(2022-11-14) Posthog How We Found Our Ideal Customer Profile

PostHog: How we found our Ideal Customer Profile. Creating an Ideal Customer Profile is one of the most important things we've ever done at PostHog

These are all example decisions we've taken because of having a clear ICP:

How do we describe what our company does?

What should our website should look and feel like?

How we did it

I'm going to assume you're building a SaaS product for paying users. (B2B)

We already had a large open source community, and we listed a paid product on our website – every week we were getting quite a few people asking about it.

We had a rough idea of the features, we weren't 100% sure which customers to focus on or how to price it. To help, we created a list of very specific things that we felt could be part of our ICP.

These were needs and haves that our customers had in common

Track bad customers that don't buy too

We scored each customer on our big list of needs and haves. When we looked at the differences between those that bought and were successful versus those that dragged along or maybe bought and had less success, our ideal customer profile became very obvious.

5 reference customers

We set a goal for the entire company of getting 5 reference customers. In the weekly all hands, we'd run through who was trying to buy from us, and what they needed, until we had 5 customers paying list price, delighted with us and using the product intensively.

We'd rapidly change priorities and ship based on our aggregate view of everyone trying to buy things from us. This is exactly where having too many people at a startup, ahead of product market fit, causes you to struggle – it's harder to adapt like this.

Once that was done, we quickly had hundreds more.

How we're evolving this

So far, we've identified ICPs at a company level. As we're getting more sophisticated, we're doing it at an individual level. We want to have a set list of stakeholders we aim to delight, so we are clearer on those within our ICP we're shipping for