ICPs and Champions

There’s a problem with the standard marketing shorthand “ICP.” Or rather, several problems.

1) It is designed for a consumer product in which the same individual is the user, champion and buyer. (For example, you personally identify the vacuum cleaner options, convince yourself which is the best option, pay for the vacuum cleaner and are responsible for ensuring vacuum cleaner adoption, and you are the one using the vacuum cleaner). This is not how most B2B products work.

2) Because in a B2B context, your customers are companies / organizations, it pushes you to think too much about the company characteristics and less about the humans involved in the transactions, who are also interesting.

Here’s what you need if you have an open source startup with both project and commercial offering (assuming it’s B2B, like the vast majority of open source startups):

For the open source project:

  • An ideal user profile

  • An ideal champion profile (who doesn’t just use, but gets others to use, too

  • Ideal community member profile

For the commercial offering:

  • An ideal user profile

  • An ideal champion profile (who is the one shepherding the deal through the company, usually is also the one evaluating options etc)

  • An ideal buyer profile. This is the check signer… often he/she depends primarily on the champion to make recommendations, so again the champion is super important.

One last note: If you have an on-prem enterprise edition and a cloud offering, your ideal user profile, ideal champion profile and ideal buyer profile will be different for each edition.

Emily Omier