Episode 773 | How to Find Your Early Customer Profile (ECP)
30:15 Share

This podcast is brought to you by Mercury. I've been banking with Mercury for years, and whenever I set up a new account, I'm reminded why traditional banking feels stuck in the past.

When our previous bank faced solvency issues, we needed to spin up new accounts quickly that could handle millions in funds across multiple businesses. Mercury had us up and running almost immediately. I managed half a dozen different Mercury accounts across a wide range of companies, from my personal single-member LLC to MicroConf, our seven-figure global events and education platform, to TinySeed.com.

our venture fund and accelerator. Mercury easily handles them all. The interface is elegantly simple for daily banking, paying invoices, and sending and receiving international wires, yet powerful enough to handle the multi-step approval processes we needed to put in place when funding founders with large transfers.

Anytime founders ask me who they should set up their accounts with, I send them to mercury.com. Check the show notes for more details and note that Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank.

Welcome back to another episode of Startup for the Rest of Us. I'm Rob Walling, and in this episode I talk with Maya Voyer. She's the author of Go-to-Market Strategist, Everything You Need to Reach Product Market Fit. And her book and her consulting and her writing is all focused on B2B SaaS.

We have a great conversation today defining what go-to-market is because that's always a term that I've struggled with because it feels very MBA-like, feels theoretical in a way that maybe isn't helpful for bootstrappers. But I've become more comfortable with it over the last several years and Maya has a nice way of communicating that go-to-market or GTM is really just

pricing and positioning and packaging and customer. It's like an umbrella term for several things. So we dig into that, we dig into ECP, which is your early customer profile, which is different from your ICP, as well as some early stage scrappy marketing approaches that don't scale. Before we dive into the episode, I want to let you know about the MicroConf Growth Retreat, a new event we're launching in London from May 14th to the 16th of 2025.

This isn't your average conference. We're keeping it intimate with just 40 to 60 SaaS founders joining us for deep networking and invaluable insights.

So with that, let's dive in to my conversation with Maya. Maya, thanks for joining me on the show.

Rolf, it's such a pleasure. Let's talk about everything go-to-market today.

Everything go-to-market.

Well, that's our best plan to reach early majority, right? The first customers are not that difficult. These are usually people who come from your phone book or some sort of social media early adopters group. So that's like not that much of a rocket science.

Then in the later stage, once you defend product market fit, you are facing a big question. So how to build these predictable and scalable ways, how to get customers? These are called go-to-market motions. And that in my science is the Holy Grail of the go-to-market stage for startups. How to just like stop worrying where our next customer is coming from, that we have some sort of predictable engines to do the work so we can maybe take vacation one day. That's nice.

But I have to emphasize here, and it's such an important thing, because oftentimes go-to-market is mistaken for marketing or sales or LinkedIn. So it's a combination of different factors. And if you are deep into the product, you will probably say, oh, go-to-market is that, but hear me out.

First, we have to find a very good market, market where we have a chance to win. Then we are dealing with just like this selection of customers, right? So what are the customers that will indulge our product and help us grow this business?

Later on, after we kind of figure that out, we can return to product and maybe we could be like even playing around with different value propositions and different ways how do we provide value after we have a little bit of an initial traction going on, initial feedback.

Then we have to learn what to say, like how to present our product. That's positioning and messaging. And nevertheless, it's nice that people pay us as well, right? So we're not doing everything for free. That's pricing. And later on, we bump into the last component, which is growth. So this is how to get customers. Ideally, we would build go-to-market motions. Hope that was clear. But if you have any sort of sub-questions, you know this is my favorite topic. And I cannot shut up about this.

Your favorite topic so much that you wrote a book on it called Go-To Market Strategist, Everything You Need to Reach Product Market Fit. There's a hard copy there. You have paperback and Kindle and of course it's available online.

on Amazon and I believe this is how you came across our radar. Folks on X Twitter have been talking about you and then GoToMarketStrategist, the book, came across our radar. I want to dive into this concept of ECP. It's this early customer profile. But before I do that, I guess in summary, saying GoToMarket is really this umbrella term for packaging up

and bringing the product to market, right? And that's the thing I think that confused me. Even like five years ago, whenever I heard go-to-market, I thought, this is very academic. It's very theoretical. It's very big business. And it's because every example that I read in a book always used

and best buy and target and these Fortune 500 companies, you know what I mean? And none of that ever applied. But if you package it up as no, it's your early customers, it's the market, it's the pricing, it's a plan, right? That's, I think, the summary. So I want to come back then to ECP, this concept that I just mentioned. So we talk a bit on this podcast about ICP, your ideal customer profile. And especially if you're early stage,

That can be impossible to know, difficult to find. Once a business is more mature, the ICP makes more sense. Maybe you have one, maybe you have two, whatever. What is this ECP concept? And talk me through how, again, maybe an early stage bootstrapper should be thinking about it, why it's important to them.

Awesome. And this is such an relevant question for our audience who's mainly in B2B, right? Because in B2B, you know how it is. If you want to target like big companies, you need to go through compliance, you need to have like a couple of badges and everybody will ask you, can you show me like 5 case studies, 7 use cases and yada yada that you don't have at the moment.

So we have to build our way to the ideal customer profile. It's very good to have a strong vision. Literally, I'm working with enterprise cloud AI softwares right now, and we are dealing and bumping into the same problem, right? So the technology is really good. But so far, like ideal customers have been

big, big considerations, just like doing pilots and use cases because it's not enterprise safe yet, right? So in order to bridge this gap between where we want to be and where we currently are with our product, our traction, we are using this proxy of early customers in order to strategically generate references and tractions so that we can move up market later on.

And why I like to call it like early is literally a very personal reason as well, because you need to do something right when you are launching. And of course, you can have this big vision that might be true in three years. But where we are today, it's a little bit different. So you need people who are thinking differently and acting differently.

Early customers usually have much bigger risk tolerance, right? So they are those early adopters. Oh, there is a new tool. I would like to play around a little bit. Sometimes they are even inclined to break corporate rules. They are just like using it from their personal emails or something like that.

So I became obsessed with just like this idea, how to get early traction. So first, like in your beta, it might be free and these are not customers. These are users, right? And there will be huge discrepancy between people who are using it and saying it is off.

This is why I wanted to differentiate this concept from just like early adopters, because the essence of customers is that they are paying for it. Meaning not only they are saying they are loving it, but we can actually reinvest in our business. So that's a little bit of why I am so bullish on this early customer profile.

So that's an early customer. It sounds like ECPs are your early adopters, right? They're willing to try your product. That are paying. That are paying. They're customers, not users. This is something I often say on this show. Because someone will say, I have 10,000 users. And I'm like, great, zero people paying you. It's 10,000 customers that matters. Okay, so ECPs are willing to try your product per...

Now, what's the danger here? It seems like it could be pretty easy to make big mistakes. It's like, I've seen folks launch, you get 20, 30, 40 paying customers that maybe we could call ECPs in this context, and they're all over the place. You know, someone's like, I want this to become this other competitor, and I want this feature, and it's just like 40 different people, 50 different feature requests.

I can imagine this being overwhelming. So what are some big maybe mistakes that founders make as they're trying to build out their ECP?

Okay, best case scenario, you think about this before it happens, right? So when we are just like deciding who is going to be ideal customer for our profiles, we can come up with a couple of hypotheses, right? And at this stage, I love to use prioritization framework. So I never, ever, ever want to say to people, just like select one and let's live with this for the next six months or something like that.

No, your technology, your maybe AI agents could be helping. A, compliance. B, VCs. C, banks. Okay, we have three ideas of the segments.

Do we really feel secure that we are just like saying, maybe I like VCs, let's go with VCs and just like take it for granted for the next months of our go-to-market operations? No, we need to do validation first. So ideally, you would not encounter this problem, but...

But in reality, you often do. And especially when you are launching and you are reverse engineering, like who either retained best or who converted best, like which segment with your product, you can come into the very conflicting situation. So for example, like freelancers love my AI content writer, but agencies would use it if they had this and this and that feature. And you're like,

"Okay, right now, mission critical is to get 50 customers. At this point, I can no longer heavily invest in the product and previously I have decided that my vision is to help small and medium businesses.

So currently, I don't want to deal with these partnerships and with these agencies. By the way, I love to work with agencies. They are great accelerators. But point, you have to be true to your vision, to your product vision. And if you have done the market research correctly, the segmentation, if you have conducted interviews, that could be a little bit easier because you will feel much more confident about your choices.

But then another very common mistake with early customers is also how we are acquiring it. Because in literally the channels that we will choose for launch, to determine who

who are we going to attract right so it's mission critical to also do a very solid research on which channels our icp is and that's not that difficult these days because chat gpt cloth what else could we be talking about so yeah definitely do your homework and especially if you are dealing in

in a very, very, very, very strict industries, for example, injection molding or some sort of transportation companies where people are not online, you can literally ask them where do they find like relevant tools and information to advance in their career or businesses, right? So you can get this information from some of your people as well. Don't just like blindly follow this blueprint. Yeah, and I should post on LinkedIn and maybe Hacker News.

and product hand launch if that's not relevant for your audience. That's a big mistake that we have to avoid. I like to dive into examples if we have them. Do you have any really good B2B SaaS case studies for ECP implementation?

So I will not throw in the names of the companies right now. Some of the founders are public with this one, some are not. But yeah, let's talk through a couple of ones. We have an AI content writer, a typical staff for repurposing a little bit better trained that you could in your projects.

And it was super, super, super interesting because we just launched. We thought that it is going to be like a very broad product that everybody, like every marketer and let's say salesperson, business developer who needs to post on LinkedIn could be benefiting from this. That was our initial assumption. But once we saw the results...

from the traction, I mean, users was always okay, but customers who were the first segments that were converting rightly, it was founders. So that was a big surprise. We anticipated that this is going to be very interesting for marketers, but we ended up serving founders and we literally had to pivot the communication of that one because just like for marketers, the value prop was not that convincing.

We could not differentiate it much nicer than like copy AI or like what you can do in chat GPT. But for founders, it worked amazingly well. We have like another example from an analytics tool and analytics tools, you know how they are. They're a little bit heavier to sell, right? It's a big investment like CRM. You have to learn it. You have to commit to be using it for a longer period of time.

So these types of launches are specifically interesting when they are done on the red ocean market. So when there is a lot of competition and usually we go with vertical positioning, meaning that you narrow down to one specific audience, one specific persona and go all in to get early traction.

Well, for this one, the situation was very similar again to what you're saying. The tool got, I kid you not, 50,000 users from Reddit and additional forum. And everybody was like, yay, this is so cool. Product managers were playing around it so far. Monetization was a pain in the ass. So

So what happened there was that like initially they went with like this idea to be serving indie developers and yada yada. But later on, they figured out that like the real customer for them are just like small and medium businesses, B2B businesses. So that was a huge one as well. I mean, I can be going on forever, forever, forever. It even happened to my launch, right? Because there is another fallacy that is

kind of dangerous here. As a founder, you have this vision, right? And usually the vision is to be helping everybody and to make your product super horizontal and useful in all different perspectives. And yeah, I was kind of the same. And there is another fallacy. So I conclude, I literally envisioned that I want to serve like growth people and marketers, you know, people just like me, aka eating your dog food.

But in reality, just like after seeing the response from the market, these ideas of segments, who is actually my target customer, refined probably 11 times since I am operating this GTM Strategist Venture. So end of story. Even when you nailed it, market changes, technology changes, go back to the drawing board. Make sure that you are always, always, always on point with that.

Yeah, there's a lot to that. You have done a tremendous amount of writing specifically, and maybe you've also done speaking in podcasts, but I've seen your book and I've seen these articles that you've written at gtmstrategist.com. One of those that really caught my attention, the title is Go-To-Market Action.

Do whatever it takes to get customers. Yep, 12 proven ways by unicorn companies and how to apply them now. And the thing that I find really interesting about this is, again, if folks who are familiar with GTM or go-to-market, there's go-to-market motions. That's usually the term everyone hears. And that is actually bringing the product to market. It's doing that, you know, I think you said five things earlier, right? It's like pricing, packaging, customers, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. But you're talking about GTM actions, go-to-market actions, which...

happen before go-to-market motions. Much like ECP is before ICP, GTM actions are before GTM motions as far as I'm reading into it because this is the first time I'm hearing of all this. But we're going to link this article up in the show notes for sure because you have this great diagram that we won't have time to go into in an audio podcast, but you have like the 12 different GTM actions versus go-to-market motions.

I want to talk about a few of these because they really remind me, frankly, they remind me of what a lot of our listeners do, which is, you know, our listeners, they are almost all of them start bootstrapped. Most of them probably start nights and weekends. Some of them have the luxury, they have a spouse or they've saved some money and they're able to quit their day job and do this. And some of them raise money 10, 20%.

probably 20% of our listeners wind up raising some type of money. So it's not about bootstrapping versus not, but there's a certain level of scrappiness, right? There's a certain level of doing things that don't scale and not saying, if I want to be a $10 million company, I have to act like a $10 million company today. And if you act like a $10 million company today, you're probably making a mistake, right? Much like a unicorn, if you want to become a billion dollar company, you don't act like that today. You do these scrappy, early stage things, which I

I think, am I summarizing it correctly? That's kind of what you're talking about, GTM actions. They may not scale, but they get you your first 5, 10, 50 customers. I love it. No, seriously, your founders are heroes. You totally understand the sentiment of doing this. Why? I mean, when you are just like this founder,

and like you have marketing, growth, sales and like fundraising and product and HR and accounting, you know, like this portion of energy that you can devote into this, it's critical, but it's not like your full day.

job, right? So I saw a lot of people just like being so burdened, so burned out by, I should be posting on LinkedIn five times a week. I should be writing a weekly blog post. I should be doing this and this and this and this and that, right? Why? Because the big companies are doing this. But methods, actual techniques, how to get first customers, like things that don't scale is a very nice comparison of it. I have literally talked to Tela. Tela is this

loom-like video recorder, but they have raised 2 million before. And in the article it is mentioned that, okay, they were like with Y Combinator and the first batch of customers were just like their peers from the incubator, right? So it's not, it was nothing fancy. Then they did outreach, right? And you don't have to build like full-fetched marketing and sales machines if your job to be done is to get 50 or 100 customers.

You can do stuff which are much, much, much, much, much easier, often very inexpensive, even for free, but you have to go out there. And this is the biggest obstacle, Rob, right there. People are so afraid to just like send out a couple of messages, post on a couple of forums. I don't know why. I'm sure that it is psychologically and I'm not an expert. But yeah, those actions are easier than you think.

Got it. And I did want to touch on a couple of these because you have 12 examples, again, in this article. What I like too is that you kind of start, a lot of these are things that I've talked about on this podcast. These are super practical things. Awesome. Which one is your favorite though, Rob? Well, I mean, I like, so your third one is warm outreach. So relationships or credibility. You also then have cold outreach with a hook as two separate things. And I've talked a lot about

this concept of concentric circle marketing where like at the center are people that know me, right? That's the warm. And then it's people I have like relationships with. And then it's my audience is probably the next one. And then it's like my network. And then it's my network's audience. You know, it's kind of you got concentric circles and that's kind of what you're talking about here. Yeah.

I love this concept. I would love to see a visual, but just like going back to our previous discussion about ECP, you have to be intentional, right? Because even like people from the second cycle, like who could potentially do this introduction to, let's say, more distant cycles, you need to have good use cases. You need to have good case studies and just like traction. Because if you are pitching like that you have this accounting software for...

let's say high schools, then if I work in construction, I'm not interested in this because I would be much more inclined towards seeing references, case studies from my vertical. So whenever you're starting out and doing this segmentation work, think really hard.

Are these companies attractive for case studies? Will I be able to move up market if I do this business, right? If your discrepancy between like early customers, the one you can close today and ideal customers, you should really, really, really be intentional about what type of businesses are you serving or white gloving. And...

Another one that I like is fishing on forums and online communities. Are forums still a thinker? Which forums do you edit? They are. I only go to forums when they mention something I have an alert set up for. But Reddit is going to be forums and Hacker News. It used to be Quora, but Quora is kind of...

Cora kind of went bye-bye, you know? It's still around, but people aren't using it as much. But I call these hangouts, you know, where people hang out online, right? And Facebook groups, right? I'm not on Facebook, but Slack, private Slack channels and everything.

I call them hangouts because it's where if I'm going to target electrical contractors, people who are in the construction industry, they're going to be on Reddit, they're going to be on Facebook, they may have a private Slack channel, probably not. There are some places, my brother runs an electrical contracting business in California and so I know there are places he hangs out online. It's not a town in there, it's not like Hacker News where everybody's on there all the time, but I would want to lurk and embed and start offering value there

And look, it's not a shortcut. And this is the thing. I was interviewed on a podcast a couple months ago and someone was asking me about these things. How do you get early customers? And I was listing all the things that I say, right? I have my standard big five approaches. There's SEO and content and forums and warm outreach, cold outreach, blah, blah, blah. And they were almost treating it pretty transactionally. And here's the thing. Five, 10, 15 years ago, you could go into online forums and you could be kind of transactional because not everyone was doing it. But marketers, f***.

ruining everything. They ruin everything, right? That's what's happened. That's what's happened. Producer Ron just sent me a screenshot of a completely random niche brick and mortar forum on Reddit. It's a subreddit. And one of the things, you know, it's like,

posting rules, don't be racist, blah, blah, blah. And one of them said, we don't want to hear about your stupid startup idea. Like, don't ask for it and give feedback. We will remove it. And you know why they have that? Because a bunch of people have come and basically spammed, you know, kind of spammed it. And so,

You really have to walk this line of like, am I actually going to come in and contribute value? Am I actually going to become part of the community a bit? Or am I going to jump in and just try to weigh in and link to my stuff, right? And I don't know if you have examples or experience with any of this. Tons.

tons so a colleague he was not a client he was just like this dude that I hang out in afternoon hours because he's building cool stuff all the time he built like AI for lawyers like he literally put one country's legislation and it was such a nice interface you could literally ask a question like is it legal that my neighbor has this car partner and it produced really good answers so he got I kid you not like

8,000 users from posting in 12 different communities, like random communities here locally. And I was just like so taken aback. Two days after he launched, one of the political parties called him if he would be interested in data exchange. He was like all around in the news. Why? Because his tone of communication was really, I build this platform

It does this and this and that. It's not perfect. If you are sick and tired of paying for lawyers, just take it for a spin and tell me what's wrong. I'm not saying that this is the formula. How should you be doing this? But it was just like this.

It was just like this, not promoting stuff or something like that. But it was just like, look, this is it. I think it's very cool. If you think it's cool as well, you can use it, whatever. It's for free. I'm not taking your data by now. So, yeah, you can still get in. But as you said, the technique, when you are just like there and developing like a little bit of credibility and trust before you go full on and start.

spam literally makes me think that less is better, right? So surgically choose the communities that your ICPs or ECPs are active in and treat them as a two or three month project. I mean, I was working with communities a lot when I was in my crypto times. Literally had to manage like a telegram of 40k people or something like that. It was ludicrous.

And you can feel it like as somebody who's on the hunt, you know, that like is there with a banner, with a hammer as an admin, you can feel this stuff from a distance. And if the community member is active, you would support them. Literally, you are developing a different type of sentiment towards them as an admin as well.

But I wouldn't place all my bets into that basket. I would definitely combine it with a little bit of outreach. And what I like to use these days a lot, especially with B2B softwares, are influencers. Because people and LinkedIn, that's just crazy. You know, like five years ago, and just like this B2C,

to see influencer games started to show up in ads and it became like an official UGC, like small content generation stuff. I think that we are approaching these days in B2B and I just love this type of tactics because the audience of micro creators usually has a lot of love and credibility towards that. So yeah, that's the one that I sneak in as well as AKA community slash influencers.

Very nice. And we've talked about three or four of the 12 examples that you give in this article. And if folks want to keep up with you, they, I mean, you have a ton of resources at gtmstrategist.com. You have a book, checklist, masterclass, as well as obviously the article that we will link up in the show notes. Maya Voyer, thanks so much for joining me on the show.

Oh my god, it was such a pleasure and guys, when you are launching and just like this GTM place in 2025, everybody's screaming like SEO doesn't work. Tomorrow I'm publishing how a company got 200k users for just like programmatic SEO. They are saying that outbound is dead. They are saying that like inbound is direct or something like that. Forget this stuff.

Just like first informed choice that you have to do is where your audience hangs out. That was a time that I took from Rob. The second thing is that you are there with a genuine message that you are contributing value, that you are not there like pitch slapping them. And the third thing is just like be consistent, right? Because...

Oftentimes things don't work the next day or the next week. Sometimes, especially with inbound, when you are producing content, you have to go all in for two, three months, sometimes even like six months and just like observe the progress, right? So that would be my best way how to say goodbye and thank you. Love it. Thanks again for joining me. Yeah, my pleasure.

Thanks again to Maya for joining me in this episode of the podcast. And thank you for listening this week and every week. This is Rob Walling signing off from episode 773.