How to identify your target audience for an early stage startup

When you’ve just launched your business and haven’t had many orders, what you focus most of your efforts on is growth. In order to grow your business, you need to know who your customers are to target them most efficiently. 

So how do you know who your customers are when you’ve only had a few? 

Dissecting very low volumes of customer data, especially if a portion of your customers are your friends and family, won’t lead to any meaningful insights. In this case, your best bet is to return to the WHY behind your brand. What is the core reason for your business to exist? What problem do you solve? How are you making the world a better place through your products or services?

If you answer these questions, you have a good chance to notice that the target customer of your business is, in fact, you. And it’s not a bad thing! On the contrary, it’s a very good thing and here’s why. If you’ve created your business for people like you, you know your target customer really, really well! Also, this means that what you do is purpose driven, has depth and stems from real life experiences - this will come through in your communication strategy (if you allow it to) and can be one of the most powerful growth engines you can think of.

In the absence of customer data, in most cases DTC business founders can safely assume that their target customers are just like them and focus their growth tactics on simply finding more people like themselves.