Should my ideal customer be the person who pays or the person who uses the product?
The short answer
Separate the two early because they often aren't the same person, and your whole go-to-market shifts depending on who you center. Whoever holds the budget and feels the pain enough to sign off is who you sell to, but if the daily user hates the product they will kill renewals, so you design for the user and pitch to the buyer. When they conflict, follow the money for who your ICP is, then treat delighting the user as the thing that keeps the money. This is a judgment call, not a rule, so map both explicitly for your specific deal.
Go deeper, your way
3 hand-picked resources, 3 link-checked. Pick how you want to dig in.
🎧 Podcast
✓ Link checkedFreeIntermediate
Why we picked it
Elena Verna has built growth at SurveyMonkey, Miro, and others, and this episode is a founder-level walkthrough of exactly the tension in your question: you design and win the individual user first, then convert the person or company who pays. She unpacks product-led sales versus product-led growth and how usage signals turn into a buying decision, so you stop guessing whether to optimize for the adopter or the payer. Treat it as one experienced operator's map, not a verdict for every business.
Why we picked it
This is the cleanest breakdown we found of who is actually involved in a purchase: economic buyer, champion, end user, technical buyer, and more, each with different priorities. It makes the core point behind your question, that the person who pays and the person who uses the product are usually different people, and treating them as one is where founders misfire. Read it as a map of the room, not a rulebook.
Why we picked it
Van der Kooij's Winning by Design frameworks are the practical standard for thinking about who you sell to in a real SaaS deal, not in the abstract. The book gives you a concrete way to separate the buyer, the user, and the champion inside an account and design your motion around each, which is the working answer to whether your ideal customer is the payer or the user (it is both, playing different roles). Reach for this once you are past the idea stage and actually running deals.
