Your target audience

You're probably smart and can quickly tell me what your target market is. It might be "tech startups with 10-50 employees in France and Germany". If it's not your first startup, you might even say something like "tech startups that got their seed round a couple months back and now are preparing their accounts for a series A".

The second option is a very good starting point. And if that's you, skip this step and go to the next step right away.

What if I you don't know your target audience?

If you didn't skip this section, you might have a general idea about the problem you're trying to tackle, but you're not sure what type of company to prioritise. You might be thinking your product can be used by so many people that you don't want to narrow it down. That's usually a startup-killing mistake.

You don't have the fire power to focus on many markets. It's much better to focus on one type of client and then frow from that. There are a couple of reasons for this:

1. Your message is specific, so you tell them you know their problems. People tend to trust more when they feel you are offering a solution tailored to them. The more specific you get, the more trust-worthy you will seem.
2. Your audience is smaller, so it's easier to find and convince. Usually companies that are similar to each other are easier to find then a general type of a company. Look up "IoT solutions for crop monitoring and field management" and compare it to "agricultural tech solutions". Two very different stories and the first one gives you a solid start for a list of clients.
3. It's much easier to create content for social media when you know exactly the person you're supposed to be speaking to. If you don't know who you're talking to, you can't write a post that would speak to their frustrations and make them laugh.

Okay, so what should you do?

Think about all the people that could use your product. If you had to get one client in a month, because otherwise your project would be closed, which group would you target? Who is the most likely to buy from your right now?

This should be very specific. "Early-stage tech founders" is too vague for you now. Are these founders in finance? In health tech? In cloud services? These answers change dramatically. Cloud services can move fast and try things. Fintech founders can't risk with super new tools because they work with banks and funds that have governments watching them all the time. Health tech founders usually do software and hardware, so they rarely have the bandwidth to consider something that hasn't been tested by others when they need to find suppliers for prototypes.

Choose just one sector like this, one size and type of company.

Now think about their current process

Ask yourself: what stage are they at right now when it comes to the problem you're solving.

Let's say you have a money-saving tool that checks all the transactions of a company and finds old subscriptions and fraudulent payments. What stage can a company of 50 people be at with this problem? They can be at:

• 0% speed: they are doing nothing about this problem and don't even know this problem could have a solution
• 50% speed: they are tracking all their subscriptions in Google Sheets and go through everything from time to time
• 80% speed: they are using a similar tool that isn't as good as yours
• 100% speed: they are using your tool.

So which of these options are your ideal client? Your answer changes a lot in how you will need to communicate on your website and in your content on social media.

Decide now whether your ideal client is going at 0%, 50% or 80%, because this will be important in the next step.