How to Find Your Target Audience as a Startup
Find your target audience by starting from the problem, not a demographic: list who feels it most, find where those people already spend time, and test one narrow segment first. Your first audience is the smallest group with the sharpest pain that you can reach today.
By Javier Alonso, Founder & CEO. Updated .
Step by step
List everyone who has the problem
Brainstorm every type of person or business that experiences the problem. Do not filter yet. Include adjacent groups you had not considered.
Rank them by pain and reach
For each group, ask: how painful is it, do they already spend money or time on it, and can I reach them this month? Give each a simple score from 1 to 5 on all three.
Find where the top groups gather
Look for the forums, professional communities, newsletters, events, search terms and tools each group uses. If you cannot find any gathering places, reaching that group will be slow and expensive.
Pick one beachhead segment
Choose the group with the best combination of pain and reach. A beachhead is the first market you aim to win completely before expanding into the next.
Test with a message
Write one message aimed only at that segment and put it in front of them through an interview request, a post or a landing page. Their response tells you whether you have the right audience.
Target audience vs ICP
Your target audience is the broader group who could benefit. Your ideal customer profile is the precise segment inside it that you pursue first. This guide gets you to a beachhead audience. The ICP entry turns it into a detailed profile.
Where to look for your audience
- Online communities: subreddits, Slack and Discord groups, Facebook groups and niche forums where people ask for help with the problem.
- Search: the questions people type into search engines. Autocomplete and "people also ask" boxes reveal their language.
- Reviews of competitors: complaints in app store and software review sites show who is underserved and why.
- Professional networks: LinkedIn groups, industry associations and trade events.
- Your own network: ask for introductions to people in the segment, then ask each of them for one more.
Example
A founder building a tool for managing music lessons lists piano teachers, guitar teachers, music schools, parents and adult learners. Ranking them shows that independent teachers with 15 to 40 students feel the most pain, because they handle scheduling and payments alone, and they gather in large online teacher communities. Music schools have bigger budgets but slower buying processes. She picks independent teachers as her beachhead and plans to approach music schools once she has proof.
Common mistakes
- Choosing the biggest group instead of the most urgent. Large audiences with mild pain are hard to convert.
- Defining the audience by age and income alone. These rarely predict whether someone has the problem.
- Targeting several segments at once. Your message becomes generic and none of them responds.
For your role
- Service providers
- Picking a beachhead works for services too: "bookkeeping for veterinary practices" is easier to market than "bookkeeping for small businesses".
Primary sources
- Market Research and Competitive Analysis — U.S. Small Business Administration
Common questions
- How do I find my target audience with no customers yet?
- Start from the problem. Find the people already complaining about it or paying for workarounds in communities, reviews and forums, then talk to them.
- Should my target audience be broad or narrow?
- Narrow at first. A narrow beachhead makes your message obvious and easier to validate. You can expand once you win that segment.
- How is a target audience different from an ICP?
- The target audience is the broad group who could benefit. The ICP is the precise segment most likely to need your product first.
Put it into practice
ICP Builder turns your chosen segment into a saved ideal customer profile. Included in the free plan.