We don’t have time or budget for user research, a startup executive told my friend. My peer pushed back — argued and wrote memos and rallied employees to emphasize the importance of refined user personas to reach PMF. The executive, bound to promises made to higher ups, rejected the proposals and pushed a premature launch. The product emerged with high-flyer media coverage and a product flush with features. Surprise to no one on the team, the startup fell flat on its face, attracting less than a hundredth of the user base the executive had predicted.
Perhaps if the executive had given my friend time to understand potential users, the startup would not have died. Alas, their feet remained stuck in the glue of claiming that their user is everyone. Anyone who’s worked at a startup knows that proclamation is false, and that every company needs the famed thousand true fans to achieve exponential growth.
To successfully leap across the chasm from early fans to majority adoption, companies must develop targeted user personas validated by hypothesis-driven test cycles. We’ll dive into the process of fleshing out first principled user personas, considering a fictional AI audio learning app called SelfTeacher.
Define behavior that you hypothesize will drive the company towards PMF
Venture-backed startups require a north star goal they believe will lead to a unicorn business. Success requires reductive analysis to define the backbone user behavior that will persist from innovators to laggards. For SelfTeacher, we have:
North star: students rely on short-form, personalized podcasts for the bulk of their studying materials
Persistent behaviors:
Users generate 10+ minutes per day of audio lessons
Users share 3+ podcasts per week in learning groups
Scope and narrow archetypes that may engage in desired PMF behavior
Your first thousand true fans should be blueprints of one another, so that you can build features that appeal to all users and encourage community building. Early-stage companies can only build one product successfully, and thereby can only build for one persona. If you have a multitude of behaviors to build, superset them into an overarching behavior and define a subset persona under that umbrella. Once you reach PMF with that subset, you can expand to additional behaviors or a multi-sided marketplace. SelfTeacher’s umbrella is:
Students who desire personalized learning materials
Start by making a preliminary list of types of people who would use your product in the mass-market stage. In the case of SelfTeacher, this includes:
College+ aged students who are diving deeply into specific verticals
High school students studying for exams across many domains
Younger students (elementary / middle school) learning fundamentals across domains
Non students (adults learning new things for fun)
Narrow your persona to only one slice. Eliminate categories that don’t fit your company stage, aren’t technically feasible at the moment, or are out of customer acquisition budget.
We eliminate non students as they are a more difficult to target segment in terms of adwords and distribution channels.
Remove college aged students as they often have split from parents, and have minimal paying capacity.
Get rid of younger students as they don’t match the success motivation of high schoolers (college admissions).
Therefore we are left with high school students.
Conduct a 200-person test targeting your niche persona
Now our goal is to test within our first slice so we can subset further within that slice to a targeted persona.
Source 200 users for your initial test — a large enough number to warrant test outcome significance, without investing too much recruiting time. Make sure they respond to your messages before confirming them as a tester, so you are confident you’ll be able to ask follow up questions. Remember to gather demographic information before distributing your test so you can build personas for ad targeting down the line. All that considered, also ensure you have low friction for first time users, who are doing you a favor by testing.
Once you’ve distributed your test, track both retention and users who complete your desired behaviors.
Say for SelfTeacher, our drop-off funnel could look as follows:
Refine your user persona; repeat with increasingly larger tests
After running your test, drill down your user persona by engaging with your users retained for seven days. Ask about their daily habits, learn their desires, DM them until you could practically be their therapist. Then refine your persona to fit their mold and test with more users that match their blueprint.
There is much more to be said about user persona building — studies and articles and podcasts galore. But rather than polarized execution of launching into the void or endless research, employ simple tactics like these to iterate with users and bolster your chances of success. Then maybe, you won’t publicly fall on your face like that startup executive. But who knows — you always have to be willing to fail big on your chosen stage. After all, that’s the whole point of working in the arena.