Ideal Customer Profile Brainstorming

Ideal Customer Profile

During the Unusual Ventures Academy session, we learned a little bit about finding the ideal customer profile. They broke up the ideal customer profile into 6 parts:

1. Technology -- what tech stack is your customer building with?
2. Product Functionality -- what features are most important to the companies you are selling to?
3. Company Size -- depending on the industry/use case, what size company are you going after?
4. Vertical -- what industries do your ideal companies work under?
5. User -- who is the individual using your product within the company?
6. Buyer -- who actually buys your product within the company? Note that this is not always the same as the user of your product.

We've been brainstorming a bit on the B2B side, thinking about the problem of e-commerce stores have better search so their customers can easily find products to lead to better conversion (for instance, for long-tail queries). Here are some thoughts on what the ICP looks like for this B2B motion:

Technology

The determining factor for technology would be how their stock keeping units (SKUs) are formatted. Some options include:

• Plain file (text, JSON, CSV, etc.)
• Database (Elastic, MongoDB, etc.)
• Through E-commerce platform (Shopify, WooCommerce, etc.)

At a glance, it looks like almost 75% of all websites with e-commerce capabilities use Shopify, WooCommerce, or another pre-built platform. This would make this segment of the market the most appealing and suggest that the deliverable of our platform would then be a Shopify/WooCommerce app of some sort.

Product Functionality

We think the main functionalities our platform should provide is:

• Recommendation/Search Capabilities (i.e., the core value prop -- generative AI enabled)
• Multimodal Search (image/being able to index based on image data)
• Explainability (why AI decided to index search results it did)

We think the most important is naturally the first, the second being a pretty novel value add, and the latter not being a need but eventually a want as users continue to use more AI.

Company Size

We think the better way to segment company size is based on the number of SKUs. From some sources, the median number of SKUs per online store worldwide, depending on the industry, still hovers in the thousands. Thus, we think that the median store is our ideal company size.

Vertical

There are a couple of different types of online stores. The main thing to keep in mind, as we've learned from our wine need-finding, is that we want to focus in on products that are not only searching for online: they are also bought online. We can also consider the average age of people buying these items, or, more importantly, their comfortability to use technology/tendency to use AI apps. Some specific sectors include:

• Clothes. In particular, shoes seem to be a big thing people buy online (I guess sites like GOAT indicate this).
• Electronics
• [Books + Other Media]
• [Arts and Crafts?]

User + Buyer

Given that most people who set up e-commerce stores are using existing platforms like Shopify and WooCommerce, the target user is more than likely the maintainer of the e-commerce website. Depending on the size of the shop, this could be the merchant themselves or other members of the team. The buyer would probably be fairly similar.

Next Steps

In terms of next steps on the B2B side, we're going to do a couple of different things:

1. First, we want to get our hands individually dirty. We'll set up our own Shopify store and play around with existing apps and plugins that try to do the same search.
2. Next, we're going to continue and restart up our needfinding. We'll talk to people who run their own e-commerce stores/work in the backend and ask about their thoughts on making more personalized recommendations and search.

Side Note: on the B2C Side

On the B2C side, we think there are some similarities, but they are not entirely the same. Specifically, we know that:

1. For Technology, it's mainly if people are using their phone or a desktop computer.
2. For Functionality, it'll be a tad bit different. We still want recommendations, but explainability -- especially in the form of sources -- is quite relevant, and having some form of social integration with other platforms will also be huge.
3. For company size, it'll be translated to age demographic. This will primarily be teens and millenials, but we can also explore older demographics.
4. For vertical, tackling the same types of items will be the same. Main consideration will be making sure that we can monetize through affiliate links.
5. For users and buyers, they're the same. However, there's different kinds of problems to tackle. These can include:
   • Terminally online shoppers
   • People doing product research/trying to find the best product to buy for a specific use case
   • People going down rabbitholes -- i.e., concept of discovery
   • People who are shopping for gifts

On this end, we believe the next steps are:

1. Making a more generalizable agent that can browse the Internet. Think Perplexity, but for shopping.
2. Continue to validate for a certain community. Outreach to maybe some folks who are big in this space, and continue building.