If you’ve just launched a product and are struggling to find users, the next 15 minutes you spend reading this article will be the best return on investment for your time than anything else you will do over the next 6 months.
We’re going to go over the building blocks you need in place to successfully market your shiny new product and get users, without any of the marketing jargon you don’t understand yet, or the overly complex and often time-wasting processes that plague marketing.
If you build your foundation right, the rest is 100x easier.
Let’s outline the problem first
You’ve already started doing this, or you’re about to: posting on Reddit and X, sending LinkedIn DMs, submitting to directories, recording demo videos, doing your best to get your app out there.
If you’ve launched, you’ve probably already felt it backfiring within the first 24 hours. The clicks don’t convert. The signups don’t come back. The replies are polite, and then silent.
The instinct is to push harder on the same tactics. Post more. DM more. Make a louder thumbnail.
It almost never works. The problem isn’t the tactic, it’s everything that should have happened before you ever picked one.
Trying to do distribution without defining who you’re selling to and your position within their head is like trying to build a house without laying out where everything goes first. You haven’t even decided how many rooms your house is going to have or stood up a single wall, and you’re already moving the furniture in.
Most of your problems are “up stream” from your landing page or marketing efforts, meaning they sit at a level above them. Tactics (like social posting and cold DMing) only work after you’ve nailed down some foundational elements of marketing that are easy to skip if you don’t know what you’re doing yet.
Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
You’re going to hear that term a lot in pretty much all aspects of business; from marketing to development. It’s possibly the most important term you should know.
The gist of it is that there’s a very specific flavor of customer that your product is built for.
This matters because if you can’t identify who that is early on, all of your development, marketing, and product decisions will be all over the place which makes it hard for any type of customer to say “this is exactly what I need”, or “this is for me”.
Most guides on defining your ICP online are jam-packed with lengthy busywork processes that make you feel like you’ve made progress, but are too time consuming and strict to give you the visibility that you need to make quick decisions and pivots early on.
Keep it simple, short, and outline the following:
Who are they?
You don’t need to specify that they are 28 years old from Manhattan.
You don’t need to generate a fake image for this “persona”.
You just need a single line.
Vibe coders without marketing experience.
The point is that you can read this one sentence, and immediately remember all the other details you’re about to define below.
The situation they are in right now
What exact moment are they in that they need your product?
They just launched, and no one is showing up
This is the trigger that makes them realize they need external help.
It’s likely something that hit them all at once, and sits in the back of their mind now forever.
The pain they feel in that moment
What is the driver of the emotion they are feeling at 2am which is preventing them from sleeping?
“Did I just waste 3 months of my life building this?”
If you can’t put yourself in their shoes and easily come up with this in less than a minute, you have a bigger problem.
It means that you don’t know your ideal customer well enough. You need to talk to more of them, or (far better) put yourself into their exact position physically so that you can go through the same motions they are going through.
This is why there’s so much advice relaying that you should “solve your own problems first” when building products. It’s not because your problems are special, it’s because when you feel something first-hand, you have a better understanding of why it happens than anyone else who only has a second-hand reference point ever will.
What they’ve already tried / what’s burned them
Understanding what they want is one thing, understanding why they didn’t want other solutions that already give them what they want, and why, is far more revealing.
“I’ve tried insight tools but I spent 4 hours watching user sessions and still have no idea what to do.”
It’s very likely that your competitors have already burnt bridges in the minds of your potential customers. We’re not really in a simulation (at least I don’t think) and people don’t pop into existence the second you are aware of them.
They have their own histories with similar products and you need to take those into account. This helps you stand out, and alleviate their fears by showcasing that the problems they have with alternatives won’t exist for them with your product.
What outcome would they trade money for?
Phrase this in a way that comes from them, not you.
You’re going to be tempted to say something like “grow their userbase and land customers”.
But what the user is really saying to themselves is:
“I wish I knew if my product was the problem, or my marketing”
If you can’t imagine a human saying it, change it.
If it sounds like it’s coming from you and not them, change it.
If possible, don’t source this from your imagination. Review sales call transcripts, support tickets, customer surveys (cancellations, research, etc), Reddit posts, competitor reviews, and so forth.
Try to read between the lines. Most people can’t tell you exactly what they want, or why they want it. It’s your job to tease that out of what they say.
A good way to finish those off is always a comparison to the pain.
“I wish I knew if my product was the problem, or my marketing. Without learning marketing for the next 6 months.”
Put it all together
These things all stream together into a tight single paragraph that lays out who you are targeting, precisely.
ICP: Vibe coders without marketing experience who just launched and no one is showing up. They think “Did I just waste 3 months of my life building this?“. They’ve tried other insight tools but watching sessions didn’t give them the playbook they need. They wish they could tell whether their product or their marketing was the problem, without spending the next 6 months learning marketing.
You want this to be “an inch wide, and a mile deep”, meaning that you want your target to be very narrow, but have enough depth to it to sustain a thriving business. If we wanted to narrow that ICP down further we might focus only on Claude Code users, or specifically Claude Code users building web apps (not mobile, extensions, etc).
Get out of your head
Now that you have a sharp idea who your customer is, it’s time to find 5-10 of them to talk to and validate your hypothesis.
This isn’t the time for you to market your product to them.
Your goal is to have a conversation with them so that you can learn the words they use for their problems, identify the moments they decided their current solutions weren’t enough, and what “solved” would look like for them.
Their words become your headlines, their objections become your FAQ.
Don’t ask family and friends, find the people who genuinely match your ideal customer’s profile.
Most builders stall here because “go talk to your customers” sounds vague. It isn’t.
Where to find them: the same places they’re already complaining. r/SaaS, r/indiehackers, IndieHackers itself, X replies under launches that look like yours, Discords for the tools they already pay for, comment threads on YouTube videos about the problem you solve. You don’t need a CRM, you need a list of 20 names in a text file.
How to message them: one short, honest DM. No pitch.
Hey, I’m not selling anything. I’m building a tool for [your ICP one-liner] and trying to make sure I’m building the right thing. Could I steal 15 minutes to ask you about how you handle [the problem]? Happy to share what I learn.
Roughly 1 in 4 will say yes if your one-liner actually fits them. If almost no one responds, that’s a signal too. Your ICP one-liner probably doesn’t match the people you’re DMing.
What to ask, in order:
- Walk me through the last time you ran into [the problem]. What were you trying to do?
- What did you try to fix it? What worked, what didn’t?
- If you could wave a wand, what would the ideal solution actually do?
- What would have to be true for you to pay for something like that?
Extract all of the relevant information you can from your conversations with them, and process it either manually or with AI (AI is good at synthesizing data, I just wouldn’t use it to ask these questions because it’s going to hallucinate answers).
Research your competitors
Once you’ve talked to your ICP, the next layer is understanding who else is swimming around in their head.
You need to understand who your direct competitors are (full feature overlap, same audience), and who your indirect competitors are (semi-overlap on features, different audience). Skip past adjacent competitors, the data you source there is usually not helpful and pollutes your research.
Look for how their users categorize them, how your competitors speak to their audience (so you can tell who their ICP is), how their audience complains about them, and what gaps they have that users are asking for.
This will help you craft your own strategy (and potentially your product) that stands out from them instead of trying to beat them on price with a race to the bottom.
Market category
If I tell you that “Brundy’s Shack” is a fast food restaurant, you know what to expect. Food that arrives fast, and probably isn’t very healthy for you.
“Fast food” is a market category. It tells your brain how to categorize something into a bucket that you can immediately understand.
This can be used intentionally to allow people to immediately identify your product and its likely feature-set.
It can also unintentionally be used to group you into a set of products that aren’t similar.
If I were to tell you that Gmail is a social network, you’d expect there to be a feed, direct messages, likes, shares, and maybe reposts. It’s true that you can be social with Gmail, but having social network as the market category sets your expectations about the product, and then when you land on it you are confused and feel deceived.
On the other hand, if I tell you that Proton Mail is in the email category, you can already guess with certainty what features it includes without me ever having to tell you.
Often your competitor research will inform you what category you’re in, but be careful with that if you’re diverging from the general feature-set because you might invoke expectations from users that you won’t satisfy later on, and have the adverse effect with your marketing by accidentally captivating people who don’t want what you’re providing.
Positioning your product
Positioning is all about “differentiated value”. You’re going to have competitors, if not now then eventually.
What’s going to make you stand out is the contrast between you and them when it comes to solving your user’s problems.
The goal is for you to find a way to represent your product to your ICP in a way that speaks more to them than any of your competitors. Whether you have better, similar, or worse functionality often means very little.
There are endless frameworks for this.
Here are some of the best:
April Dunford’s frame (author of Obviously Awesome)
- For [ICP]
- Who are dissatisfied with [current alternatives]
- [Product] is in a [category]
- That provides [key value]
- Unlike [primary alternative]
- We [unique attribute that delivers the value]
Try to start with this one. If it doesn’t fit your product, only then try one of the others. You don’t need multiple of these, just one.
Geoffrey Moore’s frame (author of Crossing the Chasm)
- For [target customer]
- Who [statement of need or opportunity],
- The [product name] is a [product category]
- That [statement of key benefit, i.e., compelling reason to buy].
- Unlike [primary competitive alternative],
- Our product [statement of primary differentiation].
Allan Dib’s frame (author of Lean Marketing)
- You know how [target market has this specific problem]?
- Well, what we do is [the solution you provide].
- In fact, [proof point: stat, result, or short success story].
The replacement frame
- You used to [old way], which meant [pain].
- Now [Product] [new way], so you [outcome].
The manifesto frame
- We believe [non-obvious belief].
- Most [category] assume [opposite].
- So we built [Product] for [ICP] who [behavior that proves they share the belief].
The analogy frame
- [Product] is [familiar reference] for [ICP/domain],
- Except [the meaningful twist].
Notice how each of these framings leans on a “new way” of doing things. Something that helps the product become an outlier to the norm instead of conforming to it.
Here’s an example of the manifesto frame for SessionSight:
We believe marketing tools shouldn’t be for marketers. Most analytics and insights products assume giving you raw data is enough, but it isn’t. So we built SessionSight for vibe coders who don’t want to become marketers to find customers.
Messaging
Messaging puts the foundations you laid out above into words that your ICP understands and emotionally connects with.
It makes them internally say “Hey, this is for me!” (or sometimes even out loud!).
By this point, you’ve probably already had some ideas floating through your head about changes to your headlines and text on your landing page (your copywriting, or just “copy”).
By far the most important “law” of copywriting I learned over the years is:
“The sole purpose of the first sentence in an advertisement is to get you to read the second sentence.”
- Joe Sugarman (author of The Adweek Copywriting Handbook)
Every line of text’s purpose is to get you to read the next one.
You know what your ICP’s pain points are, what they are looking for, and what types of proofs they are expecting.
Additionally, you know the words they use and how they speak to themselves about these problems.
You need to translate that into words on your landing page that tell them that you understand them, reiterate the pains they are facing (briefly), show them the transformation your product will give them (pain becomes pleasure), and then prove that what you are saying is true.
Always write directly to your ICP. Speak to them, not at them.
You want to show them the transformation they will achieve by using your product,
not just list a bunch of features. Make it exciting for them, entertaining, or fully to the brim with free value.
Here’s what that looks like in practice. Same product, two versions of the hero copy.
Before (feature-driven, founder voice):
SessionSight is an all-in-one growth platform with session replay, heatmaps, funnels, split tests, and feature flags. Built for modern product teams.
Nothing is technically wrong with that sentence. It’s also doing zero work. It lists what’s in the box, names a generic audience, and asks the reader to figure out for themselves why any of it matters.
After (ICP-driven, transformation voice):
You shipped. Nobody showed up. Now you’re staring at a blank dashboard wondering if your product is the problem or your marketing is. SessionSight tells you which one, in plain English, without making you learn marketing.
Same product. The second version names the 2am thought, names the trigger (“you shipped, nobody showed up”), promises the specific outcome the ICP would trade money for (“tells you which one”), and shuts down the objection right at the end (“without making you learn marketing”).
Notice what’s not there: no feature list, no “all-in-one platform”, no “modern product teams”. Those will all come later, further down the page, after the reader has already nodded their head and decided this thing is for them.
Your next steps
Don’t just read this.
Sit down and actually complete these steps for your product. It will give you the clarity you need to be able to market your product effectively and not waste time on people who will never become your customers.