Scoping out the Customer Landscape: Finding Your Champions

Clara Hong : COO and Co-founder at Smore

Smore is an interactive survey builder that facilitates genuine, authentic, and engaging communication between brands and customers that leads to growth.

1.    What would be the initial step for a startup to find its first set of customers?

We define ICP(Ideal Customer Profile) as people who will absolutely love and vouch for your product. Adding another layer to that will make the search for your ICP so much easier. And that is to understand that ICP is all about finding your people. Finding not only people who will love you but people you love. Those people you just can’t wait to spend time with. Finding your champions. They will love, develop and promote your product for you.

2. How do you go about finding customers who are ideal for your product?

Similar job titles or demographic profiles are helpful, but more critically, it's about finding a niche group of individuals who share the same dream outcome. Dream outcome is important because you are not just selling a product to them. You are promising to transport them to a desirable future together. There is no shortcut or hack for this process. After you come up with a hypothesis, the next step is to go out there and talk to actual people in the market. Test your riskiest assumptions with them.

3. What are some customer acquisition tactics you tried?

Doing things that don’t scale was the key ingredient to building traction for Smore. We have tried social media advertising, offline posters with QR codes, speaking at events, and direct user outreach like everybody else. However, since these approaches are essentially one-sided communication without customer engagement, they were not as effective as we expected. Instead, we changed our approach to having longer conversations with fewer users. Direct online outreach for sales on platforms like LinkedIn is something that does not work, but we really recommend it. It won’t work for conversion. But your KPI(Key Performance Indicator) should be the number of assumptions that you can eliminate.  Am I solving a painful enough problem? Would they find it valuable? Am I explaining my product the right way? Test these assumptions with actual people in the market. It seems a slow and tedious process, but it can ultimately drive traction in your new market.

Knowing where your customers hang out, and being active in those communities was very effective too. The momentum for product-led-growth does not start on its own. It needs to be driven, and driven by people. Build in public, learn in public, and communicate your core values through that journey. When your team has passion, when the founders have this strong love that goes beyond ambition, that force inevitably seeps into the product. It shines through. That will convince people.

4. Once you find those people and start building connections with them, how do they become converted to customers?

Customer success is the backbone of our team’s mission. Going the extra thousand mile to make sure that our customers can achieve their dream outcome in every way possible. This ties back into what our product’s value is.

Surveys suck. If you want to hear from your beloved customers, you need to go the extra mile, deliver a special experience, and make them feel valued. Here is a Smore form. Interactive, attractive, and engaging. Smore helps brands to build a relationship based on honesty, trust, and connection.

And we can’t just talk the talk. We need to deliver this to our customers first.

Today's Speech Insights

1. To define ICP, the first thing to do is to focus on communicating with the first few customers who are enthusiastic about your product/service. These customers can create a good reputation for your company by going viral on their own.

2. Target audiences that have similar goals for the outcome of your product rather than trying to pull customers from peer companies that sell similar items. Smore's customers are mostly startups looking to successfully launch an MVP(Minimal Viable Product).

3. Utilizing social media, such as Twitter and LinkedIn, and surveying your target audience can be an effective strategy to increase customer contact.