Start Small, Win Big
The ICP-First Growth Strategy
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💡 TL;DR: The biggest mistake software founders make is trying to serve everyone.
In today’s competitive landscape, success comes from radical specificity - defining and obsessing over your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).
Focused companies scale faster, build better products, and win customer loyalty.
Start narrow, solve real problems deeply, and expand from a strong foundation.
Specificity isn’t a constraint - it’s your growth engine.
The software industry is littered with the digital corpses of well-intentioned startups that believed their product could serve "everyone."
This democratic ideal - that good software should be universally accessible and beneficial - represents one of the most seductive yet destructive myths in entrepreneurship.
The harsh reality is that in today's hyper-competitive software landscape, the companies that survive and thrive are those that embrace radical specificity in defining their Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).
Source : Big Business Agency
The Trap: Why "Everyone" Means "No One"
The fundamental flaw in the "everyone is our customer" mentality lies in basic market dynamics and human psychology.
When a software founder claims their product serves everyone, they're essentially admitting they don't understand their market deeply enough to make meaningful distinctions.
This isn't just a marketing problem - it's a strategic blindness that permeates every aspect of business development.
Consider the stark difference between Facebook's early approach and Google Wave's failure.
Facebook began with an incredibly narrow ICP: college students at Harvard, then expanded methodically to other Ivy League schools, then other universities, before eventually opening to the general public.
This laser focus allowed them to optimise every feature, design decision, and growth mechanism for a specific user behaviour pattern.
Google Wave, by contrast, launched with the vague promise of "revolutionising communication for everyone," resulting in a product that satisfied no one's specific needs and was discontinued within two years.
The psychological principle at work here is the paradox of choice combined with the specificity bias.
When customers encounter a product that claims to solve everyone's problems, they instinctively question whether it can solve their specific problem effectively.
Conversely, when they see a product laser-focused on their exact situation, they perceive it as more credible and valuable, even if the underlying technology is identical.
The Neuroscience of Customer Recognition
Recent advances in consumer neuroscience reveal why specificity resonates so powerfully with potential customers.
When individuals encounter marketing messages or product descriptions that match their specific circumstances, their brains exhibit increased activity in the medial prefrontal cortex - the region associated with self-relevance and personal identification.
This neurological response translates directly into higher engagement rates, longer attention spans, and ultimately, conversion behaviour.
Software founders who resist ICP specificity often cite fears of limiting their total addressable market (TAM).
This concern reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of market dynamics. In reality, a well-defined ICP doesn't shrink your market - it creates a beachhead from which you can expand systematically.
The companies that achieve massive scale invariably begin with obsessive focus on a narrow segment before expanding outward.
Amazon's evolution perfectly illustrates this principle. Jeff Bezos didn't start with the vision of "everything store for everyone."
He began with a razor-sharp focus on book buyers who valued selection and convenience over the traditional bookstore experience.
This specificity allowed Amazon to optimise their entire operation - from inventory management to user interface design - around book buyers' specific needs.
Only after dominating this segment did they expand to electronics, then general merchandise, then cloud services.
The Precision Advantage: How Specificity Drives Product Excellence
When software founders embrace ICP specificity, they unlock several competitive advantages that are impossible to achieve with a broad-market approach.
First, they can optimise their product development roadmap with surgical precision.
Instead of building features that might appeal to a theoretical "average user," they can focus on capabilities that solve real, specific problems for their defined customer segment.
Slack's meteoric rise exemplifies this principle.
The founders didn't set out to build "communication software for everyone."
They identified a specific ICP: technical teams at growing companies who were frustrated with email's limitations for real-time collaboration.
This focus allowed them to make crucial design decisions - threading conversations, integrating with developer tools, enabling custom integrations - that would have been impossible with a broader target market.
The specificity advantage extends beyond product development into customer acquisition.
When you can describe your ideal customer with precision, you can identify exactly where they spend their time, what content they consume, and what challenges keep them awake at night.
This knowledge transforms marketing from a spray-and-pray approach into a surgical strike.
The Feedback Loop Acceleration
One of the most under-appreciated benefits of ICP specificity is the acceleration of the product-market fit feedback loop.
When you're serving a narrow, well-defined customer segment, you can gather meaningful feedback more quickly and iterate more rapidly.
Your customers share similar pain points, use similar language to describe their problems, and have comparable workflows and constraints.
Zoom's early success illustrates this dynamic perfectly.
While competitors like Skype and WebEx attempted to serve all video conferencing needs, Zoom initially focused on a specific ICP: remote teams at tech companies who needed reliable, high-quality video conferencing that worked seamlessly across devices.
This focus allowed them to optimise relentlessly for this use case, resulting in a product that was markedly superior for their target audience.
The founder's ability to speak directly to their ICP's specific pain points creates a powerful competitive moat.
When customers feel truly understood - when they encounter marketing messages that seem written specifically for their situation - they develop strong brand loyalty that transcends pure feature comparisons.
The Paradox: How Narrow Focus Enables Broad Growth
The most counterintuitive aspect of ICP specificity is how it enables rather than constrains long-term growth.
Companies that achieve massive scale through organic expansion invariably begin with obsessive focus on a narrow segment.
This isn't coincidental - it's the natural result of building deep expertise and strong customer relationships within a specific domain.
HubSpot's evolution demonstrates this scaling paradox beautifully.
The company began with a laser focus on small marketing agencies struggling with lead generation and client reporting.
This specificity allowed them to build features, create content, and develop a go-to-market strategy that resonated powerfully with this narrow audience.
As they dominated this segment, they systematically expanded to adjacent markets: in-house marketing teams, sales organisations, and eventually full customer service operations.
The key insight is that each expansion built upon the deep expertise and customer relationships developed in the previous segment.
HubSpot's understanding of marketing agencies' needs provided crucial insights into what in-house marketing teams required.
Their relationships with marketing professionals facilitated introductions to sales teams within the same organisations.
The Competitive Intelligence Advantage
ICP specificity provides another often-overlooked advantage: superior competitive intelligence.
When you're focused on a narrow customer segment, you can monitor competitive movements with precision.
You know exactly which competitors matter, which product announcements are meaningful, and which market shifts require immediate response.
This focused competitive awareness allows for more strategic decision-making. Instead of trying to match every competitor's feature across all possible use cases, you can focus on maintaining superiority in the capabilities that matter most to your specific customer segment.
Notion's approach to competing with established players like Microsoft Office and Google Workspace illustrates this principle.
Rather than attempting to match every feature these suites offered, Notion focused on a specific ICP: knowledge workers at modern companies who needed flexible, collaborative documentation tools.
This focus allowed them to build capabilities - like database functionality and template systems - that were highly valued by their target audience, even while lacking some features that other segments might consider essential.
The Funding and Investment Implications
Venture capitalists and sophisticated investors increasingly recognise the value of ICP specificity.
In a crowded software market, investors gravitate toward companies that can articulate exactly who they serve and why they're uniquely positioned to serve that segment.
This specificity makes it easier to evaluate market opportunity, competitive positioning, and growth potential.
Companies with well-defined ICPs can provide more credible growth projections because they can quantify their addressable market with precision.
They can identify specific companies, calculate potential customer lifetime value, and model expansion scenarios based on concrete market data rather than theoretical projections.
The Talent Acquisition Catalyst
ICP specificity creates unexpected advantages in talent acquisition, particularly for early-stage software companies competing for skilled developers and product managers.
When potential employees understand exactly what problem you're solving and for whom, they can evaluate whether your mission aligns with their interests and career goals.
Companies with vague target markets struggle to attract passionate talent because potential employees can't envision the impact they'll have.
Conversely, companies with razor-sharp ICP definition can attract individuals who are genuinely excited about solving specific problems for defined customer segments.
The Operational Efficiency Multiplier
Beyond marketing and product development, ICP specificity drives operational efficiency across every business function.
Customer success teams can develop specialised expertise in their target segment's workflows and challenges.
Sales teams can craft precise messaging and objection handling techniques.
Support teams can anticipate common issues and develop targeted solutions.
This operational alignment creates a compounding effect where every team member becomes more effective at serving the defined customer segment.
The result is higher customer satisfaction, lower churn rates, and more efficient resource utilisation.
The Innovation Direction Framework
Perhaps most importantly, ICP specificity provides a framework for innovation direction.
When faced with countless potential product enhancements and feature requests, companies with well-defined ICPs can evaluate opportunities through the lens of their target customer's evolving needs.
This framework prevents feature creep and ensures that product development efforts consistently add value for the core customer segment.
It also helps identify adjacency opportunities - new problems that the same customer segment faces - which can drive sustainable growth.
Conclusion: Embracing the Specificity Imperative
The software industry's rapid evolution demands that founders abandon the comfortable fiction that their products can serve everyone effectively.
In an era of increasing specialisation and customer sophistication, the companies that thrive will be those that embrace radical specificity in defining and serving their Ideal Customer Profile.
This isn't about limiting ambition - it's about channeling ambition effectively.
The path to serving millions of customers begins with serving hundreds of customers exceptionally well.
The route to broad market leadership runs through narrow market dominance.
Software founders who continue to resist ICP specificity do so at their own peril.
In a world where customers have unlimited options and short attention spans, the companies that win will be those that can look their ideal customers in the eye and say,
"This product was built specifically for you."
The choice is clear: embrace specificity or embrace irrelevance. In the software industry, there is no middle ground.
Source : Peter Mayer.
References
Christensen, C. M. (1997). The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail. Harvard Business Review Press.
Stone, B. (2013). The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon. Little, Brown and Company.
Gelles, D. (2015). In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives. Simon & Schuster.
Halligan, B., & Shah, D. (2014). Inbound Marketing: Attract, Engage, and Delight Customers Online. Wiley.
Vaynerchuk, G. (2018). Crushing It!: How Great Entrepreneurs Build Their Business and Influence. HarperBusiness.
Ries, E. (2011). The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses. Crown Business.
Moore, G. A. (2014). Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers. HarperBusiness.
Blank, S. (2020). The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products that Win. K&S Ranch.
Cooper, B., & Vlaskovits, P. (2013). The Lean Entrepreneur: How Visionaries Create Products, Innovate with New Ventures, and Disrupt Markets. Wiley.
Thiel, P. (2014). Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future. Crown Business.
✍️ Why I Wrote This
I’m endlessly fascinated by startups and the emotional rollercoaster that begins the moment a founder has that epiphany - the “aha!” moment 💡 where a problem grips them so tightly they feel compelled to solve it.
As a recovering Founder and Co-Founder myself - and someone who now supports startup founders and leadership teams across the globe 🌍 - I’ve seen something intriguing: the way a person approaches decision-making, risk, and intuition often varies dramatically depending on their age, experience, or both.
The work for ICP [Ideal Customer Profile] is foundational and don’t be fooled as it always evolves and iterates over time, based on market feedback. Getting a base line definition of your ICP is essential work for you, your team and your business. More on this topic soon, and do hope it triggers you to realise how important this is for clarity across a number of dimensions as explained in the article.
💡 What’s the most surprising insight you've discovered through ICP work? Please share your learning in the comments 👇
🚀 Founder Feeling Stuck?
I’m launching something soon to help founders operationalise ICP in real-time. DM me ‘ICP Foundation’ to get early access.”
📣 Know a Founder Who Needs This?
Tag a friend below who's navigating this topic at this ICP moment - they’ll thank you later!
🎧 Let’s Stay Connected
If you enjoyed this piece, please subscribe here on SubStack and consider following my podcast, The G&T Sessions - where I dive deeper into the minds of remarkable founders, creators, and change makers.
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(For deeper dives into the psychology of founders.)
You can also follow me on X → https://www.x.com/andrewjturner
And now it’s July 2025 already 🤬 , I wanted to let you all know I am working on a new proposition that I will be launching before September - no holidays for the wicked 😜.
I’m building something that takes all of this and more….and turns it into a framework founders can use in real time.
I’m launching a new cohort soon, helping founders address head on items like Ideal Customer Profile. Comment "ICP Foundation" or DM me to learn more.
Ciao for now 👋
– Andrew
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