Tool

Make My Persona

HubSpot Free Beginner

A quick, free way to get a first-draft persona document out of your head and onto one page, useful exactly because our short answer warns against over-investing here. Use it to produce something shareable in ten minutes, not as a research process in itself. Fine for a first pass, not a substitute for actually talking to customers.

  • A persona document should take minutes to draft, not days.
  • Capture goals, pain points, and communication preferences, skip decorative demographic filler.
  • Export it and move on to validating it with real conversations.
Open on hubspot.com ↗

It answers 5 questions

  1. What's the difference between an ICP, a buyer persona, and a target market?
  2. How do I know if I'm targeting the wrong customer?
  3. How do I build customer personas that are actually useful and not fiction?
  4. How specific should my ideal customer be for a consumer app versus a B2B tool?
  5. How do I define an ideal customer for a two-sided marketplace where I have to pick two of them?

Read with it

  1. The single best thing ever written on customer conversations. It teaches you to ask about the customer's life and past... momtestbook.com Book · ~130 pages The Mom Test Rob Fitzpatrick
  2. The permission slip to recruit users by hand, do things manually, and deliver 'insanely great' experiences to your first few... paulgraham.com Essay · ~15 min read Do Things That Don't Scale Paul Graham
  3. Market size is meaningless until you know exactly who you're for, and Lenny turns that into a concrete, repeatable ICP exercise... Lenny's Newsletter Article · ~15 min read How to identify your ideal customer profile (ICP) Lenny Rachitsky
  4. The best book on positioning against competitors by understanding the alternatives customers actually consider. Directly turns... aprildunford.com Book · ~200 pages Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It April Dunford
  5. Turns the vague feeling of product-market fit into a number you can move. Ask users how they would feel if they could no longer... First Round Review Article · ~20 min read How Superhuman Built an Engine to Find Product/Market Fit Rahul Vohra
  6. One of the few pieces that clearly untangles ICP vs persona vs JTBD without jargon, so founders stop conflating them. Useful as... netretention.io Article · ~14 min read Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs), ABM, JTBD and Personas: knowing your customer Net Retention
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