The fastest way to grow your early SaaS startup isn’t working on your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). It’s identifying your CCP–your Crappiest Customer Profile.
Finding and saying No to your most expensive and worst customers usually produces the fastest improvement in your business.
Figuring out your ICP is important, but it takes time and discipline. It can take years of relentless trials, long-term tracking, and careful observation to nail it.
So start on your CCP first and work your way over to your ICP.
Here’s how CCPs are drastically affecting your business and your future:
- Your CCP wastes your time, spends your CAC, and creates negative momentum in your market, by definition. They are unhappy customers, and they won’t stay long, and they say bad things about you.Often your worst 10-20% of customers are eating most of your budget in marketing, sales, and dev, but they don’t stay long enough to be profitable.
When you’re clear about your CCP and you stop wasting resources on them, a massive amount of energy is released to work on the ICP-side customers where the growth is.
- You start up thinking about customer QUANTITY; you scale up when you also focus on customer QUALITY.This is a big reason that big VC funding too early will kill a startup. Pushing topline revenue growth and customer counts at any cost creates a messy business that will get stuck. You bought many CCPs that eat most of your resources and slow you down next year.Product-market fit means you know who your CCPs are and you scare them away deliberately. You don’t let them become customers.
If you only have quantity goals for your company (new revenue, new customers), you are paying your team to screw up your business.
Everyone in your company needs to be clear about your CCP with incentives that prevent them from wasting time and money on potential customers that:
- Won’t get massive value from fixing the problem you solve
- Aren’t actively looking for solutions
- Never did anything to solve this problem in the past
- Don’t want to solve the problem urgently
- Don’t align with your philosophy or your brand
- Won’t do the work to implement the solution and get valu
- Don’t show up in the places where you are visible
- Don’t buy from scrappy startups
Every quarter, you should be working on becoming clearer about your ICPs and your CCPs–across your company.
It’s a spectrum of traits, qualities, behaviors, demographics, and beliefs. The best customers are at one end and the worst customers at the other, with a few levels in between.
Your product, market, and company are changing, so your ICP and CCP definitions will evolve and become more clear over time. But only if you work on them as a team.
If you aren’t saying NO to more CCPs this quarter, you are slowing down your business next year.
What’s the biggest trait of your CCP right now?
#practicalfounders
