Ideal Customer Profile Brainstorming

Ideal Customer Profile Brainstorming

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, it appears as though 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 needfinding, is that we want to focus in on products that are not only searched 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: *