How to find a Target Customer
Once you have defined a customer problem, it’s time to look at who has these problems in more details. Too often, startups fall into the trap of targeting "everyone", which leads to poor problem-solution fit and enormous investments into marketing. Here, we'll be broadly looking at different segments of target customers. In later stages, we'll start learning about the clients in more details.
What are Target Customers?
In its essence, customer segment or target customers or target market is a group of people to whom your company wants to sell the solution.
Why are Target Customers important?
They streamline the other parts of your business model by helping you figure out what solution to build, how to build it, and what kind of revenue model to use. Overall they help you to achieve a product-market fit.
They enable you to find the right people to conduct deeper interviews / surveys in Part 2, Blocks 8 & 10.
How to segment Target Customers?
Start brainstorming about:
What kind of potential customers are most likely to have the above mentioned problems?
Can you segment them based on certain criteria and identify 1-5 types of target clients? The criteria can be:
Demographic (age, sex, marital status, family size, occupation, education level, income, religion...)
Geographic (location, population density, climate)
Behavioral (purchasing behavior, benefits sought, customer journey stage, usage, timing/occasion, customer satisfaction, loyalty, interest, engagement level, user status...)
Psychographic (mental and emotional attributes: personality traits, beliefs, values, attitudes, lifestyles)
You can use the following Framework: Target customer as guidance to identify customer segments.
Congrats! You now have an idea who you can interview in the later stages and can start formulating your solution.