An ICP describes the company you want as a customer: size, industry, what they already use, what has to be true for your product to matter. A persona describes the human inside that company: their title, what they get judged on, what makes them look good or bad. You need both and they do different jobs. The ICP tells you which doors to knock on, the persona tells you what to say when someone opens. A useful ICP is uncomfortably narrow and written as filters you could actually apply to a list, not as adjectives like 'modern' or 'fast growing'.
4 hand-picked resources, 4 link-checked. Pick how you want to dig in.
Why we picked it Finding your ICP starts with interviews you are not allowed to sell in, and this is the clearest guide to running them. The rule about avoiding hypothetical questions alone will save you from a fake ICP.
On Y Combinator Startup School by Eric Migicovsky ~30 min
Why we picked it The clearest single hour on how positioning, segmentation and personas differ and how they connect to the sales call. Dunford has done this with 200+ companies including Postman, so the examples are concrete.
On Lenny's Podcast by April Dunford ~60 min
Open lennysnewsletter.com →Why we picked it A real company showing its ICP before and after, including the messy middle where they were guessing. The point that narrow ICPs beat broad ones, and that refinement takes 3 to 12 months, is the honest version nobody puts on a slide.
From Product for Engineers (PostHog) by Andy Vandervell ~12 min read
Open newsletter.posthog.com →Why we picked it Five questions you can answer this afternoon from data you already have, including the underused one about what objections churned customers gave you. Written by a16z's GTM network partner, so it is built for operators rather than theorists.
From Andreessen Horowitz by Michael King ~10 min read
Open a16z.com →How who you sell to reads from a different seat.
The same ground, over in Understand your customers, our Starting Up track.
