Why your ideal customer profile should evolve with your startup

For years, we've been told to "know your customer." But knowing your customer is a continuous journey, not a one-time task. Many early-stage startups fall into the trap of defining their ideal customer profile (ICP) once and then treating it as fixed, which can impede growth and innovation.

Through my experience working with hundreds of startups and building multiple companies, I've observed that a static ICP is one of the most significant barriers to progress. Companies often fail to refine their ICP over time, preventing them from discovering the right market fit, narrowing their focus, and building strong relationships with the customers that truly matter.

Defining your ICP isn’t the difficult part. The challenge lies in ensuring that it’s a dynamic tool that evolves based on ongoing customer feedback, market shifts, and the continuous refinement of your product. Here’s how to do that.

The dynamic ICP framework

Your ICP shouldn’t be a static document that gets filed away. It’s a living hypothesis that should get sharper with time. Building an ICP that evolves takes patience, but the benefits far outweigh the effort.

Think about ICP development as a three-phase process:

1. Initial hypothesis: Your educated guess based on market research and instinct.
2. Continuous refinement: Narrowing and focusing through customer conversations.
3. Operational alignment: Ensuring all teams act from the same ICP definition.

Let's break down how this works in practice.

Your ICP is always a hypothesis

Most founders begin by casting a wide net, defining their ICP as something overly broad like “We’re building for founders at B2B SaaS companies.” But this doesn’t provide the clarity needed to succeed.

Are you targeting fintech SaaS or healthcare SaaS? Companies with 5 employees or 500? Founders who are technical or non-technical? Without these specific insights, your ICP is too vague to drive effective decision-making.

The key to success is continuous discovery. With every customer interaction, your ICP definition should become more precise.

Your sales and go-to-market motions provide real-world feedback about what’s working — and what’s not. Sales teams quickly learn which types of prospects convert easily, who churns after onboarding, and which objections signal poor fit. Marketing sees which campaigns drive high-quality leads versus noise.

Over time, these insights reveal patterns: certain buyer personas respond better to your message, certain industries have faster sales cycles, and certain company sizes are more likely to renew. All of this helps you sharpen your ICP with evidence, not guesswork.

Common ICP misconceptions

When defining your ICP, it’s easy to fall into traps that derail your growth strategy. Founders often make assumptions about who they’re selling to and where they want to be, rather than focusing on the reality of their current stage. Here are some of the most common pitfalls:

Misconception #1: User = buyer

In B2B, the person who loves your product isn’t always the one who approves the budget.

It’s easy to focus your messaging on the user — the person experiencing the day-to-day pain — but if the buyer has different priorities, you’ll lose the deal.

Clarify who your buyer actually is. Is it the RevOps lead who needs cleaner data? The CRO who wants more accurate forecasts? The founder trying to avoid hiring another rep? Each of these buyers has a different motivation and needs a tailored message — even if the product solves the same underlying problem.

Until your ICP aligns around the buyer (not just the user), your go-to-market motion will stall.

It’s also important to define this at the right level. Are you targeting startups or mid-market companies? Are you selling to founders, sales leaders, or operations managers? The more clearly you can articulate the combination of company type and buying role, the more precisely you can tailor your messaging, pricing, and sales motion.

Misconception #2: Aspirational vs. reality

It’s tempting to build for the customers you wish you had — mid-market, enterprise, big logos — instead of the ones actually using your product today.

But prematurely chasing upmarket ICPs can break your go-to-market motion. Your product might not have the features, integrations, or compliance needed to close those deals. Your messaging may also miss the mark with the users who do see immediate value.

Instead of optimizing for a future state, anchor your ICP in the customers who are getting value right now. Nail that segment first — then earn the right to expand.

This is exactly what Shopify did. They didn’t launch with Fortune 500s in mind. They started as a snowboard shop — Snowdevil — built their own e-commerce platform, and realized other scrappy entrepreneurs needed the same thing. By solving deeply for that initial ICP, they unlocked the right to move upmarket later.

Misconception #3: Broad = better

One of the most common ICP mistakes is defining it too broadly. Saying “we sell to SaaS companies” isn’t an ICP — it’s a category. It lacks the specificity needed to guide product development, sales strategy, or marketing messaging.

To define an actionable ICP, you need to go deeper:

• Is it B2B or B2C SaaS?
• Which vertical — fintech, healthcare, real estate?
• What stage — pre-seed, Series A, public?
• Who are you selling to — technical founders, operations leaders, marketing heads?

Being specific doesn’t mean shrinking your total addressable market (TAM) on paper. It means focusing your efforts on the customers you’re best positioned to serve right now. That clarity is what gives you the right to survive — and eventually expand.

Why redefining your ICP matters

At Clarify, we made the deliberate decision early on to get extremely specific about our ICP — not just “founders,” but:

Founders at Seed to Series A B2B technology companies with 5–50 employees who are either implementing their first structured CRM solution or are frustrated with their current CRM experience. These companies are typically North American B2B startups generating between $500K–$5M ARR and value automation, flexibility, and systems that reduce administrative overhead.

We could have aimed for larger companies like Amplitude or Atlassian, but our product isn't built to replace Salesforce for mid-market enterprises — at least not yet. Instead, we focused on delivering the best solution for early-stage founders who are actively building and scaling their businesses.

This clarity helped us streamline several aspects of our strategy:

• Where we allocate our marketing dollars
• The type of content we create
• The communities we engage with
• The events we sponsor

When every team understands who we’re building for — and more importantly, who we’re not — decisions become faster and more aligned. Execution improves because you’re no longer trying to serve everyone.

Failing to refine your ICP puts you at a distinct disadvantage. According to the LinkedIn Deep Sales Playbook, 62% of top-performing sellers use industry research to deepen their understanding of their ideal customers. That ongoing research is essential — not just for internal alignment, but to remain relevant as your customers evolve.

Take Airbnb. They originally targeted conference attendees who needed a place to stay when hotels were booked. But they quickly realized this niche was too narrow. By redefining their ICP to focus on all travelers seeking affordable, authentic local experiences, they unlocked massive growth — becoming a $75 billion company in the process.

The benefits of clarity in ICP

When your ICP is clearly defined and evolves with customer feedback, it has a profound impact on your entire organization. For us at Clarify, defining “founders” as our ICP has allowed us to sharpen our focus across the board. Every team knows exactly who we’re building for, making it easier to make decisions about:

• Product features
• Marketing campaigns
• Sales strategies

Instead of trying to serve everyone, we focus on helping the right customers succeed. This approach enables us to scale more effectively, without spreading ourselves too thin or diluting our efforts.

Spotify initially focused on growing advertising revenue from its free user base. However, as engagement with music users plateaued, they redefined their ICP to include podcast listeners and creators. By heavily investing in exclusive podcast content, they transformed Spotify into a leading audio platform, driving user growth and higher revenues. And now, they’re pushing this even further with the popularity and monetization of video podcasts.

How to balance focus with growth pressure

The pressure to expand your ICP prematurely is intense, especially when investors are demanding growth metrics. Here's the approach we recommend:

Start by building a product people love, then slowly expand your ICP. Once you have a strong product-market fit with your core customers, you can expand your ICP in concentric circles.

The hard truth: If you try to please everyone, you risk not pleasing anyone.

Most startups fail not because they can’t build something, but because they don’t build something that resonates enough with customers. Building something people love is far more difficult than just building a product.

For example, Context Travel, known for in-person cultural walking tours, faced a crisis when travel halted. They redefined their ICP to target culture enthusiasts open to virtual experiences, launching online seminars at $35 each. This pivot not only helped sustain the business during travel restrictions but also unlocked a new global customer segment.

How to operationalize your ICP

Having a well-defined ICP is only valuable if your entire organization operates from it. Here's how to make that happen:

1. Ruthless filtering: For every initiative, ask: "Does this match our ICP?" If not, why are we doing it?
2. Channel alignment: If you're targeting founders, invest in channels where founders actually spend time.
3. Consistent reinforcement: Don't just document your ICP in Notion, where nobody will read it. Bring it up constantly in conversations across teams.
4. Message house discipline: Ensure all marketing and sales messaging ties directly to your ICP's specific challenges and goals

At Clarify, we constantly reference our founder-focused ICP in discussions. When someone mentions building features for RevOps teams, we remind ourselves: "Most early-stage companies don't have RevOps yet. So it’s not an immediate ICP for us."

The continuous ICP evolution cycle

Your ICP should evolve through this ongoing cycle:

1. Define based on current understanding.
2. Test through customer conversations.
3. Refine based on who actually succeeds with your product.
4. Realign the organization to the updated definition.
5. Repeat.

This isn’t a one-time exercise — it’s a continual practice that needs to be embedded in your company’s culture.

ICP evolution in action

The most successful companies I’ve worked with see ICP as a competitive advantage.

By narrowing your ICP definition, you might feel like you’re limiting opportunity. But what you’re really doing is increasing the chances of building something exceptional for your core group of customers. Once you’ve mastered that, you can expand out in concentric circles. Trying to please everyone from the start? That’s the recipe for pleasing no one.

The hard truth about ICP evolution

Evolution requires hard choices. When you tighten your ICP definition, you're explicitly choosing not to pursue certain customers — at least for now.

This takes courage, especially when these customers represent immediate revenue. But building something people genuinely love requires focus, and focus requires saying no to opportunities that don't fit your current ICP.

Your ICP definition is one of the most strategic choices you'll make as a founder. Get it right, keep refining it, and you'll build something that truly resonates in the market.

What's your process for evolving your ICP? I'd love to hear about your experiences refining your customer definition over time.