The Startup Therapy Couch™: You Can't Please All The People... or Sell to Everyone!

We've all heard the saying: "You can't please all the people all the time." This is true for your business, too, but in business terms it's more apt to say you can't sell to all of the people all of the time.

We do a lot of work with entrepreneurs to help them figure out their user personas, a.k.a. their ideal clients or customers. The purpose of this work is to narrow the focus of who you are building products and services for so that you can know you are definitely solving real problems for real people.

It may sound like we are removing a huge chunk of a potential available market by making specific user personas or by getting really specific with our target market, but in fact the opposite is true. Most people will identify themselves better as needing or wanting what you have to offer if they can hear or see themselves in how you talk about it.

So for example, we at Raika could say we serve all entrepreneurs everywhere for anything. That feels too broad, and many entrepreneurs will say to themselves, "Yeah, but I'm not just 'any' entrepreneur." If, however, we say that we serve small business owners in a non-tech space who have an idea for a technology solution, someone can immediately identify whether that is them or not, and they will feel more called to work with us because they clearly identify with how we are talking about what we do.

So build user personas, identify your ideal customer or client, and narrow your market focus. This doesn't limit your ability to do business or sell; in fact it's exactly the opposite by helping the RIGHT people find you and self-select that you are the right business to solve their problem.