We plan to bring eChai across 100 cities in India. The next eChai Startup Demo Day is on 29 August in Bengaluru and Pune. The next after that is on 26 September, all in person. 11 cities confirmed, 345 founders registered. Any city that reaches 20 interested founders is on too. See your city
Understand your customers

How do I know if I'm targeting the wrong customer?

Watch your best customers, not your loudest. If the people who onboard fastest, churn least, and refer most look nothing like who you're marketing to, your ICP is wrong, follow the money and the love. Firing bad-fit customers is a growth strategy, not a failure.

Go deeper

2 resources, 1 link-checked.

📄 Article
✓ Link checked Free Intermediate

One of the few pieces that clearly untangles ICP vs persona vs JTBD without jargon, so founders stop conflating them. Useful as the connective tissue across this whole cluster.

Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs), ABM, JTBD and Personas: knowing your customer

From netretention.io by Net Retention ~14 min read

  • ICP = the best-fit account; persona = the human inside it who feels the pain
  • JTBD explains the progress the persona is trying to make
  • Use each concept for the decision it's actually good at
  • Ground personas in real research, not imagination
Open netretention.io →
📄 Article
Free Intermediate

A PM-turned-founder's playbook that treats defining the right customer and problem as a sequence of concrete hurdles, not abstractions. Strong on iterating your ICP as you learn.

8 Product Hurdles Every Founder Must Clear

From First Round Review by First Round Review ~18 min read

  • Nail a specific product thesis and ICP before deciding what to build
  • Follow your best-fit customers to correct a wrong target
  • Continuously refine both the customer profile and the problem
  • Treat targeting as an evolving hypothesis you keep sharpening
Open review.firstround.com →

Terms in this answer

Ideal Customer Profile Churn

People also ask

What is an ideal customer profile and how do I define mine? 2 → How specific should my target customer be when I'm just starting? 3 → What's the difference between an ICP, a buyer persona, and a target market? 2 → Should I focus on one customer segment or serve everyone who'll pay? 2 → How do I build customer personas that are actually useful and not fiction? 2 → How do I find my ICP when I'm selling to Indian SMBs who don't fit clean B2B categories? 3 →

Also in How Founders Use AI

How founders actually use AI for this, over in Market Research.

How do founders validate a startup idea with AI in a weekend? 20 → How do I use AI to map competitors, pricing, and positioning? 22 →

Also in GTM

The same ground, over in Who you sell to, and why they care, our GTM track.

What is an ICP and how is it different from a persona? People use both words for the same thing. 4 → What is positioning in plain English, and why does everyone insist we have got it wrong? 3 →
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