Dear founder,
Let’s talk about handling multiple ICPs as a solo founder.
This is something I’ve been wrestling with at Podscan, and I know many of you face the same challenge: you’re building a product that could serve two, three, maybe even five different ideal customer profiles. And you’re trying to figure out how to keep them all balanced—or whether you should even try.
And before we get to that, a word from our Sponsor, Paddle.com. No matter how many customer types I have, I charge them all the same way: by using Paddle as my Merchant of Record. They take care of all the taxes, the currencies, tracking declined transactions and updated credit cards so that I can focus on dealing with my competitors (and not banks and financial regulators). If you think you’d rather just build your product, check out Paddle.com as your payment provider.
I run a small software as a service business that has several ideal customer profiles just by the nature of the business. And as somebody with limited time and limited capacity to make a product appealing to particular groups, I’ve had to learn how to juggle trying to sell to several different potential audiences at the same time.
The Universal Challenge
No matter how much we try to niche down, we often find that the software we’re building is so flexible that different kinds of people can use it.
Look at Peter Levels’ PhotoAI, for example. This is ostensibly a B2C product, so it serves pretty much everybody. But he’s trying to serve people who need passport photos, while also serving people who are using AI-generated photos for marketing purposes, for social media posting, or for their dating app profiles. So many different audiences, and he has to serve all of them at the same time.
This gets worse when you’re going into the world of B2B, into the world of bigger companies or enterprise companies that you’re trying to serve with your products. In an enterprise situation, customers expect to be very clearly spoken to. If you’re trying to speak from the same location to many different people, you are effectively diluting your own messaging just by trying to reach multiple people at the same time.
Yet there is a lot of value in trying to reach different customer profiles, because you are still in this phase of trying to find product-market fit. You don’t want to set your sights on one particular customer too early.
My Podscan Journey
That’s been my personal experience with Podscan as well. If you’ve been listening to past episodes of my podcast over the last year and a half—almost two years at this point—you’ll find that not only did I set out to serve multiple customer types at the same time, I even went back and forth between which one I prioritized at any given time.
For me, these customer groups were marketers, public relations agencies, founders in the media and podcasting world—these three-ish groups, depending on if you put the first two in a bucket or if they are independent from each other. I recently added a couple more. I found that news agencies are a wonderful customer type, even SEO professionals. So maybe there’s four or five different groups of people, and all of them, I try to reach in particular ways.
The Time-Boxing Strategy
Unless you really clearly know who you’re going to focus all of your efforts on, you have to spread out your efforts for all these different groups. But here’s what I learned: you can’t really target everyone at the same time. That just spreads out your efforts too much, and you don’t really get clear results.
If you have two or three different customer types and you run three experiments and sign-ups go up—well, which one worked? If you don’t really track where those people come from, or if you track it but you’re not really sure which of your efforts they actually saw, then it’s not that meaningful. You can’t really learn anything from that process.
So personally, for somebody who has limited time and limited attention—and that’s really what this is about—I would focus very much one effort at a time. That looked like improving particular parts of the product or having conversations with particular kinds of people at any given time.
Often, I would attempt to really focus in on the Podscan API, which is something that is more intensely used by founders. So I would make sure that all my trialing founders get exactly what they need on the API, which often meant that I would need to reach out to them explicitly and maybe ignore what the non-founder trial users were telling me, just to make sure that I could serve that one particular vertical in my prospect base.
Then other times, I would think we’ve worked enough on the API, and we need to get back to people who actually use the platform. And I would see what these PR and marketing people needed.
The Demo Discovery Method
Demos became incredibly valuable for classification. I offer a demo button in the application where people mostly self-selected by just how ambitious they were with what they were going to build. Those were usually the people who were trying to get a good demo from me.
During that demo, I could figure out which bucket they would fall into. It was often clear before, but sometimes it became more apparent during the demo. Then I could ask really precise questions about what their job to be done was, what they needed from me, what they didn’t even know they might need but were looking for in products, what alternatives they were using—all that kind of stuff was very evident during these demo sessions.
Creating Dedicated Landing Pages
I have created a landing page for each of my ideal customer profiles. Each ICP has a landing page dedicated to them that highlights particular values for the platform that are relevant for their group.
You have in your footer or in your header navigation, a link to solutions. And in those solutions, you have solutions for media businesses, solutions for PR agencies, for founders, for podcast owners, for SEO, and so on. That’s what my homepage has, both in the header navigation and in the footer.
On those pages, I highlight mostly very goal-oriented solutions that the platform offers. If you’re a news agency, you’ll find that the news agency landing page says you’ll get real-time information about breaking topics. You’ll be able to see trends and how certain topics are getting more and more traction before they become mainstream. That’s the kind of stuff that news agencies care about, because I know that their mission is to report things before others report them.
Whereas on the page for PR agencies, I highlight that it makes it very easy to find wherever one of their clients might have reputation risk—where somebody is complaining about them, or there’s a public flogging of a certain company. Podscan makes it very easy to reliably be alerted when this happens.
In that way, they become very aware of how our product is meant for them. It was built for them. It is usable and useful to them and by them. That’s something that I feel I have to very clearly communicate, because it can be used by so many different kinds of people.
Smart Classification During Registration
When people register on Podscan, they can select between a couple of options: I’m here to look at data, I’m here to look at transcripts, I’m here to look at an API, and I’m here to search for stuff. It changes over time, just to see—because I’m experimenting with that as well.
People can self-select into: Am I an analyst, or more like a founder, or more like a podcast owner? Do I have my own show and want to see what the product says? That allows me to score and select customers into groups.
I don’t necessarily ask them specifically for the industry they’re from, but that happens in the next step through in-platform onboarding. During that, I take the email domain and maybe the project name they gave me, maybe their full name, and do a background AI agentic search to figure out who they are and how I can present data to them. How can I make the platform immediately useful? That’s one of the more elaborate onboarding AI automation systems that I’ve built.
With that, I very quickly figure out who people are, what they do, and what kind of customer group they belong to. I note this in the backend, in my own CRM system, trying to sort each of these customers into these brackets. And during onboarding, I try to make it as apparent as possible what people of their customer type find most useful.
Different Marketing for Different Groups
The way I market to these particular groups and the way I sell to them is wildly different. That’s something I realized very quickly—you cannot expect a single process to work for every single kind of customer that you have. It just doesn’t work.
My founder customers are almost exclusively coming to me through my founder network or through the larger founder communities in which I or the people who use my product are active. That means I don’t reach them via cold email. That makes no sense. Founders get cold emails all the time, and they don’t really respond to them well.
What helps is that people recommend me. People who are working with the API, who’ve used Podscan before, are recommending Podscan to somebody who they know might benefit from it. Which is why you will hear at the end of this podcast, and at the end of every single podcast that I’ve had for the last couple of years, a shout-out asking people to recommend me to their peers—which they do. This works.
Whenever somebody highlights Podscan or their use of Podscan on social media, I very strongly amplify it. I’m very grateful publicly, and I try to expose this to my own audience, so that this person will be further encouraged to share this stuff on Twitter.
Just a couple days ago, my dear founder friend Rob Walling shared publicly on Twitter how Podscan finds very interesting mentions of his name and the brands that he’s interested in and the conversation around them to his own audience of almost 40,000 followers. And on a meta level, I know that he’ll be notified of this mention on this podcast as well, and likely talk about it.
There’s value in having a strong network of amazing and successful founders that know about your product, that use your product, and then spread it among their peers. That’s my logic here, and that’s how it works for founders.
The Competition Factor
But this would never work for marketers or PR agencies, because that’s not my network. To reach these people, I have to find alternative ways. That is directed sales, cold outreach, social outreach, being present on LinkedIn and going into specific communities that I know these people frequent. Or at least listening to people’s complaints and trying to figure out how to interact with them to highlight the benefit of potentially using Podscan. That could be in specialist newsletters or anything like this.
But it has to be different for each of my ICPs, because these people communicate very differently between each of these groups. They hang out in wildly different locations, and they deal with cold emails and peer recommendations differently.
Also, for some of my customer types, using Podscan is a massive edge they will not share with their peers. Where a founder would immediately tell all the other founders they know if they’d found a really cool way to increase leads or reduce churn, for a financial analyst that has just found a new way to forecast good investment trends, they’re not going to share this with their peers. That’s who they’re competing with for forecasting and trend analysis. Having an edge is a big barrier to word-of-mouth marketing.
Speaking Different Languages
All the methods are very different between each of these groups, and I found that I have to have a different outreach, marketing, and sales approach for each of these ICPs. That’s one of the biggest learnings here—even though I’m doing all of this, I have to almost be a different persona for each of them.
When I talk to my founder peers, I can be colloquial. I can use memes. I can be funny. I can use references from the founder community. But I have to be much more professional when I talk to PR agencies, who themselves are often representatively formal to their clients.
You have to speak the local language of that community. You have to learn this or find somebody who knows it if you want to be able to build a strong base in each of these profile groups.
The Bottom Line
Between different onboarding systems, different internal feature presentations per customer group, and process isolation when it comes to how to reach out and convert your customers—that’s what I have so far learned with Podscan about having different ICPs.
This is one of the first businesses that I ever had that has wildly different customer profiles. And while it’s complex, while it requires me to context-switch and be different things to different people, it’s also incredibly valuable. It keeps me from getting too narrow too early. It helps me discover unexpected use cases. And ultimately, it makes the product stronger for everyone.
The key is not trying to be everything to everyone at once, but being very intentional about when and how you serve each group. Time-box your experiments. Create dedicated experiences. And most importantly, learn to speak each group’s language—not just in your marketing copy, but in how you think about their problems and present your solutions.
That’s the reality of building a flexible product in today’s market. The juggle is real, but with the right systems in place, it’s absolutely manageable—even as a solo founder.
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