next business idea get them delivered fresh from the podcast world at ideas.podscan.fm where an AI system extracts the best startup opportunities from hundreds of hours of expert conversations every day. Please do share this with anybody who needs to stay ahead of the conversation.