Why Create a Customer Persona For Startup

Persona means you are going into the depth of the entire personality of any person. You understand your customer so well that you understand his needs in a deep way.

• When you completely understand the needs of the customer, you can effectively define his burning problem.
• When your definition of this burning problem gets perfect, your startup will achieve success for sure.

Golden statement

The persona ensures that everyone is unambiguously focused on the same target.

This can be explained with the help of example below:

• Suppose you are a start-up with a team of 5-7 people as generally, startups begin with a small team of 5-7 people.
• Now the question arises:

 Is everyone in the team is focusing on the same target unambiguously without any type of doubt in their minds?

Key Note #1: End-user Profile Vs Customer Persona

What is the difference between an end-user profile & a customer persona?

• The end-user profile is a profile of your target customer.
• Persona is much deeper than this end-user profile.
•  Persona includes all the deep information about any customer.
•  Persona studies in the depth of a target customer.

Key Note #2: 4 Steps to define Customer Persona

Following 4 steps define the persona of a customer:

1. Create a persona definition with your team: You sit with your team and create a persona definition.
2. Don’t spend too much time in worrying: Sometimes entrepreneurs stuck while creating a customer persona.

• They start taking too much time because they doubt if they have made a correct persona or not. They feel like improving customer persona again & again. They stuck in an endless cycle. They think it is not fitting properly &they are not able to understand their customer.
• As a result, the entire company derails from its focus. They spend all their time understanding customers and the product is never made.
• If you have done primary research for about 4-6 weeks at the first level and you have created your customer persona after 8-9 weeks, now you should move next towards making a product & launching in the market.
• You should not keep building one customer persona again& again.

3. Specific information about customers: You should enter your customer's entire information in a template. This customer information should be specific.
4. Primary Research: Primary research is the most effective way to build a customer persona. It is the only methodology that can help in perfectly building a customer persona.

Key Note #3: Sample Persona of a Customer

A sample of a potential persona profile is created that includes in-depth information about any customer. Following is the sample of customer persona that includes the following 7 pieces of information about Mr. Tommy Technology:

1. Background

• Profession: Staff accountant at Founder Accounting Firm.
• Education: Undergraduate from Penn State & Masters from Cornell University
• Personal Life: 1Girlfiend & 2 Dogs

2. Demographics

• Gender: Male
• Age: 34
• Annual household income: $ 125,000
• Address: Townhouse style condo An Urban Area  

3. Goals

• Ambition: Become a Senior Accountant within 3-5 years.
• Salary: Achieve a salary of $ 80,000 so that he can purchase a single-family home.
• Network: Network aggressively to build professional contacts.

4. Hobbies & interests

• Exercise: Running
• TV Series: Watching Game of Thrones
• Favorite food:
• Vacation:

5. Challenges: Life challenges that he wants to overcome are as follows:

• Want to have a more modern website, but isn't the final decision-maker.
• Struggle with being seen as the “ Young guy" in the office and being taken less seriously as a result.

6. Common Objections: These are objections from common life where he doesn’t want to participate. In common objections, you should try to understand the subconscious mind of your customer in depth. For example, common objections of Mr. Tommy Technology are as follows:

• I love the idea of a new website, but my boss will never go for it. He doesn't see the value of new technology.
• I'd love to get started on a new website, but I don't think I can get buy-in from my boss. He never takes my idea seriously.

7. Biggest fears

• Getting a job & not advancing up the corporate ladder as quickly as he’d like.
• Economic recessions mean he'll never be able to retire.
• Life passing too quickly.

Key Note #4: 6 Important points for persona creation

Following are the points important for the success of persona creation:

1. A persona defines "must-have features” in the product: If you have the complete customer persona then you can deeply understand your customers & convert the needs & wants of your customers into a perfect product.

• Your product will never fail.
• Customer persona is directing impacting your product. If your product is good, it will directly impact your revenue.

2. Team to hire for product selling & delivery: It is not necessary that every person that you hire in your team understands your customer. You should hire a perfect team in light of the following points:

• You should hire a team according to a customer's persona.
• You should see if the people you are hiring have earlier worked with such customers?
• Can they add more value to your business?
• Do they understand the important problem of your customers?

3. Marketing messages: Now you have made the right product with the right team now how will you market the product.

• What will your marketing messages?
• How will your customer pull towards your marketing?
• This will be defined through your customer persona.

4. Who should you partner with: It means with whom you can partner in this ecosystem to launch the perfect product?

• You can choose a Marketing agency, product development, distribution, etc.

5. Who influences your customers?

• If your customer persona is perfectly defined &you understand your customer deeply then you can also understand who influences your customer.
• You have been explained about the decision-making unit in earlier videos. Influencers were discussed in that topic.
• Influencers are the people who influence the purchase decision of your customer.

6. Persona helps you to decide “what to do” & “what not to do”: If you perfectly understand your customer persona, you will know “what to do” or “what not to do”.

• Especially knowledge of “what not to do” is more important than “what to do”.
• You can know about “What to do” through creating end-user profile & customer persona and you understood your customer to a large extent.
• “What not to do” is more important to know and you will know it only when you will understand in-depth customer persona across your teams.

A customer persona is never the same for a single company. It is possible that there can be multiple personas. For example, today you have product X, and tomorrow you launch multiple products such as X+5, X+1etc. There will be a customer persona mapped to every product. Therefore, there can be multiple customer personas in your company.

You don’t have to discuss which persona is right or wrong. All you have to consider the persona who is information-rich. It means the depth of any persona. The more depth, the better the persona will be. You should follow all these 6 points across the company.

Massive Action Plan

Discuss these 6 points with your team and define your customer persona.

There is nothing such as a good or bad customer persona. Persona with information depth is the best customer persona.