Article · ~15 min read

How to identify your ideal customer profile (ICP)

Lenny Rachitsky · Lenny's Newsletter Freemium Intermediate

Market size is meaningless until you know exactly who you're for, and Lenny turns that into a concrete, repeatable ICP exercise from real B2B operators. It grounds your SAM in an actual customer definition instead of a fuzzy segment.

  • Define the specific customer you serve before you size the market, not after.
  • A sharp ICP makes your bottom-up market math credible and your GTM focused.
  • Narrowing 'who it's for' is what makes a small beachhead winnable.
Open on lennysnewsletter.com ↗

It answers 15 questions

  1. 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?
  4. Should I focus on one customer segment or serve everyone who'll pay?
  5. How do I build a targeted list of the right people to cold email?
  6. How do I build customer personas that are actually useful and not fiction?
  7. How do I find my ICP when I'm selling to Indian SMBs who don't fit clean B2B categories?
  8. How do I define an ideal customer for a product no one is searching for yet?
  9. How do I know if I've defined my ICP too narrowly and I'm leaving obvious customers out?
  10. How do I define my ideal customer when I'm a domain expert who thinks everyone in my industry needs this?
  11. How specific should my ideal customer be for a consumer app versus a B2B tool?
  12. How do I define an ideal customer for a two-sided marketplace where I have to pick two of them?

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