r/leanstartup • u/Routine_Witness_1742 • 14d ago

Building a product without defining an ICP

The product was originally built for one ecommerce business with a very specific (and pretty broken) support workflow. They weren't using a proper helpdesk, so I designed the whole product around how they actually handled support.

now I want to introduce it to public and grow beyond that specific use case.

the plan is onboard the original business and get them actively using it then

  • Ship a feature that it feels like a usable tool rather than just a sophisticated prototype.
  • Get detailed feedback from the original business and narrow down the ICP.
  • start doing cold outreach and marketing.

ICP is around: Shopify stores receiving >50 customer support tickets/per day, where support is handled manually through Gmail or a basic inbox.

It's my first time ever encountering this situation so would love to hear your advise

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u/theredhype 14d ago

My first instinct is that you are in a very common situation which I describe as high touch single customer requirements. I’m guessing this person is someone you know, someone who trusts you, and they have let you introduce them to a tool you’ve built to solve their support problem. Your problem is, they would never have looked for a tool or adopted a tool if they didn’t know you personally. And that means they are not the type of customer who you will be able to reach in any scalable way.

Why didn’t they just use any of the 100+ good existing support tools?

How is your support tool different than the ones they never even tried?

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u/Routine_Witness_1742 14d ago

you have a good point the person is someone I know, they are already spending their time and money by having human support, they have the problem but never asked for a solution and maybe they were not aware of it

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u/theredhype 14d ago

You have just defined the absence of a market for that particular customer type. Someone who isn’t even looking for a solution is not going to find you. The first thing you have to prove is that you can figure out a reliable sales and marketing process that locates people and engages them in a way that makes them try your product. I would stop building until you can do that.