Understand the user

Suggested Time Allocation for This Section: 3-4 hr

The first step to building a solid acquisition strategy is understanding your users, product and market. Let’s get started.

User
Product
Market

Why do we need to understand our users? Because that’s the only way to build a sound strategy is by knowing your user. This is not just a skill needed for your projects or capstone, but a life skill in general. And so, like any other skill it will take practice and that is exactly what we are going to aim for this section!

In this section, we’ll focus on three steps to truly understand your users:

Interview 5+ users
Create 3 Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs)
Prioritize the ICPs

1. Interview 5+ people who are users of your product

Use WhatsApp groups, work friends, families, LinkedIn connections, and Twitter (now X) or go to offline stores if they have the product and talk to users there.
Learn if the product is a need or want for potential ICPs at the moment.
Document all your learnings. You can use this template.

📌 Go through this User Calling Handbook to get a better understanding.

2. Let’s get to building ICPs

One of the common mistakes people make here is to confuse ICPs with user personas. An Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is a detailed description of the type of company or individual that would benefit most from your product and is most likely to become a paying customer.
Key parameters of ICPs include-

image ICP.png

Map down your ICPs in a table format. Table for B2B ICPs and B2C ICPs are given within your project format, please refer to that. (Creating at least 3 or more ICPs by talking to as many users as you can will help you rank and prioritize which ICPs you want to build strategies for!)

ICP prioritization framework:

As you talk to users, you'll find many potential ICPs. But unless your product is already scaled, only one or two of them will actually drive business. Focus on these key ICPs—and this is where the following table will help.

Use this framework to prioritize your ICP's

Criteria	Adoption Rate	Appetite to Pay	Frequency of Use Case	Distribution Potential	TAM (user/currency)
ICP 1	High	High	Low	Low	1000 user
ICP 2	Moderate	High	High	High	1400 users
ICP 3	Low	High	Low	Moderate	1100 users
ICP 4	Moderate	Low	High	High	1500 users
ICP 5	High	High	High	Moderate	1200 users

What do we observe here?

From the ICP Prioritization Framework, we can see that ICP 2 and ICP 5 can be focused upon since the market for these users is larger enough and the the users have a good use case of the product! Now when we dig deeper into fleshing out the strategies for acquisition we will target them towards ICP 2 and ICP 5.

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