Who Is My First Customer, and How Do I Find Her Without a Following?

Finish this, out loud:

I help [person in a specific situation] move from [the problem she has now] to [the result she wants].

If it takes more than one sentence, it is not clear yet. If it could describe half the population, it is not specific yet.

You will rewrite it a dozen times over the next year. That is normal. Get a version you can say without wincing and move on.

Five real conversations will teach you more than a hundred survey responses.

Talk to people who are actually in the situation. Ask what they have already tried. Ask what did not work. Ask what they would want to be different in three months. Then be quiet and let them talk.

Do not pitch. You are not selling yet, you are finding out whether the problem you imagined is the problem they have. Very often it is next door to it, and the version they describe is better than the one you invented.

An illustration, not a customer story.

Someone plans a course on "confidence for women returning to work". She reads a returners' group for two weeks.

Nobody in that group says they lack confidence. What they say, over and over, is that they do not know how to explain the gap on their résumé without sounding apologetic.

Same underlying problem. Completely different words, and a much sharper offer. "How to talk about your years out of work without apologising for them" is a thing a woman will click at eleven at night. "Confidence" is not.

She did not change what she knows. She changed what she called it, after listening.

Pick one situation, as narrow as you can bear. Then spend twenty minutes reading one group or thread where those people talk.

Copy out ten sentences in their own words. Do not tidy them up.

Then paste this:

Here are ten things people in [situation] said in their own words: [paste]. What problems come up more than once? Which ones sound urgent rather than mildly annoying? What words do they use that I should be using? Use only what is in the list.