Stop selling to everyone. Start building for someone.
Alex Estner's proven framework for analysing your early customers.
👋 Hi, it’s Zdenko and welcome to Seedstrapped, my newsletter about funding and building profitably growing SaaS businesses in the age of AI.
If you’re new here, start with some of the most-read issues:
Seedstrapping: The Smarter Way to Fund Your Startup in 2025?
Seedstrapping Success Stories: From $500k Raises to 8-Figure Exits
When founders decide to go the seedstrapped route - raise once, then grow to profitability - the make-or-break factor isn’t the product. It’s go-to-market. Your GTM motion decides whether that first raise gets you to breakeven or burns out before you find traction.
I’ve seen this firsthand with founders who made it work - they knew exactly who to serve, how to reach them, and when to say no to everyone else. That clarity turns limited funding into leverage.
That’s why I’m excited about today’s guest: Alex Estner.
Alex has spent over a decade in the startup world, from SaaS to marketplaces, and since 2022 he’s been helping early-stage SaaS and AI founders go from pre-revenue to €1M ARR. He’s advised more than 25 startups (bootstrapped, pre-seed, and seed-stage) on how to build go-to-market motions that actually work.
In this week’s edition, Alex walks us through his process for analysing your early customers to uncover your ideal ones - the foundation of every sustainable, profitable GTM motion.
Enjoy!
Want to get your GTM foundation right? Here are 3 ways Alex can support you:
→ Free GTM library with 50+ resources to build a strong GTM foundation
→ Bi-weekly newsletter mrrunlocked.com where he shares actionable GTM content
→ GTM audit and 1-on-1 GTM advisory to build a strong GTM foundation
The WHY of Niching Down
Here’s a hard truth that most founders and marketing leaders don’t want to hear:
“trying to sell to everyone who’ll pay is the slowest path to 1€M, or at least the slowest to 10€M ARR”
Turning down paying customers feels wrong, especially in the early days. But here’s the thing: the fastest path to meaningful growth isn’t casting a wider net. It’s going narrow and deep.
The math is simple. Let’s say you’re targeting a 100M€ market.
If you capture 10% of a niche, that’s 10M€.
If you try to capture 1% of a 1B€ market, that’s also 10M€
But here’s the kicker: capturing 10% of a focused market is WAY easier than capturing 1% of a broad market.
Why? Because…
The Hidden Cost of Serving Multiple Segments
Serving multiple different segments at the same time is time and resource-intensive. Each customer segment you serve requires its own:
✅ Value proposition & messaging
✅ Sales playbook
✅Product features
✅Support processes
✅maybe even skills & talent.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Additionally, every time you add a new segment, you build a new GTM motion.
Each motion requires content, channels, sales approaches, success metrics.
And guess what? Your small team can’t execute multiple GTM motions effectively. You’ll end up doing everything poorly instead of one thing exceptionally well.
The Power of Focus
The path to 1€ and then to 10€M ARR isn’t about maximizing your total addressable market.
It’s about dominating a specific segment. When you focus on one specific segment:
✅Your marketing message becomes crystal clear
✅Your sales team becomes highly efficient
✅Your product roadmap gets laser-focused
✅Your customer success becomes predictable
✅Your referrals start flowing naturally
Most importantly, you build deep expertise in solving specific problems for specific customers.
This expertise compounds over time, creating a moat that competitors can’t easily cross.
Which will ultimately bring you to the point of predictable & repeatable growth.
Or as Robert & Anthony call it: Product Market Fit.
And once you ‘dominate’ this specific slice of the market. You have 2 expansion options:
1️⃣Vertically (same target audience (aka. ICP), but new use cases)
or
2️⃣Horizontally (same use case, but new target audiences)
But first, you need to prove you can win decisively in one space.
And this all starts with phase 1: The ‘hustle’ mode.
Hustle Mode: Get Your First 10-100 Customers
We call it the ‘hustle mode’ phase, others call it the ‘Market experimentation’ phase.
Hustle mode is where you’re throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks. You’re chasing your first paying customers, testing hypotheses, and figuring out who’s willing to swipe their credit card.
And that’s fine. For a while.
At this stage, you’re not overanalysing. You’re not building complex data dashboards or running segmentation experiments. You’re just trying to get customers in the door. It’s messy, it’s scrappy, and it’s necessary.
But here’s the thing: hustle mode should only last so long.
These initial customers are your ECPs (Early Customer Profile). They tend to be rather:
✅experimental,
✅and in the market.
They are most likely different from your Ideal Customers (ICPs) - your ultimate goal.
Your ICPs tend to be:
❌not yet solution aware,
❌require proof of work and
❌hard(er) to reach.
You can see the difference between early customers & ideal customers in this visual.
Once you’ve landed your first 10-100 customers (depending on your ACV, more on that below), it’s time to stop and think. And start analysing.
Why?
Because not all customers are created equal. Some will be a great fit for your product and vision; others will drain your resources and churn faster than you can say “customer success.”
You need to refine your ECPs and work your way up to your ICP.
The sooner you identify the *right* customers, the sooner you can focus all your energy - and budget - on pulling more of them in.
When Is the Right Time to Analyse Your First Customers?
Timing matters.
You don’t want to start analysing:
❌too early: not enough data
or
❌too late: you’ve already wasted resources on bad-fit customers
The right time depends on your target audience and average contract value (ACV)
The Art And Science Of ICP Discovery
Just a heads up before we dive into the process.
There is an art and a science to finding your ICP.
The art aspect refers to the qualitative components that go into the pot:
✅ past experience,
✅ intuition and
✅ personal preference (about the types of companies/people you want to serve)
These are important components and shouldn’t be overlooked. When setting out to do this, you’ll find yourself in one of three positions:
1️⃣You have a good idea of the types of businesses you need to be going after, or you can narrow down your possible ICPs to two or three segments.
This is especially true for large deal environments, where you have fewer customers and so, less data. You may also be in this position if you’ve had many customers already, but you’re pivoting and feel that data about your past deals are not relevant.
2️⃣Other times, especially in high velocity and low ACV environments, you will be sitting on a good amount of data, and everything we tell you about the quantitative process below is a lot more relevant.
3️⃣Then, there is a third scenario in our experience.
A founder will have a good idea of their ICP in our initial conversation. Then we look at more nuanced factors that go into shaping an ideal customer profile and dive into the data. This almost always proves to be a super-valuable process, because it refines and sometimes even overrides original assumptions and changes the game.
The magic is in blending qualitative factors with the process and data while knowing the limitations of each.
Enjoy the ride!
How to Find Your ICP: A Step-by-Step Process
Now that we know WHY and WHEN to analyse early customers, let’s jump into HOW you work your way to your ICP.
To validate your ICP, you need to:
1️⃣Collect data of your customers
2️⃣Break down your customer base into segments and
3️⃣Analyse them against metrics that are indicators of ‘better fit’
We call them ‘‘better-fit’ Indicators (aka. Winning indicators).
Let’s dive into the step-by-step process.👇
Step 1: Defining your ‘better-fit’ Indicators (aka. Winning indicators)
To know which customers are a ‘better fit’, you need to search for ‘winning indicators’.
We recommend looking for key indicators that signal those “best-fit” (aka. ideal) customers.
Step 2: Data Collection - The Foundation for Segmentation
Surprise, surprise: you’ll need data. Head over to the relevant systems (help desk, CRM, product analytics, etc.) and collect as much information as possible (ideally, export 12+ months of customer data).
Try to Include the following data points (non-exhaustive list):
Firmographics (industry, employee count, revenue, location)
Technographics (existing tech stack; previous solution)
Product usage data (login frequency, feature adoption, product usage metrics, etc.)
Sales data (sales cycle, lead source, deal value, etc.)
Persona data (champion role, decision-maker role)
Support (tickets, NPS, health score)
Payment processor/accounting (revenue, billing period, churn)
anything else that contains valuable information about customers
*Bonus: You can do the same exercise for all your open & closed deals (lost & won) to also get a picture of the lost deals.
Step 3: First-Pass Segmentation - The “Obvious” Filters
Now you want to create core segment groups based on the criteria you deem are the most important grouping criteria.
Key Insight: These surface-level segments often reveal initial patterns - but rarely the full picture.
Step 4: Deep-Dive Segmentation - The Hidden Gems
Now you’ll want to go deeper than the above steps. Layer on advanced filters that correlate with value.
Step 5: Identify Winners: Pattern Recognition Playbook
Now comes the fun part: digging into your data to find the gold nuggets (aka. ideal customers). Segments that consistently outperform on your winning indicators.
Once you’ve done the segmentation in Step 2 and Step 3 and know your winning indicators (step 1), you want to analyse your segments against the ‘best-fit’ customer criteria.
This could look like the following:
(We recommend using Excel or GSheets.)
Example: Segmentation based on Industry
Example: Segmentation based on vertical-specific criteria (SKUs in e-commerce)
Pro Tip: Create a scoring matrix where each segment gets 1-5 points per category, such as this:
Red Flags
If no segment stands out, either:
✅Wait for more data (if <100 customers) or
✅Re-examine your segmentation criteria
Final Thoughts
Validating your ICP isn’t just a marketing exercise. It is a huge, unavoidable part of company strategy.
By focusing on the right customers, you simplify everything: messaging, sales processes, product development, and even customer success efforts. You stop burning resources on bad-fit accounts and start building momentum with a segment that truly values what you offer.
So take the time to analyse your early customers now… it’ll save you years of wasted effort later.
Remember: growth doesn’t come from trying to serve everyone; it comes from serving *someone* better than anyone else can.
Pick your pond, dominate it, and grow from there.
Good luck!
Alex
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