How do I find my target market?

The fast version

Narrow in four passes. Each pass cuts your audience by an order of magnitude until you have a buyer specific enough to name 10 actual people.

Output: a buyer profile you could write down 10 names of real people who match. If you can’t write the names, you haven’t narrowed enough.

Why narrow first

The instinct is to pick a broad category to maximize TAM. The problem: messaging, channels, pricing, and onboarding all have to fit a specific buyer. Broad targeting forces all four of those to be generic, and generic loses to specific.

The pattern across successful startups:

• Slack started with internal tech teams (not “all knowledge workers”)
• Stripe started with developers (not “all businesses that need payments”)
• Notion started with personal productivity / small teams (not “all collaboration software users”)
• Figma started with product designers at tech companies (not “all designers”)

Each expanded from a narrow beachhead. None started broad and narrowed. Narrow is how you get traction; broad is what you become at scale.

How to run each pass

Pass 1: category. Start with the obvious one. “Project management software.” “Email tools.” “Design software.” This is the broadest version. You’ll cut from here.

Pass 2: behavior. Who currently has this problem AND is doing something about it? “People who manage projects” is too broad. “People who currently use Asana / Trello / Linear and complain about [specific thing] in public” is narrower and more useful. Behavioral filters are stronger than demographic ones.

Pass 3: reach. Who can you contact in year 1 with the channels you have? If you’re an indie hacker on Twitter, your effective reach is people who hang out on Twitter, indie hacker communities, and your warm LinkedIn network. If your buyer is enterprise IT in healthcare, you have a reach problem; either fix the channel (rare for early-stage solo) or pick a different buyer.

Pass 4: willingness to pay. Who has budget authority and a willingness to pay at your candidate price? A persona that loves your product but has to ask their boss for $19/mo is a longer sales cycle than a persona that can charge it on a personal card. For founder products: solo / individual buyer authority is gold.

What the output looks like

Bad: “Founders.” (Pass 1, no further narrowing.)

Better: “B2B SaaS founders running pre-seed startups in Europe who’ve raised but haven’t shipped, currently using a mix of ChatGPT and Notion to figure out what to build, frustrated that neither produces a defensible answer.” (All four passes.)

The second version:

• Names a category (B2B SaaS) and stage (pre-seed)
• Names a behavior (using ChatGPT + Notion, frustrated)
• Implies reach (Twitter, IndieHackers, niche European founder communities)
• Implies willingness to pay (raised = budget exists)

You can write 10 names of people who fit the second version. You can’t write 10 names of “founders.”

How ShipFit handles this

ShipFit’s stage 2 (Who Pays?) takes you through the four passes. The system refuses to advance to stage 3 (What Hurts?) until your buyer is specific enough that the next stage’s interview questions will produce useful data.

The output is a Buyer Persona Canvas populated with the 5 Rings of Buying Insight (Adele Revella, 2015): priority initiative, success factors, perceived barriers, buyer’s journey, decision criteria.

Further reading

• Pre-launch market research spoke, the full SOM math the four passes feed into.
• Buyer Persona Canvas, the persona work that operationalizes pass 4.
• How to validate a business idea, the wider validation flow this question fits inside.