7 Comments
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Achyut Menon "AK"'s avatar

Ouch..I have been guilty of confusing early adopters with scalable ICPs!!

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Nischala Agnihotri's avatar

With maturity in marketing, this distinction gets better and clear.

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Manoj Surya's avatar

This is a master piece

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Nischala Agnihotri's avatar

Thank you. Evolution as a dimension needs to stay with us while experimenting with markets.

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Manoj Surya's avatar

Absolutely! And the discovery of better ICPs only happen on the journey.

All we can do it do right things in the right order = better chances of luck + growth.

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Amiya Srivastava's avatar

Hi Nischala, Great post, thank you for sharing. With reference to early-stage startups, where there is a massive resource & capital crunch, I am curious to know how you see the ICP (discovery & evolution) going with the well-marketed bias for action, opportunity cost, & the competitive landscape/positioning narratives to get the traction going effectively.

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Nischala Agnihotri's avatar

@amiyasrivastava Let me get to the fundamental. Would you encourage bias of action, opportunity or competitive landscape or positioning if you had to send a letter or email to a specific person?

What happens if ends up in the wrong letter box or inbox?

You would be living at a worse point of weightage with increased opportunity cost led by reactive action and lost to never return.

Let me clarify how ICP evolution happens:

ICP clarity only emerges through doing. You don’t define your ideal customer on a whiteboard...you discover it through live conversations, micro-experiments, and repeated signals.

ICP evolution is accelerated when you act early (even with imperfect data), engage segments fast, and watch who resonates most.

Common mistake:

Treating ICP as a fixed template to be researched rather than as a strategic bet to be tested and refined in the field. Without ICP clarity, your team might waste months on customers who won’t retain, expand, or refer.

With the tougher constraints in a startup scenario it becomes all the more important to know which ICP would get you faster to the PMF stage, which gets you profitable and which lets you scale.

You don’t achieve PMF across all customers. You achieve it within ICP cohorts. So experimenting your ICP hypothesis faster is better.

Show that sustainable growth = repeatability within ICP segments. This is a question to address in my next article. Thanks for the question.

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