What is an ICP when you have no customers?
With no customers, your ideal customer profile is a written guess about three things: who has the problem badly, what makes it urgent, and who can pay to fix it. The two-week test below checks it by contacting about 50 matching people for each version of the guess.
April Dunford, the positioning consultant, gives an order you can draft on paper. Dunford's positioning quickstart on Lenny's Newsletter (January 2021) starts with competitive alternatives, meaning what buyers would do if your product didn't exist. Next comes what you have that those alternatives lack, and what that is worth to buyers. Only then does Dunford define the customers who care most about that value. You can draft each step before your first sale, then check it against what prospects tell you.
Dunford's own example shows why narrowing pays. Early in Dunford's career, the company where Dunford ran marketing sold an enterprise CRM with 6 customers, up against Siebel Systems with 400. Landing a deal with an investment bank showed what its key feature was worth. It then repositioned as CRM for investment banks and, by Dunford's account, grew from under $2 million to close to $80 million over the next 18 months, before Siebel bought it for $1.3 billion.
Paul Graham, a co-founder of Y Combinator, calls this the contained fire. Graham's July 2013 essay Do Things that Don't Scale points out that Facebook started for Harvard students only, and suggests asking whether there is a subset of the market where you can get a critical mass of users quickly.
Start with the pain and the trigger, not the job title
Write the problem and the moment it becomes urgent first, and pick the job title last. A title tells you who might care. A trigger tells you when they care enough to answer a stranger.
Two r/startups threads show what goes wrong when you start with the title. In an October 2025 thread from a European no-code startup (8 comments when checked on 24 October 2026), the poster guessed the ICP was the enterprise application architect. One commenter argued that architects care about the tech stack but lack the budget and the pain, and suggested IT directors, heads of digital transformation and CIOs instead. That is one commenter's view, but it names the gap: the user and the buyer are often different people.
In a September 2025 thread on defining an ICP early (14 comments when checked on 24 October 2026), the poster's formula was pain point plus buying power plus urgency to act. One commenter's view on urgency: "if they can live with the current solution for another year, they're not your ICP yet." Fill in this card for each guess:
| Field | Write this | Example (a tool that chases unpaid invoices) |
|---|---|---|
| Problem, in their words | A phrase you have seen a real person write | "Half my week goes on chasing invoices" |
| Current workaround | What they do today and what it costs | Spreadsheet plus manual reminder emails |
| Trigger | The event that makes it urgent this month | A late-paying client causes a cash-flow gap |
| Who feels it | The person doing the work | Agency owner or office manager |
| Who pays | The person who approves the spend | Agency owner |
| Where it is worst | Company type and size | Agencies with 5 to 30 staff billing monthly retainers |
| Where they talk | Communities, hashtags, events | Agency-owner groups, LinkedIn |
| Not a fit | Who to exclude | Companies with a full-time finance team |
The example is ours, made up to show the format. Write three cards that differ on one main thing, such as the trigger or the company type. Three different guesses will teach you more than one polished guess.
Where do you find evidence before anyone buys?
Look for people who already describe the problem in public, then talk to a handful about what they did the last time it happened. Our guide to finding people who publicly describe the problem you solve covers the search side: Reddit, LinkedIn and X queries, and review sites.
For conversations, ask about past behaviour, not opinions about your idea. Useful questions:
- "When did this last happen? Walk me through it."
- "What did you try, and what did it cost you in time or money?"
- "Who else got involved, and who signed off on any spend?"
- "What would have to happen for you to fix this in the next month?"
The third question finds the buyer. The fourth finds the trigger. Our list of discovery call questions for founders has more.
When should you stop interviewing? First Round Review quotes Christina Cacioppo, co-founder and CEO of Vanta, on this: "You'll know you understand the customer problem enough when you can predict 75% of what a customer tells you." That line sits in a list of quotes on First Round's Superhuman article. Until you reach that point, every interview should change something on your cards.
How many replies tell you a segment is real?
At 50 contacts per segment, only big differences mean anything. A segment that gets 10 positive replies out of 50 clearly beats one that gets 1. A segment with 5 does not clearly beat one with 3. We worked this out with the Wilson method for confidence intervals on a proportion, which the NIST Engineering Statistics Handbook describes. A positive reply here means someone asked a question, agreed to talk or said "this is us".
| Positive replies | Rate | Likely true rate (95% range) |
|---|---|---|
| 1 of 50 | 2% | 0.4% to 10.5% |
| 3 of 50 | 6% | 2.1% to 16.2% |
| 5 of 50 | 10% | 4.3% to 21.4% |
| 10 of 50 | 20% | 11.2% to 33.0% |
| 3 of 100 | 3% | 1.0% to 8.5% |
| 12 of 100 | 12% | 7.0% to 19.8% |
Read it like this. With 1 reply from segment A and 10 from segment B, the ranges (0.4% to 10.5% and 11.2% to 33.0%) don't overlap, so B is better. With 3 and 5, the ranges overlap almost completely, so you have learned nothing yet. Even 3 versus 12 out of 100 still overlaps a little. Non-overlapping ranges are a cautious rule of thumb, stricter than a formal test, but it stops you from rebuilding your ICP around two lucky replies.
In practice: send 50 per segment, and only declare a winner when the gap looks like the 1-versus-10 row. If all three segments come back flat, change the problem or the trigger before you change the job title.
How do you run the test without wasting your list?
Change one thing per segment and keep everything else fixed: same channel, same offer, same week, same message length. Only the opening line about the problem and the trigger should differ.
Build three lists of 50
One list per card. Each person should match the card on role, company type and, where you can see it, the trigger. Our guide to your first 10 B2B customers with no network covers where to find them.
Send one short message per person
Ask about the problem, not for a meeting: "Is chasing late invoices still a weekly job for you, or have you fixed it?" Send one follow-up after four or five days.
Log every reply in one sheet
Columns: segment, title, company size, positive or not, and the exact words they used about the problem.
Compare against the table above
Declare a winner only on a large gap. Otherwise send 50 more to each segment, or rewrite the weakest card.
Siela's AI SDR can build the three lists for you. Paste your website and it suggests roles, industries, company size, company type and locations, or you write a short ideal-customer summary. Each run gets its own CRM group, so one run per card keeps the segments apart, and every lead comes with a hot, warm or cold score and a one-line reason.
How do you refine the ICP from who responds?
Rewrite your card around the people who answered, even if they are not the people you aimed at. Rahul Vohra, the Superhuman founder, describes doing this with early users in First Round Review (November 2018). Superhuman asked users how they would feel if they could no longer use the product. Only 22% said "very disappointed". Vohra's team gave each respondent a persona, then narrowed the market to the personas in that very disappointed group. That step alone moved the score to 33%. Vohra warns that narrowing by your own assumptions about who the product is for teaches you nothing new.
You have replies instead of survey answers, but the logic is the same. After the test:
- Sort positive replies by title. If buyers answered where you expected users, move the "who pays" field up.
- Sort by trigger. If most positive replies mentioned the same recent event, that event becomes your targeting rule.
- Copy their words. The exact phrases from replies go into the problem field and your next message.
- Write the "not a fit" line. Anyone who replied "we built this in-house" or "we have a team for that" tells you who to exclude.
Once people use the product every week, move from replies to Superhuman's survey. Our guide to the product-market fit survey walks through it. Until then, check every new lead against the updated card and sort it with our guide to hot, warm and cold leads.
Frequently asked questions
Can you have an ICP before your first customer?
Yes, as a hypothesis. Write down who has the problem badly, what event makes it urgent and who approves the spend. Then test it by contacting about 50 matching people per version and comparing positive replies. The ICP becomes evidence-based once you can see which version people answer, and later which version pays.
How many people should you contact to test an ICP?
About 50 per segment is enough to spot large differences. By our Wilson-interval arithmetic, 1 positive reply out of 50 and 10 out of 50 give non-overlapping 95% ranges, so the gap is real. Results like 3 versus 5 out of 50 overlap almost completely, so you need more contacts or a sharper difference between segments.
Should your ICP be the user or the buyer?
Write down both. The user feels the problem every day; the buyer approves the spend. In early B2B sales they are often different people, for example an architect who would use a tool and a director who controls the budget. Message the buyer about the cost of the problem and the user about the work it creates.
What if nobody replies in any segment?
Change the problem or the trigger before you change the job title. When three different segments all come back flat, suspect the pain or the timing first, and the role last. Go back to public complaints and interviews, rewrite the problem field in people's own words, and run the test again.
How often should you update an ICP with no customers?
After every test round, which in practice means every two to three weeks. Each round should change at least one field on your card: the trigger, the buyer, the company type or the exclusions. Once people use the product every week, switch to a product-market fit survey and segment by the users who would be very disappointed without your product.
Sources
- Lenny's Newsletter: A quickstart guide to positioning, by April Dunford (published 26 Jan 2021)
- Paul Graham: Do Things that Don't Scale (July 2013)
- First Round Review: How Superhuman Built an Engine to Find Product Market Fit (Rahul Vohra) (12 Nov 2018)
- NIST/SEMATECH e-Handbook of Statistical Methods: Confidence intervals for proportions (checked 24 Oct 2026)
- Reddit r/startups: Find ICP and initial customers as a European B2B startup (October 2025; checked 24 Oct 2026)
- Reddit r/startups: Do you define your ICP early or sell to everyone first? (September 2025; checked 24 Oct 2026)
- Vanta: About (checked 24 Oct 2026)
- Paul Graham: Bio (checked 24 Oct 2026)