Discover And Validate Your Core Persona

One of the first steps one should take when starting or running a business is understand who they are selling to, otherwise known as the core persona of your target market segment. Many people I speak to are not sure who that is exactly, at best they are hoping for a large enough group as possible – what is known as the Total Addressable Market, or TAM. I would suggest to you that the more niche you go, the faster you can validate, or equally as important, invalidate your hypothesis of who is your core persona.

In order to do that for our companies, we built a tool that we released to the public a few weeks ago, the Core Persona app. Once you login, you can enter the URL for your website, or if you don’t have a website, you can describe your business idea in as much detail as possible – from there it will take Winston the Hamster about 3 minutes to generate you three detailed personas that your website is attracting, or core personas that your business idea should focus on first. It not only gives you some light demographic personal information to help you shape a mental model in your mind about this person, it will provide you some really juicy information to help you get laser focused.

Starting with a key takeaway about this persona, it will move into identifying their goals, pain points, what keeps them up at night, what they consider success metrics, and finally it will suggest some of their preferred channels where you can seek them out to begin the real customer discovery and validation process.

The feedback has been amazing, in two weeks I’ve been told it should be mandatory in the startup journey, to one person now redoing all of their website, branding, and social media as a result of how useful the persona details were for them.

I’d love any feedback you have on what features you’d like to see next, or any bugs you find, and we’re moving fast. One of the first big features that was requested was the ability to generate content for a given persona – this could be for your blog, social media post, email campaign, ad copy or a product description. You can also choose from a suggested list of tones to use and the length of the content you seek. You can also now share a persona, perhaps to put into your favourite LLM, or to share with your team so that you’re unified with your approach.

As a bonus, we only use ConsentKeys as a login solution, which means that the core persona app will never have your real name or email address, so you don’t need to worry about data breaches, and we don’t either, as we don’t hold any personal information on you as a user.

The easiest part of starting a business has been done now – you have your idea, you’ve identitified your target persona – now the real hardwork starts, and the most important thing any entrepreneur should be doing at the beginning, and continuously through their business’ journey – customer discovery and validation. You have to reach that core persona, and when you do, you want to ask them for an information interview, where you simply are validating these persona traits (pain points, success metrics etc), remember that invalidating them quickly as just as useful so you could find a new persona to target and begin again. You shouldn’t even have to mention your product or service if you’re expert level at CD & CV – the rookie move is to try and sell or convince the person that your product or service is something they want.

I’ve had the CTO of a Fortune 50 company want to buy my service from a simple information inerview about a decade ago, which was not only a huge surprise, I got off the call in disbelief as I’d not even mentioned the product or service I was hoping to offer! Since then I’ve been sold on customer discovery & validation as the most important part of the entrepreneurial journey. Working in tech, most tech entrepreneurs spend too much time building out an MVP and then hope customers come, or they start to do customer discovery after that. An expert entrepreneur doesn’t even need to write a line of code until the core persona is confident that you can solve their pain point better than existing solutions they’re aware of. If you’re not solving a pain point, but instead your service is providing a “gain”, it should be at least 10x better than their existing solution, which would make them moving to you a no-brainer.