Our ICP Framework: Persona + Situation, and Why Everyone Is No One

A few weeks ago I met with a founder. Very good at what she did. She had clients, she had a business, she was almost making a full-time income. So I asked her: "Okay, who do you serve?"

"Everyone with a problem."

Okay. That's the entire world, basically.

I hear a version of that answer every week. "Small businesses." "Busy professionals." Who is not a busy professional? If you're a professional, you're busy, I guess.

I spoke about this for a full hour in a webinar, and the recording is right there above. This is the written version: the framework we use at the Lab to figure out who your ideal client is, without a 40-page document.

Five signs your ICP is fuzzy

Before the framework, be honest with yourself. If two or more of these sound familiar, your ICP isn't there yet:

• People don't get what you sell, so you over-explain. Every conversation turns into a lecture.
• You keep changing your LinkedIn headline and bio. Every month a new one.
• You can't name three people in your network who would buy it right now. Not "maybe sometime I could use it." Right now.
• If I asked you to reach out to 20 people today, and not just say hi but really offer them your product, you wouldn't know where to start.
• You use different words than they do. I worked with a founder who was targeting people with burnout. And they were burned out, but they never used that word. They said "I'm stressed," "I'm overwhelmed." The moment she changed her words, everything changed for good.

ICP = Persona + Situation

ICP is just "ideal client profile." Every word in business has some kind of mystery around it. It shouldn't be like that.

I've done and paid for very expensive workshops to define ICPs. And those documents end up in a Google Drive I never go back to. I can't remember complex frameworks. I want the version I can run in the shower. Because the simpler something is, the more powerful it becomes. You can actually use it.

So our definition is very simple: persona plus situation. As simple as that.

Persona is whatever describes the person that is relevant to your business. Their role, their identity, their goals. I don't care if they're 25 to 35. Maybe that's not relevant for your business at all. But maybe you care a lot about their role at the company.

Situation is the situation they're in that they want to get out of. That's what really matters, because a situation unlocks emotions. When you can describe a situation, you can describe what they feel because of it.

Picture someone lost in the desert. They're thirsty. Their feet are burning. They want to get home. They miss the AC. See? One sentence about the situation and you already know how they feel. And business is highly emotional. Emotions play a huge role in every buying decision.

Balance the two

You don't need both halves razor-sharp. You need a good balance.

If the situation is strong, the persona almost doesn't matter. Lost in the desert? Could be a CEO, could be a 20-year-old backpacker. Doesn't matter. They all want out.

If the situation is weak, the persona has to compensate and be very specific. A consultant who helps one very particular kind of regulated health company gets away with a softer situation, because the who is so clear.

What you can't have is both vague. "Busy professionals who want to grow." Neither the who nor the why is in focus, and nobody reads that and thinks "that's me."

Sharpening the situation

Here's where most people get stuck: they write a condition and call it a situation.

"Overwhelmed." "Disorganized." "Not making enough money." Those are chronic. People live with them for years. A chronic condition is not a situation. Something has to happen that makes it urgent now.

So when the situation feels flat, break it into three pieces:

• Condition: the chronic state. The dentist who runs everything out of his own head.
• Trigger: what just made it urgent. He's opening a second location this year.
• Consequence: what happens if nothing changes. He's terrified the first one falls apart while he builds the second.

If you can't name the trigger, you have a condition, not a situation. Keep digging.

What a sharp ICP unlocks

When you nail the persona and the situation, four things happen almost on their own.

You touch a nerve. The moment you mention an emotion they feel, they're like: "Oh my god, this guy understands me." And they open up. Something clicks, something magic happens, and honestly, your offer can suck. That person is going to keep listening to you until your offer doesn't suck.

The outcome names itself. The person in the desert doesn't care about your super sophisticated distribution channel to get water in the middle of nowhere. They want the bottle of water. Then the compass. Then the ride home. You don't have to invent the outcome. When you both talk about the same situation, you're co-creating it.

Pricing becomes obvious. A bottle of water costs $2 at the store. In the desert? It's not the water I sell. It's getting out of the desert. I can give you water at $250 because my distribution channel is expensive. You want to ride home on a chopper? That's a premium. $20k. You're pricing the transition out of their situation, not the thing in your hand. I've even had people tell me I charge too little.

You stop talking about you. They don't care about you. They don't care about your credentials or your company's beautiful trademarked name. The moment you introduce yourself with "I am a bookkeeper," they already know how much they're willing to pay you. You made yourself smaller. You became a commodity. It's not who I am. It's who I help and what I help them with.

Bad and good

Bad: everyone. Small businesses. Entrepreneurs. Busy professionals. Anyone with a website.

Good:

• First-time moms, 0 to 6 months postpartum.
• A solo dentist with a 5 to 8 person practice, opening a second location this year.
• A boutique gym under 300 members, right after the January rush is gone.
• An agency doing $30k to $80k a month that just lost its biggest client.

Read any of the good ones and you can picture a real person. You can almost hear them say "Oh, that's me." A good business filters people out, not in. If you say you can help anyone, good luck finding anyone, because anyone is no one. If you say you help dentists, you know which door to knock on.

From ICP to offer

Once you have the ICP, add the outcome and you have your Seed Offer: I help [persona in a situation] achieve [outcome]. I help people lost in the desert get home. That's the foundation stone. I wrote about it in the Seed Offer post. Your seed offer should be a consequence of your ICP, not the other way around.

And you'll usually have one umbrella ICP for the business and a sharper one per product. Say I sell hot dogs at a field where they play soccer every weekend. My ICP is the people who come to the games. During the week I sell to whoever passes by, of course. But I know who I built the stand for.

Same thing in the desert. The executive gets the $20k chopper. The young backpacker gets water and a Tylenol for $200. Same situation, two products. That's where the Offer Levers come in.

You find your ICP. You don't define it.

This is the part nobody tells you. Your ICP is not something you decide at your desk. It's a hypothesis. You find the real one down the road. But you need something to aim for.

So you go and test it. Pitch it to 3 to 10 real people who fit. Your mom doesn't count. Your friends don't count. It has to be someone in your ICP.

And ask the right question. "Would you buy this?" "How much would you pay for this?" Useless questions. Everybody says yes to "would you." The question you're looking for is: do you want to buy this sh***y product right now?

Then read the no's. "This isn't for me" means your persona is off. "That's me, but that's not my problem" means your situation is off. Both are gold.

And please, no paid ads at this stage. Where to find your ICP is the golden question. Figure out how to talk to them on a regular basis (picking that one channel is line 4 of my one-page business plan) and you've solved the hardest challenge of every business.

They have to be able to pay

One more filter, the Income First one. The person who feels the pain isn't always the person who pays. The building concierge feels it, the property manager pays.

So ask both: do they feel it now, and can they, or someone on their behalf, pay to get out of it? Sometimes we spend weeks going back and forth to really find a person who feels the pain strongly enough to pay us for something. That's normal. That's the work.

It keeps changing

We're human beings. We change all the time. Our context changes, so the situation changes.

One founder I worked with was building a technical solution for manufacturing companies. After enough conversations he came back and said: "You know what? This is not a technical problem. It's a cultural problem." So of course he went back to the ICP, then the pitch deck, then the product. That's not failure. That's the ICP doing its job.

Your turn

Write your current ICP in one line. Don't polish it. Persona plus situation.

Now name three people who would buy right now. If you can't, sharpen the situation: find the trigger. Then message one of them tomorrow and ask if they want it now.

If the recording helps, it's at the top of this page. Take what resonates with you and try it—or not!