A critical ingredient for side success is understanding who are your paying clients. This is very important because it helps you shape your product, design your ads and identify the best distribution and acquisition mechanism to access your clients. The more detailed your ideal client profile is designed, the more specifically you can target them and the higher your chance of success. Lastly, you are also able to get detailed feedback for targeted products tailored for your users and ensure that you are solving their critical pain points.
How to create an ideal client profile?
Before we create an ideal client profile, we need to first crystalize your personal value proposition and what is your unfair advantage to provide this particular product or service to the client. This will be covered in a different article as to how can we unlock our unfair advantage, but for the purposes of this article, we assume that you have already found your hidden advantage.
Example: As a full time investment banker, I would like to start a consulting service where I provide fundraising advise to startup founders to help them think about how to raise funds
Once you have identified the product or service you are going to launch, the next step is to conduct some market research to identify whether you are truly solving a painpoint from your users and to get an idea of which segment should you be targeting.
Example: Start surveying startup founders on their daily painpoints, rank the painpoint from the biggest to smallest painpoint to decide whether fundraising woes is part of the top 3 painpoint, if not you might want to consider pivoting.
Assuming that you have validated the customer pain point and it is a critical pain point for these startup founders, the next step would be to conduct some audience segmentation to start narrowing down the type of users which you are going to serve
Example: We would want to target first time founders in tier 2 cities with a STEM background because they would truly appreciate and need our services, other founders might think they can run the fundraising process by themselves.
Once we have a large market segment which we intend to target, we can then start constructing user profiles and personas to answer specific questions relating to our GTM, product and distribution so that we can customize each outreach campaign for each persona.
Example: We can create a sample user profile with the following information:
- Name: Peter
- Age: 28
- Occupation: Founder of a fintech startup
- Goals: To raise Series A within the first year
- Challenges: Post Product, Pre Revenue, still proving product market fit
- Buying Behavior: Data driven individual who will only purchase after seeing value, hence there is a need to provide trial packages and refund policies
- Preferred Channels: Instragram, Linkedin, Startup conferences
- (The more details you have to identify the user persona, the more tailored your outreach campaign and product design will be)
Once you have identified a user persona, it is time the start gathering real life humans which matches the persona and validate some of your assumptions about the persona with them. This could include focus group discussions, 1:1 interviews, showing beta products, running sample campaigns etc. All of this is to validate any product or marketing hypothesis you may have over your product with potential customers.
Finally, you have to turn these insights into action and refine your product accordingly after gaining feedback from your user testing. This can also be a virtuous cycle of testing where you update your product and go back to your user testing group to gain further feedback before launching your product.
Conclusion
Defining an ideal user profile is a crucial step in launching a successful side hustle. By understanding who your ideal clients are, you can create more targeted and effective marketing strategies, develop products and services that truly meet their needs, and gather valuable feedback to continually improve. Take the time to research, segment, and validate your ideal user profiles, and you’ll be well on your way to building a thriving side hustle that accelerates your journey to financial independence. Happy hustling!