Comment by this2shallPass | Hacker News Reader

Comment by this2shallPass | Hacker News Reader

Have you read The Mom Test? Highly recommended. Here's a summary: https://www.slideshare.net/xamde/summary-of-the-mom-test

- Exactly who is your ideal customer, and what do they care about? Veteran CEO of 4 person seed stage start up in FinTech world trying to build an MVP? Mid career hiring manager at a Series B or C company in healthcare looking to expand their team long term? Recruiter at a Series D company with 20,000+ employees trying to meet their quota of leads for the week? Someone else? Drill down here. Once you identify it and validate that through experiments, focus on as few as possible - ideally just one.

- Is it clear to your potential customer what problem you are solving for them?

- Do they think you are the best way for them to solve it? What alternatives do they use currently? What's painful about it? What's better about your solution, so compelling that they should try it?

- Is the problem they think you solve one of their current priorities?

If the issue is with framing or marketing, here's a useful guide: https://www.julian.com/guide/growth/intro

Good luck!

Thanks for that!

I'm lucky enough to know both Rob and Julian personally, but this definitely doesn't serve as an excuse not to re-read the Mom's Test.

Very good point about the ICP. We were targeting startup companies 20-250 ppl, that raised their last round in the last 6 months, sector agnostic. However we weren't sure about the right decision-maker. The three options are CTO, CEO and HR manager.

So far we had more top-of-the-funnel conversions on Linkedin ads from CEOs and HRs, but more actual sign-ups from CTO.

You're welcome!

Lucky indeed. Their resources are so valuable. The Mom Test is always worth a re-read, I recommend it so often to people.

I understand the tendency to be broader and speak to more different people (larger target market, more potential buyers), but it makes it harder to effectively communicate your message in the language of the buyer. Also different people have different priorities. The more focus, especially at first, the better.

Do some experiments and see who has the problem in the most pressing way, or who can and is willing to pay enough to solve it to make it work for you and them. Consider size of company, decision maker, potentially industry/sector, location, time since money raised, bootstrapped vs investor funded, anything that makes sense - you never know which niches will be amenable to you.

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