A founder replied to one of my Reddit threads with a nutrition app she had built.
The product could account for meals, workouts, sleep, and other inputs. There were plenty of features to talk about. But the part that caught my attention came later in her reply.
She was a first time mom. She had built the app with pregnancy, postpartum, and other stages of women’s lives in mind. She was struggling to find users and had little time to promote it.
My wife and I had also recently had a baby. My wife was gradually getting back into CrossFit, so that part of the founder’s story felt familiar.
I suggested exploring a more specific position around postpartum needs instead of presenting it as a generic fitness app.
I don’t know whether she tested that suggestion or whether it brought her users. It was a direction worth investigating.
But that conversation is a useful place to start when thinking about an ideal customer profile for startups. The founder had described both a broad product category and a much more specific situation in which someone might care.
Those lead to very different conversations.
1. Describe the situation that makes someone care
“People interested in fitness” gives you a large audience. It gives you very little help deciding what to say.
Someone training for a competition, someone starting exercise for the first time, and someone returning to a routine after having a baby may all care about fitness. Their questions, constraints, and expectations can still be very different.
An ideal customer profile is your current description of the customer your product can serve well.
In business software, an ICP usually describes the company, while a buyer persona describes the person involved in the decision. HubSpot’s explanation makes that distinction. For an early product sold directly to individuals, you can start by describing the person and their situation.
The practical question is the same:
What is happening in this person’s life or work that makes your product relevant now?
For a founder, “I want more users” might mean several things. They could be testing demand before building, trying to understand why people abandon onboarding, or looking for conversations with potential customers after launching.
Each situation calls for different help.
Before choosing a channel or writing a message, get specific about the problem you can actually help with.
2. Use the details people give you
In the nutrition app conversation, the founder volunteered something useful: why she had built it and the circumstances she understood personally.
That gave me a more specific question to explore.
Would people in a similar situation recognize themselves in the product? What were they already trying? What did they find difficult about existing options?
I would investigate those questions before treating the suggested audience as the right one.
This is where listening helps. People may describe their problem in language you would never put into a search box yourself.
A founder might say:
“I know where my customers hang out, but I never know when it’s appropriate to join the conversation.”
That is more informative than “I need marketing help.”
You can ask what happened the last time they tried. You can understand what made the interaction difficult. You can decide whether your product addresses any part of it.
When someone gives you that much context, use it to understand them.
3. Write a profile you can use this week
I would keep the first version short enough to refer to while reading a conversation.
Here is an illustrative starting point for a product that helps founders participate in relevant public discussions:
- Customer: A founder handling customer discovery and distribution themselves.
- Situation: They have something people can try and need to reach beyond their existing contacts.
- Current behavior: They manually search communities, read discussions, and write individual responses.
- Problem: Finding relevant conversations takes time, and they struggle to do it consistently.
- Desired progress: Have more useful conversations with people who experience the problem their product addresses.
- Required fit: They are willing to read context, contribute something helpful, and review what they send.
- Poor fit: Someone whose main requirement is sending the same promotion to as many people as possible.
That is a hypothesis. It needs evidence.
Its immediate value is that you can use it to make a choice. When you read a post, you can ask whether the person’s situation matches. When someone requests a feature, you can ask whether it helps the customer you are trying to serve.
You also have something specific to revise when you learn more.
4. Ask about what they already do
Once you have a possible customer profile, talk to people who appear to match it.
I would start with questions like:
- When did this problem last come up?
- What did you do?
- What have you already tried?
- What was difficult about that approach?
- What happens if you leave the problem unresolved?
- Who else is involved in choosing a solution?
Their answers may challenge your initial idea.
Someone might sound frustrated but have a workaround that serves them well. Another person might barely complain because they have accepted an expensive manual process as normal.
Ask enough to understand the difference.
I would also avoid treating a friendly response as proof of demand. Someone can enjoy your conversation, appreciate your advice, and have no reason to use your product.
In the guide to finding your first 100 users, I separate conversations, registrations, and meaningful use. That distinction matters here too. Each tells you something different about your customer profile.
5. Keep assumptions visible
A simple way to stay honest is to write down what you believe alongside what supports it.
For the nutrition app example, the notes might look like this:
What we know: The founder described building around needs she had experienced and said she was struggling with distribution.
What we suspect: A more specific audience might understand the product more easily than a broad fitness audience.
What we still need to learn: Whether people in that audience share the problem, find the product useful, and continue using it.
The suggestion becomes a testable idea.
You can apply the same approach to your own product. If you believe a particular customer has an urgent problem, write down the behavior that supports that belief. If you have only heard one person describe it, record that too.
You do not need certainty to begin. You need to know which parts remain uncertain.
6. Let the profile improve how you help
This connects directly to how I think about Mangos AI.
A clearer customer profile helps you describe the public conversations you want to find. You still need to read those conversations and decide whether you can contribute.
The person’s relevance to your business does not make every reply an opportunity to mention your product.
Sometimes you have a useful suggestion. Sometimes you need to ask a question. Sometimes the most helpful thing you can do has nothing to do with what you sell.
That was my intention with the Reddit threads: invite people to share what they were building, understand their challenges, and engage properly.
When there is a clear fit and interest in continuing, a further conversation can happen naturally.
You can use the 30 day startup distribution plan to put this into practice. Start with a customer hypothesis, listen to the people you find, and revise the profile as you learn.
Start with someone you can understand
The nutrition app founder had a detailed product description. She also had a personal reason for building it.
That second part gave us a specific audience and set of questions to explore.
Your first customer profile can begin the same way. Look for the person, the situation, and the problem you understand well enough to help with. Then go and find out where your understanding is incomplete.
If you looked at your last ten customer conversations, what did the people with the strongest need have in common?