🚀 How to define ideal customer profile (ICP)?

3 tactics for a well-defined ICP

📏 Have specific and measurable qualities

• Ensure absolute clarity across the following areas:

  • Company size (e.g., 1,000–5,000 employees) or revenue range 

  • Type of business (e.g., B2B SaaS, e-commerce)

  • Geography (e.g., country, region, specific language)

  • Industries served (e.g., manufacturing, government, banks) 

  • Job titles (e.g., engineering manager, social media manager)

  • Company specifics that define your problem statement (e.g., sales over Zoom, design focused, cost focused, developer led)

  • Specific technologies used (e.g., a cloud data warehouse, GitHub)

  • Unique buyer behaviors (e.g., only use specific messaging platforms or information sources)

  • Has a problem that is defineable and solvable (e.g., works in the cloud and needs to connect across clouds)

• Avoid generalizations or vague answers (e.g., mid-size companies or enterprises that use computers)

👂 Conduct listening tours with customer cohorts

• Interview both successful and lost customers and answer:

  • Which customers get the most out of the product?

  • What traits do the best customers share?

  • What objections are there from lost customers?

  • Who’s easiest to upsell and why?

  • What do competitors’ customers have in common?

• Look for patterns in good-fit customer profiles—and antipatterns in poor-fit ones

🔄 Continuously refine the ICP

• ICP changes over time—market, product, and customers evolve with growth

• Product enhancements may unlock new use cases or capabilities (E.g. adding features for 10k+ seats can shift focus from SMB to mid-market or enterprise)

• Ask: Do expanded product capabilities open access to new markets? If yes, revisit the ICP

2 traps to avoid

🚨Mistaking Annual Contract Value (ACV) as a good fit

• Best-fit customers = fast revenue growth, high lifetime value, short sales cycle and high retention

• Big logos ≠ best customers

• High ACV doesn’t always indicate long-term success—some may be outliers or one-off wins

🚨Treating ICPs and personas as interchangeable

• ICPs defines which businesses to target; personas define how to engage stakeholders within those businesses

• Use personas to help anticipate potential blockers in sales process—not to define the market

• Building sales strategy around personas instead of ICP risks targeting the right people in the wrong companies

1 tool to leverage

📖 Best practice on identifying ICP

• A well-defined ICP is uncomfortably narrow—so specific that others might think it’s crazy to build something so niche

• Leverage tools like Keyplay to identify and prioritize ICP accounts

Bonus: 1 trend to spark startup ideas

📈 AI is 10x bigger than the cloud boom, with AI agent economy being the next frontier

• Software alone was a $400B market. AI is going after both software and services at the same time—2 huge markets

• With 5.6B people online and instant distribution via platforms like Reddit, X, and TikTok, AI is now mainstream—deployed across industries and matching Reddit in engagement

• Individual AI tools are evolving into agent networks that collaborate, reason, and complete tasks autonomously

• The emerging agent economy will act like a real market—agents will trade value, track trust, take action, and communicate seamlessly

• Three core tech challenges remain:

  • Memory — agents must remember users and past interactions

  • Communication — protocols like TCP/IP for AI networks

  • Security & Trust — new models for identity and safe agent interaction