You don't have a positioning problem. You have an ICP problem.
Before you touch your homepage, answer one question: who is this actually for?
Before you touch your homepage, before you rewrite your headline, before you hire a copywriter — you need to answer one question.
Who is this actually for?
Not “startups”. Not “SMBs”. Not “companies that want to grow”. A real person. With a specific job, a specific problem, and a specific reason to care about what you're building.
That person is your ICP. Your Ideal Customer Profile. And if you can't describe them clearly, nothing else works — not your positioning, not your sales, not your marketing. You're just shouting into a room and hoping someone shouts back.
If you don’t have customers yet, don’t start with guesswork. Start with How to find your ICP when you have zero customers.
And once your ICP is clear, positioning stops being a copy exercise and becomes a product decision. If you want the homepage version of this idea, read Your website isn't confusing. Your positioning is.
Why most founders skip this
Building is easier than thinking. You have a product, you have a landing page, you start getting users. Some stick around, some don't. You add features for the ones who ask loudest. Repeat.
At some point you realize your product means different things to different people, your messaging resonates with nobody in particular, and you're spending money on leads that never convert.
That's what happens when you build without an ICP.
The uncomfortable truth: most founders know vaguely who their customer is, but have never written it down. Never pressure-tested it. Never asked whether the people they think they're building for are actually the ones buying.
What an ICP actually is
An ICP is not a persona. It's not a fictional character named “Marketing Mary” with a stock photo and a list of hobbies.
An ICP is a description of the type of company or person most likely to buy your product, get value from it, stay, and tell others. It's built from reality, not assumption.
For B2B it usually covers:
- Company size — not “any size”, a real range where you win consistently
- Industry or vertical — where the problem you solve is most acute
- Stage — seed vs Series B vs enterprise behave completely differently
- The trigger — what situation pushes them to look for a solution right now
- The buyer — who actually signs, who influences the decision, who kills the deal
- The outcome they care about — not your features, their goal
For B2C or prosumer products, swap company attributes for individual ones: role, seniority, context, motivation, what they were doing before they found you.
How to actually find your ICP
Step 1: Look at who's already buying
If you have any customers at all, start there. Don't build your ICP from imagination — build it from data.
Pull a list of your best customers. Not the biggest. Not the loudest. The ones who got value, didn't churn, and required the least hand-holding. Look for patterns.
Same industry? Same company size? Same job title making the buying decision? Same moment in their company's life when they found you?
That pattern is your ICP draft.
Step 2: Talk to them
This sounds obvious. Most founders skip it anyway.
Book calls with five to ten of your best customers. Don't pitch. Don't demo. Ask:
- What were you trying to solve when you found us?
- What had you already tried?
- What made you decide to buy?
- What would happen if you stopped using us tomorrow?
Listen for the language they use. That's your copy. Listen for the trigger that pushed them to act. That's your targeting. Listen for the alternative they considered. That's your differentiation.
Thirty minutes per customer. Five customers. That's two and a half hours and more insight than most founders get from months of analytics.
Step 3: Find the trigger
The most underrated part of ICP work. Not who they are — when they're ready.
Most products solve a problem that exists for a long time before someone decides to fix it. Something changes that makes the pain suddenly urgent. A new hire. A failed launch. A competitor doing something they're not. A funding round that means they now have budget.
That trigger is gold. It tells you when to reach them, what to say, and why now.
Step 4: Narrow it down
Your instinct will be to keep the ICP broad. More people = more opportunity. That's wrong.
The narrower your ICP, the easier everything becomes. Your message resonates more. Your sales cycle shortens. Your product decisions get easier because you know exactly who you're building for.
Pick the segment where you win most often and go deep. You can expand later. Right now, being the obvious choice for a specific type of customer is worth more than being a vague option for everyone.
Step 5: Write it down and share it
An ICP that lives in your head doesn't exist. Write it down. One page. Share it with everyone who talks to customers or writes copy or makes product decisions.
Then update it. Your ICP will shift as you learn more. That's fine. The point is to have a working definition that forces clarity, not a permanent document carved in stone.
The test
Here's how you know your ICP is specific enough.
Read it out loud. Then ask: if I put this in front of the right person, would they feel like I'm describing them?
If the answer is “maybe” or “sort of”, it's not specific enough.
A good ICP makes the right person feel seen. It makes the wrong person feel excluded. Both reactions are correct.
ICP and positioning are the same conversation
Once you know your ICP, positioning becomes straightforward. You know who you're talking to, what they care about, and what moment in their life they're in when they find you. Your homepage stops trying to speak to everyone and starts speaking to someone.
That's when the words start working. If you want the “how to test this on a real homepage” angle, read Your website isn't confusing. Your positioning is.
If you want to see how well your current homepage speaks to your ICP, run it through the Homepage Teardown. Paste your URL, get an instant score and verdict.
Run the Homepage Teardown → ← Back to blog