By Manuel Tardivo
"Everyone can use it" means you still do not know who you are building for
"Everyone can use it" signals the customer has not been chosen. How to find a behavioral ICP, and why Snowinch will not work a scope built for everyone.
"Everyone can use it" means you still do not know who you are building for.
The ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) is the operational description of who has the most urgent problem, pays, and adopts without an endless negotiation. It is not a marketing exercise for a slide. At Snowinch it is one of the first knots when a product does not pull: often the code is there, the "everyone" is not.
The sentence
We ask: who is your customer?
The answers that come back: everyone who needs X. Anyone in sector Y. Both small and large, it scales. Everyone, but we start with the easiest to reach.
Each one sounds reasonable. Each one says the work has not been done.
Not because the product can never widen. Because "everyone" is not a target. It is the absence of a target. Building for that absence is an efficient way to burn attention.
What breaks when there is no target
Every product and sales decision sits on who you are trying to reach. If you do not know, the decisions contradict each other and nobody notices at first.
A message that must speak to everyone speaks to no one precisely. The words that land with a freelancer are not the ones that land with someone who buys software in a company. Tone, problem, promise: they change. Generic copy produces generic clicks. Generic clicks do not pay.
Channels are not interchangeable. LinkedIn holds certain jobs and not others. People searching Google use the words of their problem, not yours. A vertical newsletter, a group, word of mouth: each has an audience. Without an ICP, channel choice is a dice roll.
Price follows the same hole. What is high for one person can be irrelevant to a software budget. Without knowing who buys, you pick the number by feel, and wrong prices get disproved late.
The roadmap loses north. Features that make the product necessary for one segment are often different from the ones that make it "interesting" for another. Building for everyone means shipping pieces nobody puts first, and postponing the ones that would matter to people who actually have the problem.
Not the census: what they do
The usual mistake is stopping at the census. Company size, sector, region, a revenue band. That helps delimit where to look. Alone it does not say who will buy. Inside any band there are people with the problem on fire and people who have it and do not move.
The ICP we use is behavioral. What they do. What they search for. What they already tried. How they decide. Which event pushes them now.
What deadline, costly mistake, or role change put them in motion? What do they call the problem when they talk to a colleague, not how you wrote it in the pitch? Who do they have to convince before they pay?
The answers give you a profile you can use: message, where to put it, what must happen in the product for that person to stay. Not a brochure list.
You do not find an ICP at a desk. You find it by talking to people who have the problem and watching what they do, not what they say out of politeness.
Start where it hurts most. Not the average customer. The one who already lost money or time, who already searched and did not find. They have the problem without padding. Understanding them tells you where the product is worth something.
Listen to their words. They often do not match yours. That gap is the copy, not a detail.
If you already have someone who paid or moved for real, look at the pattern. Not age or city. The situation before. The push. The click of the decision.
Then falsify. Look for people who "should" be the customer and would not buy. The why tells you which pieces of the profile matter and which are noise.
Or rather, "everyone" is sometimes laziness, not vision. It is harder to choose and accept disappointing people who are not in that picture.
Defining an ICP now is not a lifelong oath. It is where you put resources while they are scarce. A product necessary to one segment has a message, a channel, word of mouth among similar people. One that is "good enough" for many has everything diluted. Widening comes after you have a case that stands. Not before, out of fear of looking small.
A rebrand that starts from a vertical, not from a visual refresh, is the ADevolution case. Positioning and narrative, when they have to travel with the build, are the go-to-market part on services.
When the ICP is the right one, copy gets shorter. The channel is obvious. Sales calls run shorter because the problem is recognizable. Useful feedback sounds like "finally", not "nice idea" from people who do not have it.
We do not work with everyone
That applies to us too.
We do not work with everyone, or we would work badly. If the brief is "everyone uses it, we build wide, then we see", we refuse that scope. It costs: we lose conversations where the founder wants to feel large. I take that. A yes on a nonexistent target produces a product that does not know who it is talking to, and a live system you do not know how to hold.
If you want someone who always says yes to the scope, that is not us. If you need a tight ICP, an honest first perimeter, and then production that holds, we can talk. Otherwise no.