https://medium.com/@sonuarticles74/how-saas-companies-fix-wrong-customer-targeting-fast-dbb5bf230414
Learn how Slack, Notion, and other SaaS winners pivoted their ideal customer profile to unlock massive growth and avoid stagnation.
How to Realign Your ICP for Faster Growth
I’ve been there. You build something, get some early users, maybe even a bit of revenue. Then everything just… stalls.
Prospects keep saying “cool tool, but not for us.” Deals drag on forever. People sign up and disappear. Your churn rate makes you want to hide under a blanket.
Here’s what nobody tells you: it’s probably not your product that sucks. It’s that you’re selling to the wrong people.
I learned this the hard way, and apparently so did the teams behind Slack, Notion, and a bunch of other companies you’ve definitely heard of. They all started by targeting completely different customers than the ones who made them rich.
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There are some pretty obvious signs when your ideal customer profile is off. I wish someone had spelled these out for me earlier:
Your prospects keep giving you feedback that doesn’t make sense. Like, they say your product is “too simple” when you think simplicity is your biggest strength. Or they complain it’s “not a priority” when you’re solving what seems like a huge problem.
The story you originally told about why your product needed to exist? Yeah, that doesn’t resonate anymore. Your users are doing things with your product that you never imagined, or they’re not using the features you thought were most important.
People sign up but don’t stick around. Meanwhile, the folks who would actually love what you built aren’t even finding you.
Take Slack. Those guys were building a game called Glitch. The game totally bombed. But they had this internal chat tool they used to coordinate their team, and other companies kept asking about it.
Most founders would have been like “nah, we’re a gaming company.” Instead, they paid attention. They ditched the game and went all-in on team communication. Now they’re worth billions.
This was my biggest mistake early on. Customer says they want feature X? I’d build it. Someone complains about the UI? I’d redesign it. Another person wants integration Y? Off I go to build that too.