How to build your product ICP with audience interviews, surveys and competitor research

This guide delves deeply into understanding your customer, how to learn about them, how they shop, and which products they're currently using.

This is a process for startup founders or idea validation teams to create your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) to target when you launch your MVP or fresh feature. Start with research on your target audience, your competitors and finish with clear ICPs.

Find your personas to research

You can do primary and/or secondary user research to learn more about potential users. Through interviews, questionnaires, and other primary research methods, gather go-to-market insights from the target audience. 

Start by broadly defining your target market. Through this post, we’ll use as an example the immigration platform VISXA, which was built and launched last year from the Paralect Startup Accelerator.

VISXA’s broad target market is people relocating long-term. Obviously, people move for a variety of reasons — education, marriage, work, etc. As a result, the buyer's persona will vary depending on their need or motivation.

You can find research participants in the following places:

• Customers who recently bought a comparable product can be located using social media, app stores, and questions in niche forums (we found lots of online communities about relocation).
• Customers who actively considered a product but did not purchase it can be found through forum discussions or other related groups.
• Customers who previously used a product but stopped using it can be located through public surveys on social media or within those same target communities.

Consider your problem from multiple viewpoints, not just your’s – this is critical if you're developing a solution that tackles your pain point. It’s easy for your perspective to create tunnel vision.

With VISXA, we found large, international digital nomad communities as well as region-based groups like "Foreigners in Croatia," where detailed info-sharing about key challenges occurs.

While both communities vary and overlap in terms of origin, the digital nomad group is younger and more often explores new travel tech solutions.

Prep the questions

You have two interview objectives. One, to collect direct qualitative and quantitative data to achieve the research goals. The second, and equally crucial, goal is to leave a lasting positive impression via respect for the interviewees.

Why number two? This is your target market! Value their time by coming organized and asking clear questions — you’re on track to win an early adopter.

Keep in mind:

• Open-ended inquiries are better. Simple yes/no questions set the context and lead to open ones.
• Open with broader questions to build rapport and establish context.
• Then go further into specific pain points. Collect both qualitative and quantitative info.
• Have a genuine conversation, don’t forget to be friendly!

Find out about the competition

Don't pass up the chance to learn what solutions they currently use throughout your interviews or surveys. And what issues they face with current solutions.

Here’s a quick check-list for competitor research:

1. Product overview: Include pricing, the quality of customer service, the overall product quality, etc.
2. Pricing breakdown: How are features tiered, free trial or fremium model, what key features do their users rave about?
3. Sales strategy: Go try it out yourself and see what it’s like firsthand.
4. Check out marketing: What is popular with the audience, what’s their paid and organic strategy?
5. Who loves their content and why?
6. Technology: What’s their stack look like, why did they build it that way?
7. Create a SWOT Analysis to understand your potential edge in this space.

This does not begin on launch day or even the week before! Your team needs to understand why and how they are creating and describing the product to outperform the competition. 

This vision is reinforced by market research and continuously communicated.

Gather the results

It’s up to you and the team to decide where and how to collect the results – in slides, a Notion page, Figjam, or a Miro board. Whatever tool or workspace your team likes!

You may have a large pile of data by now — the purpose isn't to showcase everything! This will bore everyone and the key findings can be overlooked. Consolidate and highlight — you can always show more data to whoever wants to see it.

Include the following:

• Context: Explain your research objectives.
• Audience: Who are the persona groups? Divide them into logical categories.
• Highlights: What valuable insights did you uncover? What can your team do with this data?
• Awareness: Why and how dp these personas recognize their problem(s) and search for solutions? Quote the specific triggers from your interviews.
• Comparison: How do they compare solutions? How long until they decide to buy? Who’s opinions inform their considerations?
• Purchase: What factors influence the decision to buy? Who decides — is the buyer the user in the end? Is the purchase triggered by key features or events?
• Next steps: Based on the results, lay out strategies to put your product into the consideration sets of your target personas. Prioritize each and give an expected timeline!

Define your Ideal Customer Profile

See the word "ideal"? From the start, you want to put your product in front of people who are inclined to buy. They face the problem you kept in mind when designing and building the product.

Here's an example of an ICP for the VISXA immigration platform. People can choose a lawyer, file an immigration case, and have it resolved in a transparent manner, with estimated costs and dates.

Put both needs and gains in your ICP. Needs reveal how people want their problem resolved. Gains are added features that the target audience values but are not make-or-break for their purchase decisions.

Before developing your ICP, agree on your target audience at a high level (for example, immigrants in the case of VISXA) and then break down segments. After that, build ICPs for each segment separately.

Now you have a data- and research-backed clear view of your target market.