Session 3
Your Ideal Client
Whales or minnows? One-off trinkets or repeat buyers? Once you know who you’re for, the strategy writes itself.
Founder Files
At Stitchin’ Heaven, our best customer isn’t “a quilter.” She’s a woman 55–75, retired or semi-retired, with disposable income, who treats quilting as identity, not hobby. She spends thousands per year, comes to multiple events, and tells five friends.
Once we got that specific, every decision got easier. Our ads. Our copy. Our product mix. Our retreats. Our store layout. Every dollar we spent got 3x more efficient — not because we got smarter, but because we stopped trying to sell to everyone.
Your Ideal Client Is Your Playbook
Most founders skip this step or do it lazily. They scribble “small business owners ages 30–55” on a worksheet and move on. That’s not a customer profile. That’s a phone book.
The right way to do this: get specific enough that a stranger reading your ICP could walk into a room, point at someone, and say “that’s her.” If you can’t do that, you don’t know your customer yet — and every marketing dollar you spend will leak.
"Are you chasing whales or minnows? One-off trinkets or repeat buyers? The client profile decides the entire game plan."
Whales vs. Minnows — Pick Your Game
Before you do anything else, decide which game you’re playing. They each work. They just require completely different machines.
Whales
- Fewer customers, higher ticket, longer sales cycles
- You need a sales team, white-glove service, deep relationships
- Revenue is concentrated — losing one whale hurts
Minnows
- Many customers, lower ticket, faster sales cycles
- You need automation, paid ads, a brand that scales
- Revenue is distributed — no single customer matters too much
Neither is better. But trying to run both with the same team, same systems, and same marketing is the fastest way to suck at both. Pick.
Borrowed Brilliance
Alex Hormozi · $100M Offers
The Starving Crowd
Hormozi’s hierarchy: Market > Offer > Copy. The single biggest mistake founders make is having a great offer for a market that doesn’t desperately want it. A mediocre hot dog stand in front of a stadium at halftime beats a Michelin-star menu nobody can find. Find the starving crowd first. Then build the offer. Then write the copy. In that order.
Translation: if your ICP isn’t actively shopping for the problem you solve, you don’t have an ICP problem. You have a market problem.
SKUs Are a Crystal Ball
Here’s a fast diagnostic if you sell products: look at your top 10 SKUs by revenue and your top 10 by margin. They tell you exactly who’s buying and why.
- Price tells you what kind of buyer you have (price-sensitive vs. value-driven).
- Quantity tells you whether they're hobbyists or pros.
- Volume / weight tells you about your shipping economics and your repeat purchase patterns.
- Margin tells you which customers actually fund the business and which ones just inflate revenue.
Most founders make the mistake of falling in love with the loudest customer (the one calling and emailing). The SKUs tell you who the profitable customer is. Listen to the data.
The 10 Customer Discovery Questions
Project yourself into your best customer’s mind. Not their demographics — their inner world. Then answer these:
- What’s the primary tension or pain they’re trying to resolve?
- What are they trying to become? What’s the hero’s journey they’re on?
- What are their concrete goals? How does what you sell connect to those goals?
- What are they Googling right now? What’s the literal search query in their head?
- What do they value? What do they care about most — price, status, ease, identity, community?
- What lights them up? What are they passionate about even outside the buying decision?
- What emotion are they trying to feel by buying from you?
- What unmet need are you serving? Safety, belonging, status, growth, creativity?
- What traits do your best customers share? Optimistic, driven, frugal, status-conscious?
- What makes you irreplaceable to them? Both the rational reasons and the irrational ones.
Borrowed Brilliance
Ryan Deiss · DigitalMarketer
The Before/After Grid
BEFORE (their life right now): Have · Feel · Average day · Status
AFTER (their life after using you): Have · Feel · Average day · Status
The gap between Before and After is your offer. The bigger and clearer the gap, the more your customer will pay you. Most marketing sucks because it describes the product. Great marketing describes the transformation.
Vanity Customers vs. Right-Fit Customers
Every business has them: the loud, demanding, low-margin customer who eats your team’s time. The one you keep around because firing them feels scary. Fire them. They aren’t your ICP. They’re the ghost of who you used to serve before you knew better.
The fastest way to make your team better, your offers tighter, and your margins higher is to ruthlessly aim everything at your right-fit customer — and let the rest go elsewhere.
The $10K Question
If you could only keep 20% of your customers — the ones you actually love serving — and had to fire the other 80%, what would happen to your revenue, your margin, and your team’s energy?
Action Steps for Session 3:
- Decide: whales or minnows. Write it on your CEO Snapshot.
- Pull your top 10 SKUs (or top 10 deals) by revenue and margin. What do they reveal about your real ICP?
- Fill out the Before/After Grid for your ideal customer.
- Pick your top 3–5 answers from the discovery questions and add them to your CEO Snapshot.
- Identify one current customer who is NOT your ICP. Decide what you’ll do about it.
